What is a spiritual awakening?

View of Earth from Saturn, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. 900 million miles from Earth.

There are many things we could say about spiritual awakening, from my experiences their defining characteristics are a shift in our consciousness and our life perspective.

Imagine you were to go on holiday to a country which is very different from your own. You’d get to experience new people, sounds, foods, customs and so on. Your perspective on how people live has changed from what it was before you travelled there.

Now imagine you buy a ticket to visit the Moon. Your perspective shift has just been ramped up a notch. Not only do you go through an exhilarating launch, you also get to watch the universe from out of your window on the trip there, and once you finally reach the Moon, you have an awesome new perspective on planet Earth.

Now, let’s ramp it up a few more notches. What if you could go to Mars? Similar in some ways to your Moon journey, except now the Earth is just a dot of light in the endless blackness of space, sitting alongside several million other dots of light.

Spiritual awakenings too come in various shapes and sizes. Some are small shifts in perspective, like the analogy of a trip to another country. Others are a more significant perspective shift, like the analogy of a journey to the Moon or to Mars.

 

Managing spiritual awakening

Why does understanding this matter?

Firstly, if you’ve experienced this, to know that whatever changed for you is perfectly natural for you. Secondly, if your currently attracted to spiritual awakenings, you can be aware of what to expect.

The side-effects of these perspective shifts can be positive, negative and neutral.

On the positive side, you may have a deeper love of life or a profound sense of gratitude for being alive as a human or a nameless all-pervading joy.

On the negative side, many of your former passions and interests might now seem boring and you don’t want to do them anymore. Or you could feel an odd sense of isolation, surrounded as you are by people who have no clue what’s going on for you.

On the neutral side, many things don’t change. The dog still needs walking and you have the same job to go to on Monday morning.

Another aspect of this is that awakenings are an on going process. Yes there is an event that triggered it, and it’s this event which we tend to focus on. However, the ripples from these awakening events can spread out in our lives over many months, and even years in some cases.

Learn more about my online Meditation Course.

To find out more about managing spiritual awakening, visit Adyashanti’s website.

Best Wishes,

David.

© D. R. Durham, All rights reserved, 2024.

 

Image Notes:

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame.

Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometres) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at centre right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. An arrow indicates their location in this annotated version.

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