Submitted by Friday on
What Is Spiritual Awakening?
In truth, you can't know what is spiritual awakening. Because it is the absence of any understanding. When all ideas have fallen away there is just consciousness, just awakening. Just the clarity of awake-ness, of nothingness.
On one hand spiritual awakening could be said to be realizing what you are beyond the body and mind. And in that realization, there is freedom from the sole identification with the body and mind. You exist in this moment beyond your idea of yourself, beyond conflict and stress, beyond separation as formless, radiant consciousness itself. And the experience of this is unconditional peace and bliss.
It is easy to realize this to a certain degree. Simply close your eyes and feel the sensation or sensations that you exist. The mind wants to define it. To say "I am the body. I am John, I am a musician." But for now, let go of all thinking and directly feel what is here, without trying to define it or describe it with words.
Notice the feeling that "you are." Not that you are a something or a someone, but actually feel yourself existing in this moment, without trying to change it in any way. Beyond all thinking, there is the sensation that you exist.
If this is difficult, try this exercise: with your eyes closed, notice the sensation of your right hand. Without moving your hand, bring your attention to the area of your right hand and feel the sensations that are there.
If you do this, you will notice that your hand does not feel like a solid object. You do not feel the border of where your hand stops and space begins. Rather, the sensation of your hand is more like a cloud of energy, without borders, without heaviness.
Now do this same exercise with your whole body. With your eyes closed, notice the sensation of your entire body. It feels like a vibration and it feels peaceful, blissful even. This is the beginning of spiritual awakening.
Try keeping your attention on this feeling of being for as long as you can.
You will notice that it is easy to get caught up in thinking again; in the experience that you are your thoughts. And when this happens, the experience is that you contract back into a dense, physical body that feels very separate from everything else and there is stress.
There are many techniques and paths to move you out of being identified with your thinking and into resting into your natural state of consciousness. What I just mentioned is one of them: to allow your attention to rest on the feeling of existing in this moment beyond your thinking. And when thoughts arise, allow them to arise and let them go, keeping your attention resting in the sensation of being.
And if you keep practicing, you will come to the point where you see thoughts arising by themselves. You will experience everything arising and disappearing back into consciousness. You will experience yourself completely free of the confines of the mind and body, as consciousness itself. You will realize at the very depth of your being that consciousness is what you are. This is one aspect of spiritual awakening.
Other aspects can be the feeling of the heart opening and radiating divine love, the feeling of being one with God/Guru in your heart.
In spiritual awakening, there could be the experience of being nothing, that everything is of this nothingness and that nothingness is pure consciousness, pure peace.
There can also be the feeling that you become a vehicle for the transmission of Shakti/bliss, almost like you are a lightbulb of bliss. You experience that you can leave your body and personal self completely to experience yourself as pure energy and experience things and places that really are undescribeable.
In any of this, it is about freedom of the limitation of feeling separate from everything into realizing the one conscious energy that makes up everything. Everyone will have their own unique experience of this. It is not that there is one awakening experience and that is that. There are millions of experiences.
Kip Mazuy