1. Spiritual Experiences and the Gift of Awakening

There have likely been moments in your life when you asked big questions: “What is real?” “What is life all about?” “Is there a God?” For some of us, these questions arise in early childhood—especially when we feel we don’t see the world as others do and don’t seem to fit in. As adults, we may ask them after a crisis or in a moment when we realize that we are unfulfilled by relationships, work, or material accomplishments. We sense something important is still missing and long for completion. Moments like these frequently stir a search for more, for fresh answers to the puzzle of our existence. We feel called to understand what is actually true. We feel propelled into a spiritual search from within.

We can also be thrust into this journey without intending it. Even people who would never identify as spiritual sometimes find themselves awakening through activities that I’ve come to call “portals” to awakening. Here are some external things that can propel us to seek deeper truths.

Through these moments of expanded awareness, we recognize there is something much bigger than “me,” that “I” is not limited to the boundary of personal consciousness. They instigate experience beyond our personal body-mind that is a powerful, and often life-changing, event. These are the ways a spiritual journey can begin.

Portals and initial experiences often inspire us to go deeper. Our glimpses open up more questions and we may seek more answers. Awakening may become a primary intention in our life, pulling us into an unfathomable longing, and laying the groundwork for enlightenment. Our yearning is an internal call for a transformative shift of consciousness.

What Is Awakening?

This transformational shift is called awakening. Spiritual awakening, from a non-dual perspective, is clearly remembering who you are: one with all existence. Therefore, the universal consciousness within you awakens itself. Some spiritual teachers say it is the remembrance or realization of our true nature, by our true nature. Awareness and consciousness are suddenly clear and expansive, undisturbed, and undivided by thought. The experience may be accompanied by great insight, ecstatic bliss, or a mystical infusion of light, love, and vision. Awakening can strike us like a bolt of energy or it may gently unravel through years of seeking truth. Joanne, a retired librarian, had an awakening while meditating at a retreat.

There was a sudden seeing of complete, white, brilliant stillness everywhere. There was no “me” thinking—there was nothing but white illumination and it was complete love. It was spacious, unbounded, undifferentiated, endless, and pure love. I became aware that everything is of love and there is nothing other than that. Also, within this brilliance arose little blobs of worry, angst, and thoughts. I immediately knew that every thought, worry, angst was only that—and nothing else. They just appeared and fell away, and were without substance in this complete and pure brilliance. There was only joy, awe, and amazement.

Joanne had a sudden thought about hanging on to the experience and making it last, and then felt a heavy curtain came down over the entire scene that brought the sensation of density in her body. Mental chatter arose and she came out of meditation. Her momentary awakening can be called a “glimpse of freedom” or a “touch of grace.” Many who experience it feel distressed when it passes, but its transience can offer encouragement to keep entering the silence of meditation.

Awakening is an internal, evolutionary impulse that may draw us into new perceptions of human life and our true nature, forcing a radical realignment of how we live. Awakening is a sudden movement, or a series of shifts, that makes enlightenment possible.

What Is Enlightenment?

When awakening becomes stabilized, we may experience liberation—enlightenment. All of us have this potential because our true nature already exists within each of us. We become liberated from our old identifications, compulsions, demands, and suffering.

Enlightenment has been described in mystical literature from many traditions in expansive terms, such as a descent of divine grace or a dissolving of the personal self while merging with the cosmos. It has also been imagined, and exaggerated, as a permanently transcendent state of all-knowing wisdom and unending bliss, with miraculous powers. An ineffable spiritual experience is sometimes mistaken for enlightenment, but it is not. More often, enlightenment feels like opening into a quiet and subtle recognition of our true nature.

Enlightenment is the ability to live, day in and day out, in a state of union, free from conditioned separateness and division. It requires continual alignment with the truth we have seen while awakening. It is more enduring—and therefore more challenging—than having initial moments of awakening. Enlightenment requires plunging into the unknown mystery of transformation. Not many who have an initial awakening realization will continue the journey beyond to liberation, as most of us are content with the initial gift or become distracted with the demands and desires of life.

A common misperception about enlightenment is that it requires a kind of sainthood and purity that we know we will never possess. This ideal is based on stories of a few enlightened sages or saints. But these men and women are simply styles of enlightened living, because liberated lives vary as much as unawakened ones. Many great mystics, historical and modern, had lives in turmoil before they were liberated—and their enlightenment brought clarity rather than perfection. Enlightenment calls for authenticity, a willingness to listen to the deepest intuition about what right expression is from moment to moment. It brings an appreciation of the needs of the whole rather than caring only for the individual, limited me.

“Enlightenment” describes a natural consciousness and presence that is fully awakened to its own true nature. This liberation, as I’ll explore in Part Three, feels like freedom, peace, and at times an irrepressible love without conditions. We deeply relax into life, and a way of being unfolds that does not feel at all personal. Rather than abandoning individual humanity, enlightenment is a lightening of it and includes compassion for the ways we become stuck in separateness.

