As we move through the awakening process, we experience many moments of letting go. Our emotional pains surface and we face them. We let go of what we no longer need and support our body as it adjusts to new sensations. There can be moments when we feel loss for our old life and exhaustion from the struggle. It can seem like as soon as we come to terms with one realization, we find ourselves adjusting to the effects of another.
Julianne felt fed up with the process. After thirty years of doing yogic and Buddhist practices, awakened or not, she wanted out. But there is no emergency exit. The only way out is forward. After a supportive talk with her teacher, a shift happened and her resistance fell away. Shortly afterward, she awoke in the middle of the night.
I woke up feeling so not there that I doubted I was physically alive. I checked to see if anything in my direct experience offered proof for my physical existence. I couldn’t find it. Only knowing remained. My sleep was disrupted, as again and again when waking there was only the knowing and nothing known. The next day, while crossing a street in the evening, another shift happened. The car headlights looked very different, like they were dissolving. I thought, Oh no, not again. But I had to drive home so I refused to look more closely. At home, I took stock of what happened. And I saw it. Everything is one vibrational field. What I look at is me, looking at me. When I eat, it feels like eating myself. When walking, I walk through myself again. It is very tender, beautifully intimate. The best way to express it would be: everything is made from love. That evening, I felt drawn to listen to one of my favorite Bach cantatas. So much bliss arose that I completely dissolved into it. I felt wonderful, like being home again, and stayed in bliss for a long time. While dissolved into it, I saw that I have never been born.
When we fully let go into the experience of the moment, like Julianne we may fall into a new realization, closer to knowing inherent oneness. Openness facilitates release and we can intentionally open by taking time each day, through meditation or relaxation, to allow energy and consciousness to move as inclined. Whenever we release a physical blockage or an emotional contraction, as Julianne describes, we momentarily lose feelings of separateness and come closer to knowing freedom. Then we can relax into joy and peace.
Human change seems to involve loss. When we move from infancy to childhood we give up dependency and learn self-sufficiency. During adolescence we lose connections with childhood toys. As we move into marriage or partnership we exchange some of our independence to cultivate cooperation and sharing. When we are in an awakening process, we can expect old attachments and patterns to fall away. We lose the addiction to our former identity.
This is a release into life and love, not a descent into barrenness. It is the transformation from limitation, living in the shadow of who we could become, to the liberation of being aligned with the deepest longing of our soul: to know our true nature.
Loss of the Autobiographical Self
Tom Thompson, founder of The Awakened Heart Center for Conscious Living, has called this transformation “the loss of the autobiographical self.” He first heard the concept from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who uses it to label an area of the brain that holds memories and future plans, and is responsible for a stable sense of self. Damasio says that other species do not have this autobiographical self, which develops social-cultural patterns and regulations.55 Thompson’s use of the phrase conveys the aspect of our mind that controls our sense of being a separate identity. This is what changes during a spiritual emergence.
The autobiographical self is what you think you are and, for the most part, what you experience reality to be. It is an ongoing story that you are always telling yourself in your mind. Almost all of your thinking is an internal dialogue oriented around “you,” your autobiographical self, and its imagined life. It requires constant embellishment and propping up as it believes itself to be a noun, an actual entity, when in fact it is a verb, a flow of interpretive thought…Every “thing” is always changing, moving, shifting, appearing, and disappearing. In actuality, there are no nouns, only verbs. Sooner or later an autobiographical self notices that it, and everything else, has no solid or permanent reality.56
What Is Transformation?
Essentially, transformation dissolves the power and limitations of the autobiographical self. The stories and goals are not forgotten, but they become irrelevant. The sense of a separate “me” who is burdened by the past and driven into the future simply loses all steam. Thoughts concerned with appearances like accomplishments, accumulation, admiration, and expectations are seen as simply the autobiographical self, the story of a life. This is not just a psychological adjustment, it is an energy adjustment as well. The “working mind,” which navigates the day-to-day details of our life, remains, without attachment to the personalizing tendency of the autobiographical mind.57
Losing a sense of self may sound like a big loss, but think about your life. Hasn’t it happened already, over and over again? Is the person you believed you were at age twelve the same person you thought yourself to be when you were twenty? Were you the same at thirty or forty or fifty? Our body is continually dissolving and rebuilding, and so is our mind. Everything we learn, and all the new experiences we accumulate, change our inner landscape. This impacts our perceptions of self, our capacities, and our positions in the world. The autobiographical self of today is an image, just like all the past images were. As we awaken into liberation, the old images are harder to sustain, and we see a new dimension to what it means to be human.
