What Is Awakening?

“Awakening”.

It’s a word you’ll hear tossed around a lot in spiritual circles, often sounding like a New Agey version of Eastern concepts of enlightenment. It’s a word you’ll hear a lot around here.

But what, in practical terms, does it mean? How does one awaken? How does one know if awakening has occurred?

I’ll start with that last: Like with orgasm, if you have to ask if you had one, you probably haven’t.

That’s not intended to be as flip and unhelpful as it sounds, but rather to assure you that it definitely won’t pass through your life unnoticed.

It can’t, in fact, because conscious awareness is an inherent part of the experience– part of what defines it as awakening in the first place. One of the definitions of the word “awaken” is “to be made aware of”, and that’s what we’re talking about here.

I like to think of awakening as the experience of becoming “differently conscious”. I resist terms like “more conscious” or “heightened conscious” or “enlightened” because they suggest a very ego-based superiority (and it irks me to see discussions amongst so-called spiritual people who enjoy putting down their opponents by suggesting that those people are too benighted to get it, whatever “it” happens to be in that case). Comparison is beside the point, and largely pointless; you can be the most awakened being alive, and you still crap and itch and pay taxes and you still have to do the work of this incarnation.

Imagine you found yourself suddenly wearing heat vision goggles. It’d be weird and a little freaky, and you’d stumble around a bit, and everything would look sort of blobby and indistinct at first. Depending on your temperament, you might spaz and want them off, but there’s a decent chance you’d be interested, even fascinated, and find even the humblest items newly compelling. You might want to explore the world to see what other cool stuff you could see through these goggles, you might concentrate on trying to see different details, you might strive to understand what you were looking at, you might feel an intense urge to find the friends who are most likely to also think this is cool, and try to share the experience with them.

Now imagine you’ve worn them often enough, or long enough, that when you take them off and go back to looking at the world in the usual way, you find that you’re seeing things differently that way, too. Sure, you might not literally see, as in cones-and-rods see, the heat signatures of everything around you. But your mind’s eye can guess what you’d see if you were looking through the goggles, and so you can perceive it anyway, much like when you’re immersed enough in a foreign language that you find you’ve looked at the animal and identified it almost simultaneously as “dog” and “chien”.

Awakening is like putting on those goggles for the first time. It’s the moment you realize that you’re seeing the world in a whole different way. It’s powerful enough that it stays with you and affects how you see the world from there on out.

I would venture to say that *what* you see is a somewhat individual thing, something that can and has been interpreted many different ways. But, based on the descriptions offered by people who have had this type of experience, there seems to be some common ground, for example:

• A sense of peace, well-being, safety, bliss, joy, hope, and/or possibility not rooted in any tangible cause;
• An awareness of connection on a soul or spirit level to all other beings, even to matter itself or the entirety of the universe;
• A feeling of having glimpsed “beyond the veil”, of having seen past illusion and facade to a vast and overwhelming truth underlying all things;
• A sense of one’s self as an eternal, ethereal being temporarily housed in material form; an awareness of the Ego as a construct of this material existence, a necessarily limited lens through which the unlimited Self is focused (and consequently, the awareness that the Ego and the Self are related but distinct from each other);
• A radical change in perspective regarding the Ego and aspects of the material world, reducing material concerns from movie-monster hugeness and often ascribing to them a deeper spiritual/archetypal meaning within the context of this incarnation;
• A realization of a greater meaning or purpose that serves as the context for one’s entire life, whether or not that purpose is fully understood right away, a sense that we are each here for a reason;
• As a consequence of the perspective shift mentioned above, an increased ability to release outworn attachments, old griefs or neuroses, past traumas, grudges and resentments, and pent-up rage; the ability to resolve long-standing problems in the psyche and move on to new challenges and initiations;
• A “click” of recognition and ease when reading things related to the experience of awakening, which may have seemed puzzling or opaque before;
• A heightened desire to be of use to the world, to undertake more meaningful work, to connect on a soul level with more of the world, and/or to try to share one’s experience with the world;
• A sense of the sublime, expressed in religious or spiritual longing, often accompanied by ecstatic experiences, vivid dreams, unexpected and powerful moments of bliss, and/or psychic or empathic experiences.

Not everyone will experience all of these, and not all in the same way; some may require conscious work and effort, and some may come very slowly and gradually over time. I have probably left some out, but these seem to me to be the most common feelings arising after an awakening experience.

To me, awakening is an initiation, something that takes place when a person is ready to do the work of severing Body and Soul (or Ego and Superego, or Persona and Anima) and then reintegrating them in a more wholistic relationship.

Let me repeat that. It’s what happens when a person is ready to sever their material self from their spiritual self *and then re-unite the two in a new way*.

My beef with a lot of transcendentalism is that it tends to see the material world and the human existence within it as something to be suffered or at best endured, that the spiritual state is “pure” and that the material state with its attendant messes, desires, quirks, and mood swings is just a big trap for the spiritually unwary. I don’t really see a difference between a spirituality that says that sex is dirty and sinful, and a spirituality that says that the only path to spiritual mastery is the renunciation of the world in favor of endless meditation on a mountaintop. Both of them treat physical existence like an appendix, something vestigial and useless and occasionally troublesome.