Today’s Spiritual Emergence

Transpersonal psychology uses “spiritual emergence” to describe a variety of phenomena that may arise through spiritual or energy practices. This term includes changes in consciousness and a variety of altered states, described throughout this book, to differentiate these anomalous events from pathological conditions. This all-inclusive category usually describes initiatory events that are the first movements in our journey to enlightenment.

Many young people experience spontaneous moments of awakening. One spiritual teacher observed that more and more young people, between the ages of fifteen and thirty, are showing up at her talks and reporting that they are familiar with the expansive experience of oneness, feel an intimate connection to the earth, and have gone through a spiritual awakening. Most have neither done a practice nor had a conscious longing for awakening.2 Many spiritual teachers speculate that this is happening because we live in desperate times and need an influx of aware, creative, compassionate people who will actively serve others and contribute fresh ideas. This is a radical change from the traditional spiritual path of withdrawing from society and from the 1960s movements when young people felt a need to drop out of the mainstream to seek social alternatives.

There is currently a movement toward awakening evident in the abundance of inspirational books, experiential retreats, and organizational conferences—despite many cultural obstacles, distractions, and inadequate understanding. Ordinary people are waking up spontaneously and powerfully after exposure to teachings or practices, such as meditation and yoga, that they don’t realize are designed to facilitate spiritual processes. Even popularized versions can change our body, breath, how our mind functions, our view of relationship, and our level of identification with conditioning.

A spiritual emergence, at any level, is an invitation to deepen our intention and open our mind and heart to the unfolding of an awakening process that will transform our relationship with life. We ask: “Could this happen to me?” “Does my heart long for truth?” “How can I invite awakening into my life?” “How can my awakening contribute to our world?”

From Suffering to Awakening

Just as there are many triggers for awakening, we also have predispositions to awaken that have been identified in the literature of mysticism. Today, we do not often call people who have experienced awakening “mystics,” as it seems to be an old-fashioned term reserved for rare beings who lived in past centuries, like Catholic saints, Buddhas, Hindu gurus, Sufi dervishes, and Taoist sages. But when we read their stories, it’s clear that their journeys as mystics usually began with struggles that are familiar to us. For hundreds of years, their recorded writings—whether nuns or poets, inspired teachers or artists—have described a division, or painful restlessness, within themselves prior to a moment of illumination when a great light or descent of grace fell upon them.

Some female mystics, including Saint Catherine of Genoa, Madame Guyon in France, and Anandamayi Ma in India, were married in the conventions of their times when marriages were determined by strict family edicts. They turned their passions toward a love of God, eventually becoming free from conditions that felt like imprisonment.

Men were often entangled in worldly finances, wars, and even revenge before they had awakenings that pulled them toward lives closer to nature and service. Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Paul of Tarsus, and Milarepa the Tibetan saint are examples of the sudden transformation from fighter to spiritual seeker. Siddhartha was a wealthy prince and father, but when he saw suffering and death for the first time, he plunged dramatically into a spiritual search, leaving home to pursue truth and to become the enlightened Buddha. As a teenager, Ramana Maharshi suffered from profound grief and puzzlement after the deaths of both his father and then the uncle who had taken care of him. This suffering preceded his search and realization. Milarepa originally wanted yogic powers to gain revenge on an uncle who had stolen the family property, and after terrible consequences saw the evil in his heart and begged for liberation.

Today, many people who are awakening have histories of suffering, either physically or emotionally. Many among us were abused or neglected as children, experienced trauma or violence, or report chronic illness such as Lyme disease, environmental sensitivity, lupus, or chronic fatigue. Many endure emotional challenges, such as grief, depression, or anxiety, preceding a moment of breaking through into another dimension of consciousness.

One modern mystic, Eckhart Tolle, describes this experience clearly in his book The Power of Now. Until he was nearly thirty years old, Tolle says he lived in “a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression.” He writes that one morning he woke up with a feeling of absolute dread. “Everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence.” Overwhelmed by this feeling, he longed for annihilation and thought “I can’t live with myself any longer.”

Suddenly, he realized how peculiar this thought was. For if there was an “I” who could not live with “myself,” there must be two distinct things: the I and the self. “Only one of them could be real” he thought, and that stopped his mind.

I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken by my chest. I could feel myself sucked into a void.3

After a while, the fear went away and he let himself fall. In the morning, Eckhart awakened to the sound of a bird and his entire sense of self was transformed, being full of wonder at the beauty and aliveness of the world. For the next five months, he lived in a state of peace and joy that gradually diminished, but eventually became his natural state. Journeying from despair into a transformed perspective, through energy, is common for many people who awaken without understanding or preparation.

Historically, seekers intentionally induced suffering to trigger awakening experiences. Long fasts and months of sitting in isolated caves are classical preparations for spiritual shifts. Buddhism and Christianity both emphasize impermanence and suffering as important motivations on the spiritual path, and some Indian mystical paths encourage direct rejection of all worldly pleasures. Ancient mystery schools even simulated a near-death experience (NDE) as a method of triggering transcendent experiences, as both NDE and the actual dying process can awaken us. However, not everyone’s motivation for a spiritual search arises from a direct encounter with suffering.