Annette had a Christian background and began seeking awakening after her retirement. She practiced meditations she learned from books. In a ritual with a small group of friends, she slipped into an awakening that left her feeling both graced and stunned by a loss of self.
I leaned back with arms wide. As my head touched a pillow, I was propelled into what seemed like a vast, empty universe. I thought, This must be what it’s like to die and also I have been here before. I saw a small dot of light come from the left that melted into the emptiness. After that there was no thinking, just peace and quiet and nothingness. It was a sense of being one with all. The next day I picked up a spiritual book and read a description of my experience. I found myself in tears, feeling I had lost something, a view I previously held of the world, of myself. I had awakened out of my familiar sense of self into a much greater reality, something far beyond anything I knew existed.
Like Annette, many of us have moments that open us to trust and that transform our worldview. As the need to protect a self-image disappears, we can bring these insights into our lived experience by relaxing, opening, and exploring new capacities and potentials.
When transformation happens, it is not our doing. All we can do is allow it. Allowing feels hard for most of us because we firmly believe we need to stay in charge or nothing useful will happen. This is one reason liberation takes some time. Most of us need to let go in small steps, like children learning to step in water and eventually swim. We are adjusting to the new environment blossoming inside.
This new environment is beingness, as opposed to the doingness of the mind. We don’t become passive or dull or disinterested in living. Instead, we feel deep intuition about each unique moment so we can follow what calls us. We feel peace and clarity of mind. Gradually we move closer to liberation.
Three Obstacles to Transformation
Awakening begins with slipping through portals that offer expanded moments of perception, which is often followed by the surfacing of unconscious material that can feel difficult to face. As we become more compassionately aware of our history, we heal and evolve. Three specific obstacles can put brakes on this process if ego takes hold of our spirituality.
Identifying with Spiritual Attainment
A spiritual ego can arise to help us escape from facing the clearing process. It can feel very painful to lose the fullness of an awakening event. When human foibles and emotions inevitably return, we can feel depressed or anxious. We may have expected to remain in a transcendent state and to give up ordinary life. We can cling to awakening glimpses and try to repeat them over and over, instead of allowing a natural evolution to occur. Or we can become fearful that we will return to the old identity we believed we had left behind.
Our ego can even appropriate the spiritual process, jump into inflation, and declare itself enlightened, which curtails any capacity to end separation and find stable realization. Naively assuming we are enlightened, and eagerly rushing forward to tell the world, is simply a re-identification with the sense of “I.” It might give “me” a higher purpose, but it shuts down vulnerability. This can derail the awakening process and quickly get us over our head with friends and students. Remember that the “me” cannot get enlightened, because “me” is only a facade. It does not exist in the way the mind believes it does.58
Spiritual Ruts
We can fall into the ruts of stubborn attitudes, emotional patterns, or old beliefs that reignite and take a long time to dislodge. These may be related to fear, attachment to religious belief, a sense that we no longer fit into mainstream culture, or other unique issues. We get stuck for so long because when we’re attached to old patterns of being, shifting perspective can be very difficult. Awakening challenges everything we assume is true, especially existing as a separate “I,” and that sense of “I” can rebel against awakening.
Attachment to Spiritual States
Unusual spiritual gifts can arise, which may become the foundation of a new identity. You might find greater synchronicity in your life, in which you have a thought and then its object instantly manifests. You may find yourself drawn to healing others or using a new psychic power. While these abilities can indeed be gifts that will become part of your life work, if ego attaches to these new experiences, deeper realization can halt. This tends to happen more when the gifts are used commercially or you gather followers attracted to your special skills.
Realizations Along the Way
There are states that invite us to see where we are still stuck in separation, personal identity, or ego’s hold on spirituality. We may want to be recognized, feel arrogant, be reactive to criticism, or feel judgment toward someone. These are opportunities to face parts of our self that are asleep and need to be awakened. Then, as conditioned assumptions and impulses are seen to be illusions and released, we may feel purposeless. We might be frightened by emptiness.
