What Does it Mean to Have a ‘Spiritual Awakening’?

What does it actually look like and how does one become ‘awakened’?

We use these words all the time in the spiritual community as if we all know exactly what they mean. But, what does it really mean to say you’ve had a spiritual awakening?

Is it something you do? Something that’s done to you? Some process of revelation is implied, right? That we’re awakening out of something, that we’re awakening to something. We are the subject, awakening is the verb.

But that begins to paint a picture that I consider imprecise. It’s more precise to say we remember what we are. Because there’s nothing to become, nothing to do. We already are the end result, even as we are unfolding. Consciousness is simply revealing itself to itself.

“The truth is you already are what you are seeking.”

— Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

My Awakening Experience

I say I’ve had an ‘awakening’, because of an experience that revealed to me a truth of my existence that I’d never known before; namely, that I am not my mind or my body.

I experienced emptiness. I didn’t have any background in Buddhist practice, that was just the only word that came to me to describe it. I’m grateful that it did because it led me to Adyashanti’s works, which literally saved my life.

If you’ve read some of my other pieces, you’ll know this emptiness came after a heartbreak; that was my catalyst. But I don’t want to talk about the catalyst, I want to talk about the actual experience.

Awakening is, by its very nature, phenomenological, meaning it doesn’t center in a concept; it’s centered in personal experience. This is why you can’t bring it on by understanding what it is. Nonetheless, I’ll do my best to describe my experience, in the hopes that it will help someone and further demonstrate my point, which is that we don’t have to strive, in fact, shouldn’t strive for awakening. We already are the thing so many are striving for.

What I knew of my identity was shattered entirely. I simply woke up after three days of crying feeling completely empty of thought, of feeling.

There was just quiet, empty space and I thought: ‘Oh, there’s nothing here. Hmm.’ It wasn’t blissful. It wasn’t freeing. I wasn’t happy or sad about it. I was just empty stillness. Nothing. When my mind would look at the experience, it would just go: ‘How strange. So spacious.’ There was no judgment, at first, just curiosity.

This emptiness went on for months, okay. I was experiencing this for about seven months. That is, to me, an extremely long time to be in this kind of vacuum.

“Awakening itself can be very disorienting. Everything you thought was true, you now see is not. The person you thought you were, you now see you are not.”

— Adyashanti, The End of Your World

Dying in The Void

Some people in the spiritual community talk about a ‘Void’ phase between ego breakdown and when you start plugging into what is beyond the ego. I’d say this period was that on steroids. I had no motivation to do anything at all. What felt most natural to me was laying still. Anything beyond that felt exhausting like I was forcing myself to do when I was just supposed to exist. After all, nothing doesn’t do nothing, it just is nothing.

I remembered who I was supposed to be to people: ‘Joy’. I was living at home with my family at the time and I could remember how ‘Joy’ was supposed to interact with them. I was working and knew how to put ‘Joy’ on. But it felt entirely like a mask. There was nothing there that felt like ‘Joy’ behind that mask.

Eventually, my mind started to get antsy and uncomfortable with the quiet, the stillness. It remembered what it was like to experience feelings, to think thoughts beyond the mechanical, to have preferences, desires. It missed those things.

It started wanting to get out of this experience. Meaninglessness is what started to pervade my psyche. If I was nothing, if we were all nothing, (and we were, that I knew), then what was the point? Life was meaningless. I might as well not live it, right?

My ego was in its death throes, trying to survive the only way it knew how. Escape hatch from the experience of dissolving into nothing. I wanted to die because ‘I’ was already dying.

“In a certain sense, enlightenment is dying into the ordinary, or into an extraordinary ordinariness. We start to realize the ordinary is extraordinary. It’s almost like catching onto a hidden secret — that all along we were in the promised land, all along we were in the kingdom of heaven.”

— Adyashanti, The End of Your World

Coming Back to Life

Adyashanti’s The End of Your World is pretty much what got me through. Understanding what was happening to me, what my mind was doing, how it was reacting, helped go some way to soothing the feeling that I was scratching at the walls of a prison that was my own earthly body. Surrendering to the suicidal thoughts and allowing them to just be there, without resisting, gave me some relief.