Longing for Truth

Children can begin a spiritual journey by asking questions about the meaning of life, as they long to know what is true in a world of contradictions and to see beyond the veils of conventional religion or superficial values. Many scriptures suggest this longing arises from an unconscious, deeper part of self that wants to be remembered.

Some pursue this search through intellectual concepts and ideas for many years, but find that acquiring more and more knowledge does not lead to realization, although it can settle a mind that has a need to know. These great thinkers experience breakthroughs that take them beyond the horizontal learning curve of the intellect to expose the limitations of intellect in spiritual matters.

Our mind must expand beyond conceptual understanding. As we awaken, we can find complex, traditional, intellect-based ideas unsatisfying. So we bring our questions deep within ourselves, asking: “What am I?” “What is God?” or “Who am I?” Even with internal probing, we realize we cannot possibly know the answers through intellect alone. We need to embrace not-knowing. While questions like these may propel our spiritual emergence, our mind has no answers for them. We need to enter the unknown, to follow the inner curiosity and longing deep within our heart. Knowing the truth and feeling the spirit leap are kinesthetic and cellular, which is how awakening expands us into the unfamiliar territory of enlightenment.

Longing for Love

People who are inclined to follow their hearts may find that awakening comes in the midst of devotion, chanting, nature, or service. Classical Christian, Yogic, Buddhist, and Sufi approaches to awakening appeal to the heart. As a sincere devotee, we can fall into an unexpected and overwhelming love that drives us deeper into relationship with the cosmic self. Sufis call this awakening “coming home.” We can sense our loving connection to a cosmic source by looking inward.

Realization can come on suddenly or evolve gradually, and there is no way of predicting how it will appear. But across cultures and centuries, we have the same realization. It can be described elaborately by saints and poets with terms like radiant emptiness, eternal expansion, unconditioned love, unbound consciousness, absolute oneness, ineffable joy, merging into the infinite, discovery of true nature, God-realization, and many other expressions. All of their attempts to put words to the awakening revelation are notably unable to describe the experience itself in a way another mind can grasp. This is because realization must be known directly and cannot be taught.

What Happens After an Awakening

What is predictable after an awakening or mystical insight is that the trajectory of our life is changed. We undergo a process of restructuring our energy, consciousness, and lifestyle.

This process can be chaotic, intense, and rock the spirit and body to its core. There may be moments of ecstasy beyond what we ever imagined possible, visions that lift our soul, an elimination of everything we ever believed was true, and the unfolding of great challenges and blessings. For a few, this happens simply, as a calm and radiant seeing that penetrates the small self, dissolves the seeker, and accepts life as it is. This feels like seeing something obvious that had been strangely overlooked. As a client named Jules told me:

The penny finally dropped that I am Consciousness, that only Consciousness exists, and that nothing is separate within Consciousness—making everything feel a bit like a dream. It feels so obvious now that I can’t believe I never noticed it before.

Often, we come back to earth with a thud. In some traditions, students are told the journey to enlightenment will take many lifetimes, or that attaining enlightenment is too advanced to even hope for in this life. All the student can do is live more peacefully, become devoted to service and practices, and be optimistic about the next life. So if students have an awakening that results from committed spiritual practices, they seldom report it. If they do, teachers commonly discount, dismiss, or misunderstand experiences—especially when erratic side effects are not discussed within the tradition.

When we talk about our realization, we can also be accused of being mentally ill or somehow pathological. The masts, the God-intoxicated madmen of India, may be people who have stumbled into awakening moments without the support needed to fulfill their promise.4

We can enter a gradual unfolding process that takes years and can be very challenging because of a lack of support and understanding. This feels like a slow, and often lonely, unraveling of our old sense of personal self. Eckhart Tolle was blessed by a stabilized feeling that followed his first awakening. Yet he still had to spend several years seeking to understand what had happened to him, and waiting to know what to do next with his life.

By boldly facing challenges that follow awakening, which I describe in depth in chapter 5, we can see them as unconscious elements needing to be recognized and released from our own psyches. We can begin to clear their destructive and self-limiting tendencies. And as we awaken, our collective experience awakens. As the Buddha reportedly said, “When I woke up, the world woke up.”

In the following chapters, you will read about the changes in energy and consciousness that occur during, and as a result of, spiritual awakening. I’ll share the ways awakening impacts the minds, bodies, spirits, and lifestyles of modern spiritual seekers. Because many portals can send us into this mystery of knowing, I will share a wide range of reactions from people who enter this territory.

It is important to recognize both the challenges and great blessings of a spiritual journey. By bringing full respect and appreciation to this age-old evolution, we can move awakening out of the dark ages and into the modern world. We need to do this because it is a natural, human potential that offers greater clarity, wisdom, and peace to us personally, to the culture we live in, and to the earth as a whole.