Personal Awakening & Global Ascension

Our Lives are a Remarkable Series of Awakening Moments

[Updated August 23, 2022] Each awakening is a hidden Timeline Shift that we make new in each moment.

A MEME on Facebook asked:

“What does it mean to awaken?”

There were 188 comments over a 4.5-day period. After skimming through maybe half of those, I wrote my response:

To awaken is to consciously take the first step on the unending path of enlightenment. That step can take infinite forms, which is why there are a seemingly infinite number of definitions on FB.

I have written elsewhere (in the article below ⬇):

If you feel you have had an awakening, then most likely you have awakened. If you feel that you are enlightened, then most likely you are not enlightened.

What I wrote got me thinking about how my life has been a series of many (innumerable) awakening moments. Cumulatively, they have created, and continue to create, the person I am today.

Based on my definitions above, and with the benefit of hindsight, the earliest first step toward awakening that I can remember was when I was 15 years old.

Half a century later, I do not consider myself “enlightened”, but I feel I am a little more awakened than when I started this path. And it is getting better all the time!

Awakening Moment #1 — Becoming Public

When I was 15 years old, I decided that there was more to life than what I had experienced up to that point in time. This meant switching from a Catholic high school to a public high school, which was the first public school I had attended since kindergarten. I never bought into those religious teachings. But Catholic schooling was all I knew — it was my Matrix. Moving to a public school was huge and took me into totally new realms of consciousness (it was, after all, the late 1960s and early 1970s).

The awakening knowledge I gained in taking that first step was that I could change my reality. I could see an option that might be better. And I could take action to bring that vision into my reality. It was an act of empowerment. And it was a spiritual awakening, although I did not think about it in those terms then.

Awakening Moment #2 — Mind Alterations

Shortly after I switched to a public school, I started partaking in various mind-altering substances. Personally, I saw this as a kind of self-medication, to help maintain my sanity through the matrix of high school. In retrospect, again, I see that experience as another step in my spiritual awakening.

After learning that I could change my physical world and change my life, I was now learning that I could change my mental world and change my life even more. It was also an escape from the world of high school, in which I felt little control. But I still consider it a significant spiritual awakening lesson.

Awakening Moment #3 — Freedom, Sort Of

When I graduated from high school, I felt finally let out of prison. I know many people have fond memories of their high school years. Unfortunately, I do not — especially in comparison to life after those years. I felt a huge expansion of freedom as I entered the social norms of college (another Matrix), even though I was still living at home with my parents and hanging out with old high school friends.

While I still did not consider it spiritual, the experience of freedom was a surprise. I learned something about how our social structures, like our education system, shape our human experience. In my case, that structure (high school) severely suppressed who I really was. I was, finally, awakening to a potential that had lay dormant in me.

In retrospect, as much as I disliked who I was in high school, it allowed me a lot of room to explore. I do not really regret those years, though I would not want to live them over again.

Awakening Moment #4 — Frat House Meditation

I learned Transcendental Meditation (TM) about 9 months after graduating from high school. TM was the thing to do in the college fraternity I had joined — besides drinking beer and going to parties.

A group of us would meditate in the ‘frat house’, which many people find hard to believe. This was, however, the early 1970s, and we would also attend Grateful Dead concerts together in northern California. I also bought and read Be Here Now by Ram Dass and my hair had grown to shoulder length. I was a wannabe hippie.

That fraternity experience was more important than college. The summer after my first year, I ended up living and working (as a janitor) in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I had no intention of returning to college.

This awakening is closely related to #3, above. But the real focus is my introduction to meditation. Meditation awakened me to the fact that I could alter my mental reality without external substances. To this day, I feel that learning to meditate had the greatest long-term positive impact on my life than anything else that I had ever done.

Awakening Moment #5 — A Total New Reality — This Was Huge

A friend from California knocked on my apartment door in Wyoming one day. He said that he contacted my parents to find me, and that I needed to return home because a university in Hong Kong had accepted me to be an exchange student. (There is a story behind how that happened, which I will not recount here.)

My friend and I hitchhiked up to Seattle and then down the Pacific Coast Highway. I soon took my first flight ever, flying from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

I hated Hong Kong at first (culture & climate shock), but I soon grew to love it and stayed there for over two years. TM became my sole mind-altering substance while I was in Hong Kong, although I would occasionally have a beer as the legal drinking age was lower there.

This awakening complete change of my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual world. It was the best thing that ever happened to me because of all that.

I feel sorry for exchange students today because the internet is so global that they can be on the opposite side of the planet and feel fully connected to home. When I was in Hong Kong, I never thought of making a phone call home because it was far too expensive!

I really had to learn to create my own reality. Fortunately, I had a TM support network, which was already global, to help. I regularly attended their lectures and my first meditation retreat, held at a Trappist Monastery in Hong Kong.

Ram Dass came with me to Hong Kong, and I also started reading (no more parties) many other spiritual authors. Some of my favorites were J. Krishnamurti, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Robert’s Seth Speaks, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I used the I Ching (Richard Wilhelm’s 1924 translation) to explore the future and make life decisions.

I went through a shamanic or spiritual initiation (what social scientists call a liminal experience) in which almost everything was stripped from me: my environment, my family, my friends, my foods, my culture, and my comforts. Also stripped from me were fears and insecurities that I associated with many of those things. I felt lonely, but also free. I felt confused, but also confident. In retrospect, I was learning how to create my reality. And that is something that I used for the rest of my life.