I don’t think this is wrong so much as I think it doesn’t go far enough. I actually think it’s useful for the first part of the equation– the initial separation of Body and Soul. Generally speaking, even those of us immersed in churchgoing throughout our lives are deeply mired in the illusions of the material world. We’re living in Plato’s cave, with maybe at most a deeply-suppressed instinct that the shadows dancing on the walls aren’t as real as they seem.

After the initial experience of awakening– which seems, on the whole, to normally be a blissful, exciting, or relieving one– the realization of the Self as distinct from the Ego begins. There’s an element of trauma to this, even when overall the sense of excitement or relief persists. To redefine oneself and one’s world is unsettling and often difficult, especially when the Ego is fighting to hang on to the status quo. Traditional enlightenment teachings can be very helpful here, providing guidance and context for the spiritual realm and identifying the toxic nature of the ego-based beliefs that are hanging on, so that they can be completely released. Having spent however many years immersed in the material world, it can be a wonderful and necessary balance to retreat as much as possible to the spiritual world for a while, to enjoy rest and contemplation.

But that’s only half the story.

That level of ascetic, transcendent spirituality might be enough if it meant it was time to experience a physical ascension as well, to be taken up to some gently-lit spirit realm and leave physical cares behind.

Generally, though, we still have the material world to contend with.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with going to live a hermit’s life on a mountaintop, eschewing material comfort and spending one’s days in advanced meditative states. If that’s what you feel called to do, and you manage to arrange your life to do it, more power to you!

What I’m saying is, there’s still a physical body there. There’s still a material existence. Ignoring it in favor of purely spiritual existence is as limited and lopsided in its way as being mired in the physical world at the expense of the spiritual.

And perhaps more to the point, many people who connect to their spiritual natures feel a great desire, not to transcend, but to return to the material world with a new perspective and new understanding. The philosophy of ascension doesn’t really support this, except maybe in a somewhat condescending way (ie, since you have to stick around for now, you might as well show some compassion to the less evolved), and those who still thirst for the sensuality and experiences of their incarnation are stuck feeling like maybe they’re only kidding themselves about making any spiritual progress.

To me, the re-integration is a crucial part of the work. You’ve just done a whole lot of work to shatter the bonds shackling your eternal Self to the illusions of the Ego, right? Now you have the opportunity to come down from the mountain and go back into the world, but to do it with a much healthier perspective and a sense of purpose. Putting Body and Soul into right relationship with each other, you become liminal, someone who walks with ease in both the material and the spiritual realms, who understands how they feed into one another, and who can use the tools of one to do work in the other, and vice versa. Believing that there is a purpose and meaning to your life, you become better equipped than ever to fulfill it.

So how does awakening happen?

Asking whether you can will yourself to awaken is a little like asking if you can will yourself to fall in love with someone. Certainly you can hold the intention, and you can prepare fertile ground for it to happen, but at some point there’s going to be a spark that is beyond reason and will, the sense of a revelation of a mystery which is what makes it an initiation experience. So I would say, yes and no.

Some people awaken completely spontaneously. They read a book or even just a quote, they meet someone who says something that shatters their worldview, they have a powerful dream, or an intense ritual experience, or they have a brush with death. Something comes into their life and kicks them in the head and demands that they pay attention.

Some people are guided there by good teachers, or guide themselves there through extensive spiritual exploration. Usually they have a nagging sense that there’s something more to life, and so they cultivate circumstances that allow it to happen.

Sometimes it’s a gradual process, like someone who needs to hit the snooze button five times before they can really get out of bed. They may have spontaneous experiences or guided ones, but usually they’ll have periods of insight and perception that are not quite strong enough to outlast their current worldview yet leave impressions for the next period to build on, until something finally tips the balance.

It’s not too hard to tell when you meet an awakened person. You’ll probably feel drawn to them, but not in the way you might feel drawn to a charming charismatic (the kind that dazzles you and throws you off guard). Around an awakened person, you’ll feel strangely comfortable and safe, like you’ve known them for a long time, like you feel that you could tell them deep things about yourself and not be judged or scorned. Other people will find them approachable, too– it won’t be just you. People enjoy being around them, and it makes sense, because they’re probably warm and compassionate. They smile a lot and exude peace, even if they’re being rowdy or silly or even angry. They aren’t quick to anger and they tend to be thoughtful. People value their opinions and advice. They may be quite perceptive, but they are also forgiving. The real key is that they have at least a measure of humility about their place in the world. They may share their insights, especially if asked, but they don’t wield their spiritual state like a weapon to beat down other “unenlightened” souls in argument, and they don’t put themselves forward as the final authority on anything, even if they are teachers or leaders of organizations.

Being awakened doesn’t require you to be anointed by a spiritual hierarchy. You don’t have to buy a particular author’s books or take a seminar. It doesn’t require that you be any specific race, age, political party, nationality, religion, or level of education. Your wise and loving grandma who never finished high school and always wore secondhand clothes is as likely to be an awakened soul as that Indian guru whose lecture sold out at the city stadium. The only requirement is, as Coleman Barks translates it from Rumi, “Don’t go back to sleep. Don’t go back to sleep.”

The incomparable Rob Brezsny has a quote that really sums it up: “You are the Chosen One, but so is everyone else.” We’re all “chosen” for something in this life, in that we– our higher selves– chose this incarnation for a reason, and part of the work of this life is to listen for guidance towards that reason. Awakening is simply the moment when you hear the universe calling your name, and you begin to pay closer attention to what it has to say.

Are you ready to get up?

Note: This post will be the first in a short series on the topic of spiritual awakening.