Some therapists will be concerned if you report these conditions, because they are the opposite of mainstream ways of looking at building a healthy ego. Students in some of these stages have asked me “What is the point of living?” or “Am I losing my mind?” or “How can I function in the world?” But these are shifts in how we know our self and not the losses they seem to be. They are part of clearing, recognized for centuries in monastic traditions. Here are the predictable realizations likely to arise to help you release restrictions on your freedom.
Unknowability
This is an awareness of being unable to locate the “I.” It is not the body, not the thoughts, not the feelings. If we look, we cannot find it. We suspect that it is a contrived sense holding together our history, experiences, and beliefs, that it is an illusion. Asking “Who am I?” thrusts you into the unknown.
Productive Doubts
Feeling doubt about, or loss of faith in, teachings and beliefs you formally embraced that framed your worldview—and losing all interest in rules, rituals, and dogma—can be painful. You may see that the beliefs are illusory, just products of mind and not essential to life or spiritual growth. When this happens, it’s an invitation to go deeper into yourself to see how these beliefs have framed your sense of reality. Beliefs are not reality; they are thought forms. Reality is what is happening here and now.
Futility
Your desires may shift, whether for food or sex, certain habits or old friends, accumulation of power or wealth. You may witness your reactions and be disheartened by your behavior. The reactions may be based on desires to have your way or to be right. You realize that as soon as one desire is met another arises, so attachment to these experiences is futile. As soon as you meet one goal, you search for another, and may become bored with the first accomplishment. You will see the futility of many things as you awaken.
Shedding the Old
You may no longer care for the material things you have accumulated and feel like leaving it all behind to wander the world. Disinterest can spread to things you enjoyed in the past. A fogginess of mind can arise when trying to do tasks that require organized thinking, and you may fear losing the ability to function. The fogginess will pass, but this journey may completely restructure the way you live your life.
Spiritual Detachment
Your interest in transcendent spiritual practices or longing for mystical experience may fall away. If these were your main preoccupations, you may feel empty of all goals and not know what to do with your life. Adyashanti has said spiritual attachment is the last thing to go. If all your psychic energy has gone into focusing on acquiring mystical experience or becoming enlightened, it is a shock when this last desire collapses. If you have felt a need to leave a community, or you’ve been rejected from one that sustained you for years, you may feel rudderless in ordinary life. This is felt as loss, but is actually a liberation. You may benefit from taking another look at your beliefs and all you were trained to think about spirituality. Awakening is much bigger than any system that teaches it.
Restlessness
There may be a stage of restlessness because you no longer believe in an “I” who tells you how to live or what to do. You may feel you are living outside of time and space. If you feel lost in emptiness, and withdrawn from life, this restlessness may be your heart pushing you to discover a further step toward liberation: living it in the world. Follow your heart and take the next obvious step.
Ignoring the Value of Awakening
In Buddhism, ignorance is the fundamental cause of delusion, suffering, and transmigration from one life to another. We can maintain ignorance by refusing to acknowledge the eternal source we have touched or by favoring it over human form and experience. The keys to ending suffering are to accept the realization of our true nature and to bring our unique expression into the world.
Facing Conditioning
Some spiritual teachers see previous life memories as ways of recognizing conditioned traits that must be faced to be released. Others say that by recognizing there is no personal self, and knowing yourself to be consciousness, all residual conditioning dissolves. In other words, you must believe in “me” for it to continue. Fundamentally, when an old pattern of conditioning arises, we need to meet it with honesty and self-reflection.
It can come as a surprise that awakening is the beginning, not the end, of transformation. It is extremely rare for a moment of realization to become permanent. But like a sixth sense, knowing never really goes away. Identity falls away and then resurges, yet a sense of radiant presence remains when we attend to it. Changes in our view of who and what we are can be disorienting. This disorientation happens because of human tendencies to create meaning, want familiarity, and seek understanding. They are powerfully programmed patterns of mind, which is why gradual alignment with the truth we have glimpsed is important. We realize that any experience that comes and goes is limited, impermanent, and not the whole of who we are. Awakened consciousness doesn’t buy into drifting thoughts or stories about the past or future. We must slowly learn to navigate the world in a new way.