Spiritual Awakening & Enlightenment

Do You Take Your Awakenings in Large, Medium, or Small Doses?

And would you like fries with your enlightenment?

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Large Awakenings

• I have not had a Near Death Experience.
• I have not had a Kundalini Rising.
• I have never seen auras and energy fields.
• I have not reached enlightenment.
• I have not even had a Dark Night of the Soul experience

What am I doing wrong?

Large Awakenings may be seen as once-in-a-lifetime events, if even that often. I believe most people (or souls) wait many lifetimes to have one of these types of awakenings. For a rare few, these events occur more than once in a single lifetime.

Perhaps my last life was one with several large awakenings, which is why I have not yet had one in this lifetime. However, I have known and heard about many others who have had, and are currently having, a large awakening experience.

Large Awakenings are almost always life-changing events. You are, or feel as though you are, a completely different person before and after such an event. For those who are unprepared, this can sometimes be traumatic.

Large Awakenings are what people write books about and talk about on YouTube and Facebook. For those who have not had a Large Awakening, this is what their ego wants so they, too, can be “famous” and have a socially accepted “purpose” in life. Thus, knowing that such an experience is possible is a major motivation for an ego to follow a spiritual path.

Medium Awakenings

• I have experienced moments of Bliss and Oneness with Everything — although for only short moments of time.
• I have experienced some wonderful Lucid Dreams both while sleeping and meditating — mostly when I was taking a lucid dreaming class, but rarely now.
• I have learned to Channel my Higher Self, both through voice and writing — I took an online class over a year ago and I still do this a couple of times a month.
• I have manifested many, but not all, of my desires in life, though the timing was sometimes a bit off — I attribute this to 45+ years of somewhat regular meditation practice.
• I experience levels of samadhi (transcendence or oneness) almost daily in my meditation practices — although these are temporary and often lower levels.

OK, so I am doing some things right!

Medium Awakenings range considerably from things that may happen once a week to those that occur once every few years. They also vary in their impact on us, with some being much more significant than others.

Medium Awakenings are, I believe, quite common among people who have a regular spiritual practice. However, spiritual practice does not guarantee an Awakening experience.

While they are seldom life-changing in and of themselves, they can accumulate over time to change one’s life. This is true for me, with these types of awakenings having mostly been associated with my practice of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and occasionally other forms of meditation, and with my yoga practice.

Medium Awakenings can also be experienced through hallucinogenic plants and chemicals. As deep as the experiences can be, they are almost always short-lived glimpses of what is spiritually possible.

Medium Awakenings, while not large, are still special experiences. We sometimes share our stories of them with our friends and relations. But if our friends are not spiritually oriented, we may never talk about the experience at all.

Over time, we might even forget that we had the experience. Keeping a journal in some way can help us to remember. (Nowadays, I write about my experiences on Medium.com — an appropriately named platform.)

Small Awakenings

• I have a Small Awaken every morning to a new day and a new world. There is no going back. We are always moving forward from the present moment.
• I have a Small Awakening every time I realize, while meditating, that my monkey mind has strayed from my focus (breath, mantra, or whatever).
• I have Small Awakenings throughout my day every time I realize that my mind has wandered from my being present with my reality.
• I have a Small Awakening every time I see signs of synchronicity, such as repeating number sequences, which may or may not occur daily.

We all do this as part of our ‘taken-for-granted’ existence.

Small Awakenings happen throughout our everyday lives. They happen so much that we take them for granted — we often ignore them and do not pay attention to them.

At a minimum, there is a Small Awakening every time we realize that we were “lost in thought”, or “distracted by thoughts”, or perhaps “distracted by Facebook or Instagram”. Simply realizing this is awakening to the realization that we are more than our thoughts and that we are more than the media we engage with.

Small Awakenings are not commonly thought of as spiritual experiences.

However, my particular meditation practice is all about learning how to return gently to my inner or true self from bouts of wandering thoughts. The goal is to make that ability to return to the self an innate part of my waking (and sleeping) activities. This means being present, here and now, all the time.

Small Awakenings, from that perspective, are very important. They build upon the larger spiritual teachings that learn from various teachers. Small Awakenings are how we integrate those spiritual teachings to make them real-world experiences and to raise our consciousness from the 3rd to higher dimensions.

Awakening vs Enlightenment

If you think you are Awakened, you probably have. If you think you are Enlightened, you probably are not. — from ‘Awakening vs Enlightenment’, by Alan Lew

Large Awakenings are often associated with “enlightenment”. But while they are a big step on the path to enlightenment, they are not enlightenment because they are temporary and partial.

We are multidimensional beings, and even Large Awakenings only involves a small part of that multidimensionality.

Enlightenment is a path, not a destination. We say someone is “Enlightened” when they have achieved a very high state of Awakening. “High state” means that they have integrated and raised their multidimensional consciousness to a noticeable degree above where others are.

But even beings at the highest levels of consciousness can go higher in our infinite universe.

Large and Medium Awakening help to keep us motivated on the path to enlightenment. They show us who we truly are and what our deeper relationship is to our life and our world. They show us what is possible, which is helpful as we inevitably slip out of those temporarily awakened states of being.

The Potential of ‘Small Awakenings’

Small Awakenings are much more common and accessible than Large and Medium Awakening. Because of that, they can be a significant source of spiritual motivation if we are aware of their value and role.

It is said that the more Awakening experiences we have, the shorter and less intense are the un-awakened period that we experience between them. Small Awakening could have a huge role to play in facilitating this, beyond the more typical focus on Large and Medium Awakenings.

I think this has been true in my own life, as I have become more and more aware of my Small Awakenings. Or perhaps this awareness is simply a positive sign of ascending to a more awakened and enlightened life.

Related

• I previously wrote about seeing my Life as a Series of Awakening Moments. That article talks about Awakening Moments that seem far from spiritual but ultimately have spiritual outcomes.

• Here is a simple technique to remind yourself of your beingness throughout the day (and perhaps night)…

• For more on Spiritual Awakenings, see this collection of articles:

• Note that the articles in that collection are behind the Medium paywall. For paywall-free access to my articles, go to www.AlanLew.com, linked below.

Contact

• I appreciate comments, questions, and typo corrections. - See the About link in my Medium profile for contact information and related articles.
• Written in collaboration with my Energy Group/Higher Self. This is our perspective of the truth and not the whole truth of reality.

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