Finding Meaning After Spiritual Awakening

After awakening to reality, it becomes difficult to find meaning in the mundane

With greater consciousness, or awareness of the truth of what we are, inevitably comes the realization of how small and limited the lives we’ve been leading up to that point have been. Or rather, would seem to be.

For months after my awakening experience (you can read about what “awakening” means to me here if you’re inclined), I fell into a black hole.

My experience of awakening was characterized by what I called emptiness. Though I now know this is a Buddhist term, I didn’t at the time.

I didn’t feel oneness with all things. I didn’t feel blissfully connected to Source. Instead, I was hurled into a state where the ego I’d been attached to my whole life was suddenly just gone. My mind was quiet. There was no emotion. Everything was still and when I looked inside myself, there was just nothing there. Nothing.

For a little while, it was fine. I suppose my mind was so blown open, my ego so thoroughly decimated at that moment, that there was nothing of it to resist the experience. The most I felt was an occasional distant curiosity. A sort of “huh…that’s weird, *shrug*”.

After some time, though, the mind came back online and I started to feel restless, uneasy, disoriented, and then, not long after, depressed over my state of being.

Apathy

As humans, we know apathy to be a sign that something’s wrong. It’s an indifference to life, a way of being “checked out” and emotionless in the face of things that would usually spark interest or emotion. Oftentimes, we discuss it as a symptom of depression.

However, apathy, in my experience, is the general state of consciousness. Emotions are the domain of the ego. The mind creates all of our emotional experiences. Emotions are fleeting and changeable. They can be good guides to places that are unhealed within us or signals to tell us why we’re behaving the ways we do, but they aren’t true in the way that what we are is true.

When my egoic structure was broken down and all that was left was nothing, apathy became the norm. Emotions were no longer constantly rising and falling within me. I wasn’t reacting to the world around me that way. All was quiet, still.

That could sound nice, especially for someone who deals with anything like anxiety or obsessive thinking, but the mind is made for emotion. It’s made for thought. It doesn’t have to be inundated with them all of the time, but the absence of them entirely isn’t natural to the human mind.

There was nothing that excited me anymore, nothing I felt inspired to do. Nothing made me feel good, nothing made me feel bad. The only time I felt right was when I just laid still and existed, like an inanimate object. Being, as is the way of consciousness, instead of doing.

But of course, humans must do. We must hydrate, we must eat, we must shower, we must do things, at the very least to simply maintain the health of the body. My mind looked at the state of apathy I was in and determined, no, this was not okay.

Meaninglessness

Another related experience was feeling that everything was meaningless. Before awakening, as is the case with all humanity, my desires, and passions, my drives, and my goals all came from the ego. That doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with them. They were spawned from the perspective with which I perceived my existence.

For example, I wanted to be a journalist, to tell people’s stories. I wanted to do volunteer work, to help serve local and international communities after disasters. I also wanted to be successful at those things, to be respected for my work and contribution to society.

None of those things is a problem. They just have no bearing on anything real. All of our egos, and by extension, all of the structures and systems we’ve created as human beings, are false constructs. It’s not reality.

And having seen through my ego so thoroughly, having touched reality, I had a clear embodied understanding that, in absolute terms, none of it mattered. Not only had all my desire, passion, and motivation been ripped away when my ego was torn to bits, the awareness that everything in this life wasn’t reality made it feel completely devoid of meaning.

Imagine, you’re going about your life, la dee da, and suddenly you get knocked over the head, open your eyes and see people with VR helmets on all around you, sitting in a vast emptiness that goes on forever. Your helmet is in your hand, cracked. And sure, you can put it back on, but you’ll always know that nothing you’re living is real.

For me, that brought about a nihilism so strong, my mind struggled to swim out of the depths of it. If I was nothing (which, I knew), and nothing I did was real, then nothing mattered. Why was I even here? Existence became heavy, living became an endless series of uninteresting, somewhat surreal moments. Nothing mattered.

Finding Meaning Again

If you’ve gone or are going through a spiritual awakening, it’s not uncommon for the mind to react this way. Remember that an awakening, by necessity, requires that your ego be, if not destroyed for some period of time, certainly seen through, which means your mind is going to be completely at a loss for what to hold onto.

There’s a vacuum. Where there used to be constant stimuli, now there is quiet and at the very least you’ll be discomfited, disoriented. Meaninglessness cropping up is pretty par for the course.

My first advice is not to get scared and try to fight it with judgment — “I shouldn’t be feeling this way.”. That won’t work. Let your mind do what it does. Even if you feel suicidal — which I did for a while — it’s just your mind grappling with this new state of being. Let it be.

The way that I crawled my way out of the black hole of nihilism wasn’t by escaping the mundanity that had become to mean so little to me. I didn't meditate my way out. I didn’t enlighten my way out.

Paradoxically, I had to ground myself thoroughly in my day-to-day.

I took walks, remembered what it was like to feel the sun on my skin, reminded myself it felt nice. I put my hands in the dirt, smelled it, touched trees, felt the bark under my fingers. When I sat down to eat, I tried to taste my food. When I took a bath, I tried to feel the wetness on my skin.

I forced myself to be unbearably present in my body and meaninglessness slowly gave way to gratitude, for the small moments, the little things I couldn’t feel before, couldn’t find pleasure in. Gratitude gave way to wonder.

I’ll be honest and say that sometimes, it’s hard not to slip back into apathy. That fundamental awareness of reality is never far from me. I still have moments when I forget to plug in, to ground into the experience of this life. I have moments I forget to find value in it, to be grateful for it.

I’m here has become a mantra for me. Because yes, this life experience is a fabrication, but what a spectacular fabrication, then, no? I’m here. I might as well eke out every morsel of joy, experience every possible range of emotion I can while I can.

I know what it’s like to not be able to. I know the still depths, the nothingness of consciousness, and though at times the quiet calls to me, I know that there is more in being human. I’m here, experiencing it all, so I find meaning in that.

I find meaning in the fact that I can open my eyes and see more than vast emptiness and VR helmets, that I can feel the sun and taste the air and, when I remember to, play in this remarkable dreamland we’ve created.

❤

If you’d like to talk more about awakening, feel free to drop a comment! I love chatting down there. And if you’re interested in catching other things I write, you can become a Medium member here. XO