Awakening Moment #6 — Reverse Culture Shock

I finally returned to the US and was ready to return to college in a more serious way. I experience reverse culture shock, of course. My friends said I spoke with a British accent. I was much more interested in Buddhist dharma talks and TM meditation retreats than parties. They had changed as well, but I think not as much as I had.

My return was another liminal transition in which I even more fully realized that the world I knew a few years ago was gone and would never return. Everything felt so different. And I was happy for that, as the future felt wide open with possibilities.

Unending Awakening Moments

I could go on and on describing one awakening moment after another. Some seem like a temporary step backward, but each contributed to the expansion of my consciousness. In many ways, I have been extremely fortunate to have had the life experiences that I have had.

For example, I ended up going to 8 different colleges and universities in 8 years before finally finishing my bachelor's degree. I had two marriages, children, and a successful career doing a job that I loved, and which took me to interesting places all over the world.

Each new school and new life-changing event was a new experience, and a new awakening. Through the polarities of push and pull in each transition, I learned more about myself, about other people, and about the world we all share.

I then integrate that new knowledge and understanding. And I become a new person as a result. And gradually, my consciousness expanded.

With all those awakening moments, you would think that I would be enlightened by now! I am certainly more awakened than my teenage and middle-aged selves.

Awakening is a never-ending process in a universe that is eternal and infinite. To me, enlightenment is always a higher state from wherever we currently are. No one ever “reaches” enlightenment.

⬇ This story is about one of the more powerful awakenings I had in recent memory, and which I have since integrated into my life…

⬇ Karma is another way to think of how the events in our lives conspire to guide us toward awakening. The process is very similar to what I describe above…

Awakening Moments as Timeline Shifts

I have come to believe that awakening moments occur in every present moment point. We are continually shifting into new timelines from one moment point to the next. And each of those shifts is an awakening moment. They are an opportunity for us to remember our true self and to expand our consciousness.

Most of the awakening moments we experience are so subtle that we are not consciously aware of their impact on us. In addition, our small ego-self resists large awakenings because it does not want to give up its power to our deeper soul-self.

But there are also awakening moments that are huge. We are very aware that something big has is happening or has happened to us. Examples of the big ones include graduating from school, getting a new job, moving to a new city, getting married, becoming a parent, and my Hawai’i story linked above.

We can also think of these awakening moments as timeline shifts. We choose timelines in every present moment point. That means we define our past, present, and future from one moment point to the next. Again, most of the time, there are only minor shifts between each of those moment points.

But occasionally there are big ones! Some of those are personal, like my move to Hong Kong, while other are global, like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Each time we shift our timeline, we are entering (or creating) a new reality, a new planet Earth, and a new universe for us to experience. When we sense a meaningful change in our environment (including our body and mind), that is a result of a significant timeline shift that we have just made.

For more in timelines, see…

Manifest reality is infinite and eternal, with no boundaries of any kind. That means we have an infinite number of worlds to choose from as we create our reality from moment to moment.

For more on infinity, see…

The COVID-19 as a Global Awakening Moment

Every change is purposeful and moves us in the direction of expanding our consciousness. We live in an infinitely expanding universe, and there is no other direction that we can go — even if it seems hard for our ego-self to believe this at times. Many believe our Soul is the main part of us in charge of directing our expansion and our awakening moments.

This year of COVID-19 [2020] was the biggest global awakening timeline shift of my half-century life. I am too young for WWII and the Vietnam War. The 9/11 terrorist attack was probably the biggest shift that I had experienced prior to 2020.

For me, it is fascinating to watch the world change the way it has. Some people are so hopeful for a more “positive” New Earth to emerge, while others are just as hopeful for a “return to normal”. Nothing can ever return to the past, because, as stated above, we are always expanding and awakening in the present moment.

While the direction of change is always positive overall, just what the post-COVID-19 New Earth will look like could be different from what some New Age spiritualists envision. Not that their visions are flawed, but our smaller ego mind can only go so far in knowing what our Soul has in store for us.

Trust that we are all awakening a tiny bit more every moment, and together that will bring the big global awakening and transformation that is the promise of our beautiful planet.

Awakening to Our Absolute-Self

One possible sign that I have reached some level of evolution through my awakening moments is that I (as my ego-self) am convinced that I (ego-self) had nothing to do with any of it.

I (ego-self) am simply a mechanism through which the larger I (my absolute-self) experiences a narrow sliver of physical reality (also known as the 3rd Dimension, or 3D). Our larger absolute-self is what we are all awakening to know ourselves as.

One definition of awakening is a shift in having a primary identification with our 3D ego-self to primarily identifying with our absolute-self. Nothing else really changes in the life experience of your 3D ego-self, other than that identification — which changes everything.

Events in our physical reality lives do not change. They continue to unfold as we release karma and live our life purpose (dharma), as described in the karma article linked above.

But how we interpret and appreciate those events completely changes. We perceive the underlying unity and synchronicity of everything. We fully realize how each moment is an awakening. And by seeing that, we hold unconditional love for every experience we have through our ego-self.

For more on the ego-self and absolute-self, see...

For more on the synchronicity (unity & purposefulness) of everything, see…

Related

• 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.

My Medium writings are available “paywall free” at www.AlanLew.com:

• follow my Facebook page linked to my Medium writings
• subscribe to My Medium Writings
• become a Medium member to support my writings

Visit and Follow New Earth Consciousness for More Articles like this.

• subscribe New Earth Consciousness NEWS, the occasional newsletter for NEC
• …and join our New Earth Consciousness Group on Facebook