Table of Contents
Before we get into the signs of spiritual awakening and why they don’t matter, I want to make sure we’re on the same page.
People interpret spiritual awakening differently. For some, it may be feeling more connected to their soul, nature, some higher power, or all of the above. For others, it may be an increase in intuitive abilities or simply feeling happier in general.
These are all well and good, but here I want to speak about spiritual awakening in the sense of awakening to your true nature, to what you really are.
A deeper connection and a better mood can still happen, but they happen as a byproduct, not as the main event.
The main event is a non-event.
It’s the Understanding that your true Self is No-Self, meaning not an entity. And this Absence is all there is.
To see this, nothing needs to change, be added, or taken away.
Awakening has nothing to do with purifying yourself, being a better person, eating vegan, or going to retreats.
Spiritual awakening is something you have to go alone, no one can come with you and no one can take the smallest step for you.
You jump off the cliff into the abyss by yourself.
This takes quite a bit of determination, to say the least. And yet when seeing happens, you’ll see that you haven’t actually moved anywhere and that there never was a cliff to jump off from.
Nonetheless, there seem to be some signs that occur before and after a spiritual awakening.
But I want to add that signs are usually perceived retrospectively and some may or may not happen to you.
So it’s important to not get stuck looking out for signs. The signs in and of themselves are not important and looking for signs can actually be a hindrance to waking up.
When spiritual awakening happens you will know, and that knowing will be the one and only sign you’ll need.
Before Spiritual Awakening
A Sense of General Discontent
This is usually the first telltale sign of spiritual awakening. It’s what pushes you in the right direction.
Without a general discontent directed at nothing in particular or at everything in particular, you won’t take the first step.
There needs to be some incentive.
If your house isn’t on fire, you probably don’t feel pressured to leave it.
This general discontent may come in the form of disgust toward falseness or a feverish desire to know what the heck is actually going on here.
That’s the point where you seriously start seeking and looking for answers. You hope someone has them. Perhaps you read books, attend retreats, channel spirit guides, consult an oracle, or ask some wise-looking fellow if he knows what’s up.
Although this may be helpful initially, eventually this all needs to be discarded for the one and only work – looking at yourself and reality with a hard and honest look.
Feeling Lost, Confused, Meaningless
Feeling lost and confused often comes with the general discontent deal. So it’s kind of a co-sign of spiritual awakening.
When we feel lost and confused and like life has no meaning, we usually assume something’s wrong.
But what is happening is that you’re getting a taste of the truth.
And the truth for a mind clinging to non-truth can be a shocking experience akin to an existential crisis.
The truth that no one wants to hear is that beyond the mind there is no meaning. Life is essentially meaningless.
The initial recognition of this may evoke fear and depression, but when you surrender to the fear and go further (no matter how uncomfortable it is), meaninglessness will become good news.
After all, how could the realization that there is nothing you have to do and that whatever purpose you might have you’re already fulfilling it not be good news?
Strong Desire And Pure Intention
A strong desire for knowing what is going on and a pure intention to look honestly is one of the rather reliable signs of spiritual awakening.
Imagine you’re being held underwater. After a minute, how strong is your desire for air?
Pretty strong, right?
You’ll claw at everything to get a good breath of air into your lungs.
If your desire for awakening is that strong, you’ll be awake in no time.
Pure intention simply means that you’ll no longer accept second-hand ideas as the truth, including signs that apparently indicate a spiritual awakening.
This implies radical self-honesty–a readiness to look for yourself and at yourself with a clear unobstructed view.
You’re fully committed to figuring this out yourself, no matter what.
A Sense of Knowing
This sign may or may not occur for you during spiritual awakening.
But sometimes there is a sense of knowing that “it’s about to happen,” a sense of foreboding, of impending doom (I’m just kidding, or am I?)
This can come in the form of an intuitive hunch and a relaxation of any effort.
Suddenly, you know there is nothing you have to do anymore and you simply relax into your human.
You chill out, mind your business, and then it hits you like a gentle ton of bricks.
After Spiritual Awakening
No More Belief in The Separate Self
This is often seen as the last and final sign of spiritual awakening, but only because most seekers assume it takes years of spiritual practice to see through the illusion.
As the matter of fact, however, you can see it right now.
If you investigate honestly with pure intention, you can see it in seconds or minutes.
All you need to do is look and see if you can find the ‘I’ you claim yourself to be.
The belief in a separate individual self is the mother of unquestioned assumptions and the only reason why we don’t see this is because we never sit down and seriously question this assumption.
Ask yourself:
Is there a separate entity ‘self’, ‘me’ ‘I’, at all, anywhere, in any way, shape, or form?
Was there ever?
If you say “I am thinking,” look and see where your thoughts come from.
Where did you get the idea that it is ‘you’ who is thinking?
Seeing that there is no one home is so ordinary that you’ll most likely laugh your ass off at how simple and obvious it is.
When you understand this viscerally (not just intellectually), you’ll no longer believe the story the mind is telling.
At times, you might forget as the body-mind conditioning continues to rotate, like a switched-off fan doing its last rounds, but you’ll never again believe the story of a separate self.
Deep Acceptance
Eventually, there is a surrender into deep acceptance, which is acceptance at the deepest level possible.
It’s acceptance of whatever is arising in your awareness right now.
It’s useful to know that you can’t force acceptance, it either happens or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t happen, you can accept that it isn’t happening and then it is happening.
Yet whatever you are experiencing has already been accepted by some part otherwise it would not come up in your awareness.
So acceptance is really a non-issue as it’s already done.