Ultimately, thanking my ego-mind for its suicidality, thanking it for trying to ‘save me’ in the only way it felt it could anymore is, ironically, what finally made the suicidal thoughts end. (Again, the ego-mind wants to exist. It’s a protective guard, and to it, my ‘awakening’ felt like the worst possible thing. The escape hatch was its only solution.)

I also think that my awakening kind of sent me out too far, in the sense that I was too long stuck in detachment from the ego. People consider complete ego death to be some kind of goal of enlightenment, but actually what this taught me was that we need the ego to interface with this world. Without feeling connected to it, I was adrift in the emptiness, unable to actively live my life and enjoy it, which is what we’re here to do.

Grounding into my everyday experience is what started to bring me back down to earth. I had to teach myself to enjoy things like the warmth of the sun on my face, the taste of cherries, the feeling of grass between my toes. Everything was new. Gradually, I came back to a baseline, where I felt more plugged into my life and able to do ‘Joy’ again.

But even now that I’m feeling attached to my ego-personality again, I can’t unknow that. I can’t un-experience that and my life has been forever changed because of that awareness. My awareness has only grown from there.

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretense. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

― Adyashanti

How Do You Bring About Awakening?

The thing is, though, I didn’t do a whole lot to get here. I meditate, but that’s more of a grounding and centering technique for me than it is about getting anywhere or having any kind of ‘enlightening’ experience. I do yoga, but that’s mostly stretching to ease my chronic back pain. And anyway, I only started both of those things in the summer of 2019. Not nearly long enough to bring about ‘enlightenment’ by any traditional means.

I didn’t feel bliss then and haven't to this day. I found my way back to living, found my way back to joy through utter mundanity, and still find the most peace that way. But, now I think that was a gift. Because what I came to realize was that this, this experience, every experience, is it. There isn’t anywhere else to be, there isn't a mountain to climb to get to an enlightened state of being. We aren’t arriving, we’re unraveling everything that keeps us from understanding what we already are.

We already are. When the ego isn’t there, there’s nothing. This means we already are that nothing or emptiness or whatever word resonates for you. It’s simply what is.

Every single person that exists is that thing beyond the ego, which means every single person is already in a perfect state of being. They just aren’t conscious of it, which is okay too. Emptiness doesn’t have a preference for being recognized by the mind. It doesn’t stop being what it is because the ego-mind can’t see it.

But I recognize that isn’t everyone’s experience of awakening. Sometimes people make their way to the realization of what’s beyond the ego-mind through particular peak experiences that bring bliss. And I think this, more than anything, can get them stuck, believing that bliss is what it means to be ‘awakened’.

I know there are a lot of people who also practice ‘spirituality’, in the sense that they ascribe to certain ideas about how to live our lives: what we should eat, wear, drink, how we should talk, treat people, spend our time. All of that is fine. None of it is what we are.

“Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is.”

― Adyashanti

It’s the most paradoxical thing that awakening is simply seeing what we already are, and if we chase after ‘awakening’ we’re already missing it. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing anyone can do to bring about awakening. There are tools that can help us start to see the ego more clearly and therefore begin its slow dissolving, so that we may better see through it, but there’s nothing that can force someone into the sudden experiential awareness of what’s beyond it. It happens or it doesn’t.

But I take comfort in the fact that we don’t have to be consciously aware of it at all. Seeing out of our own two eyes is just that which we are bearing witness to itself in the form of other ego-minds masking that same Self. And bearing witness is awareness. Sure, it’s nice to know it with the mind, but it’s enough to simply be it.

❤

I used a lot of Adya quotes because his writing/teaching really spoke to me at a time I needed it. He and Rumi are the only teachers I’ve ever had. lol I don’t believe you need any particular teacher or guru to guide you in your awakening. You have everything you need within you, but it can be nice to have someone else reflect your experience back to you.

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