The acceptance you’ll experience is not a choosing what you’ll accept, it’s a complete acceptance of the whole messy lot we call life.
This is a primary sign of spiritual awakening because every other sign is connected to this simple yet profound surrender to whatever is.
Radical acceptance is infinitely deep as there is always another layer that can be accepted. And when it happens it happens on its own without you doing it.
Gratitude For Whatever Arises
Gratitude for whatever arises often goes hand in hand with radical acceptance.
Even if stuff arises that is painful or you don’t necessarily prefer, you’ll be grateful because it’s another old layer that falls away.
In fact, you’ll see that whatever arises, simply arises to be discharged.
As mentioned earlier, old conditioning may still be active for some time after the initial awakening. All the old stuff and unwanted personality traits may still do their thing but the conditioning has nowhere to hook into anymore.
This continued falling through you of old habits and patterns is the de-conditioning process.
And that’s why gratitude arises for whatever arises.
No More Moral Judgments
One of the more interesting signs of spiritual awakening is that you’re no longer concerned with moral judgments.
You’ll no longer use moral viewpoints as a scaffold to divide reality into piles of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ Instead, you might start seeing world events more in the light of entertainment value.
I know, I know this sounds horribly wrong when you look at it from a moral perspective.
Does this mean that you’ll become a cold, heartless person no longer caring about your fellow human beings?
Not necessarily. We could even claim the contrary.
When you wake up, you’re all non-discriminating heart. When you’re fast asleep you’re all discriminating mind.
If you do become a cold, heartless person then you were most likely inclined to this before.
Know that you can be compassionate and help others without moral judgments.
“But aren’t moral standards important?” I hear you protest.
The answer is, only if you still believe the story you’re telling about yourself and who you think you are.
The other side of no more moral judgments is right action, which is a kind of true form of morality.
Morality is like the retarded little brother of right action.
Right action happens naturally and spontaneously and is unbound by conventional beliefs.
Non-Attachment
Real progress (if it can be called that) towards awakening is made by scraping off attachments. And this scraping off of attachments results in an increased sense of non-attachment.
Non-attachment goes hand in hand with deep acceptance and simply means enjoying the world on a non-clinging basis.
It doesn’t mean that you’ll be emotionless and won’t have preferences. It means that your general happiness is not tied to anything in the world.
Even the long-haired wise man called Jesus said, “Be in the world but not of it.”
Non-attachment is something many people prescribe as a practice. This is the common prescriptive/descriptive fallacy.
Only because the Buddha was non-attached doesn’t mean you become a Buddha by practicing non-attachment.
Sure, you can move in that direction, but really, you don’t need to bother practicing non-attachment because it happens when it happens.
It’s a sign of spiritual awakening, meaning it comes with the whole awakening deal.
A Sense of Effortlessness
A sense of effortless living is one of the signs of spiritual awakening that sounds most attractive.
After all, who wouldn’t want to live an effortless life even in the midst of all the mess and turmoil living life entails?
But as with everything in this list, aiming for it directly won’t work.
An increased sense of effortlessness is a natural result of spiritual awakening because awakening is the recognition that there is no one to make an effort.
When it is known that there is no you, how could there be any effort when there is no one to make an effort?
And although in the beginning, effort might still arise, you’ll know that it’s not you who is making it.
The truth is that life is living and expressing itself and if you let it, it will do what life does, be effortless in every way.
Deep Inner Peace
At some point, a sense of deep inner peace arises.
This doesn’t mean that you’re always calm and never experience anger.
Deep inner peace is more like an ever-present background instead of a human emotion.
No matter how much emotional turmoil or external drama is appearing, this peace doesn’t go away.
Usually, most of us have a second layer to our thinking, which is the self-judgment, -doubt, and -hate layer. This second layer of thought leads to a lot of inner tension and conflict.
With clear seeing of the truth, this second judgmental layer starts to dissolve, which resolves all the inner tension and conflict.
Ultimately, the inner violence disappears from your experience.
Final Word: Beyond Signs of Spiritual Awakening
Now that you have read about signs of spiritual awakening, you can forget them all again.
Why?
Well, because it’s not about the signs. Nor is there a before and after spiritual awakening.
Then why have I written this article?
Good question. I’m not so sure myself.
Perhaps because some kind of roadmap can be reassuring sometimes, especially when you feel like you’re going crazy.
Anyway, if you want to awaken, you need to know that it’s not in the future.
You can awaken right now. Whether it takes years, months, weeks, days, or seconds all depends on how honestly you look (and because there is no you, you can’t actually do anything to awaken. Hah!)
Just for a moment forget everything everyone has ever told you about spiritual awakening (no matter how wise they seem) and look at your own experience with fresh eyes.
Is there anyone to awaken? Was there ever an ‘I’ behind all the thoughts, emotions, sensations, experiences, and so on? Is there a future where awakening could happen?
This is the last obstacle, the belief that you’re not already awake.
Spiritual awakening has nothing to do with waking up because there is no one to wake up.
It has nothing to do with coming to the end of your spiritual journey, it’s about dropping the story of being on a journey altogether.
Spiritual awakening has nothing to do with meditation, practice, and purification. It’s about recognizing that everything is already what it is and you are everything there is.
It has nothing to do with becoming something else but about recognizing that you are already that what you are seeking.
In the end, the seeker and the sought are one and the same and both are non-existent.
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“When asked Who I Am, the only answer possible is: I am the infinite, the vastness that is the substance of all things. I am no one and everyone, nothing and everything — just as you are.” – Suzanne Segal
Luka
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