Spiritual awakening is not always a joyful process. Often you might feel confused, frustrated, angry, sad, grieving or being “out of place”. Depression and anxiety is your constant companion. It might feel like the end of your known world. Whatever life you have built on competing, achieving and acquiring mentality is not resonating with you anymore. Life is making no sense to you. Spiritual awakening can be an intense experience of personal transformation. But despite how much suffering your dying mind conditioning may cause, you are not going insane. You are evolving!
What is Enduring and Non-Enduring Spiritual Awakening?
People realize spiritual awakening in two ways. The one is a rare event when the person is fully enlightened. We can call it “Enduring Awakening” or Enlightenment.
And the other is a gradual process that most of us need to go through, accompanied by the dark night of the soul. We can call it “Non-Enduring Awakening”. The truth of the matter is that awakening itself is not a process. There is a process in terms of how we come to express the awakening, but really waking up and coming to the end of our personal suffering is not something that takes time. In a non-enduring awakening as the mind’s conditioning is not completely dissolved, it pulls us in an unconscious state frequently, and that’s why the journey from non-enduring awakening to enduring awakening takes time.
Fluctuating Between Depression and Joyful States
People claim to have tremendous realizations about the truth but then feel as if they have forgotten it the following day, the next week, the next month, or the next year. They have lost that inner peace. Actually nothing is wrong with you. You realize awakening and it is a non-enduring awakening. You have seen the truth. In those fleeting awakening moments, you have transcended duality such as good and evil, negative and positive, dark and light, spirituality and materialism. You just need to remember this transcending truth and feel it in the present moment. Sometimes remembering the truth that we have experienced is the end of our personal suffering and is not something that takes time
Whether you have been bestowed with an Enduring Awakening – Enlightenment or Non-Enduring Awakening depends upon your Karmic Load. People with enduring awakening have a very light karmic load; even though they may have experienced extreme suffering before awakening, one can see that their karmic inheritance, the conditioning that they were dealing with, wasn’t too heavy. Only a few people in a given generation may have an Enduring awakening. They have no further process to undergo.
It does no good to bemoan your karma- whether you think you’re carrying a lot or not. What matters is what your actions are going to be going forward. It is what it is. Karmic load actually doesn’t have much to do with whether we can awaken, but it may have something to do with what happens right after that moment of awakening.
The majority of people who experience non-enduring awakening will, at some point, find their non-awakening state and conditioning arising again. Though awakening removes a tremendous amount of conditioning and dark states; everybody’s different about how much is removed out of the system. For some people, less conditioning get removed. For others, it will be more. It’s hard to say why awakening affects one person’s conditioning one way and another person’s another way. I could get into metaphysical discussions about what might be going on, but ultimately the why doesn’t matter. Either way, we need to deal with what it is.
As a metaphor, we can think of the egoic state, or what I call the non-awakening state, as the Magnet. The egoic state has a magnetic force ; it has the tendency to pull us out from the awareness. This magnetic force is really what one is dealing with throughout the entirety of the spiritual journey. That’s why we oscillate between awakening and non awakening state.
During awakening, though the mind’s conditional pattern is dying, it makes you feel miserable by re-identifying yourself with its old dysfunctional pattern.
Awakening is breaking free of this magnetic force. But because we’ve awakened does not mean that our awareness has gotten past the magnetic pull of the egoic state. If we haven’t gone entirely beyond this magnetic field, we’re going to be pulled back toward the experience of “me” and the perception of separateness. This gives rise to what we call the “I lgot it, I lost it” phenomenon.
Why do you realize the awakened state and you lose the awakened state
As you had noticed it, before we awakened, we either believed a thought or not. It was one or the other, But a sudden shift of perspective due to awakening can make things seem very bizarre. After awakening, we can both believe and not believe a thought simultaneously, or act in a way that contradicts the truths we have experienced with our own being. We feel so depressed because of this inner confusion that stems from something unknown to us.
Spiritual awakening is not about feeling bliss and freedom from negative states
People also have an unconscious idea that spiritual awakening means they should feel total bliss & freedom from the negative states of mind all the time. Its the misperception. It is true that, after awakening, the outer circumstances of life and behavior from people no longer make us suffer.
But it is also true to say that when we wake up, we begin to realize the patterns in our life that go against what we have realized in our awakening moments. Now, you can see the patterns of less optimal emotions like anger, envy, jealousy, etc. Hence after awakening, you feel more miserable, thinking that you are going backward. But it is not so and you are evolving.
Your authentic understanding that enlightenment is about more than just being happy and blissful takes the pressure off those aspects of your life that are more human and imperfect. Those areas of life which is less than optimal. As we grow more conscious, we need to deal with those areas of our lives where we’ve been avoiding or where we’re less aware.
It can be easy to think that spiritual awakening comes through blissful and happy experience, but this isn’t the case. Some have an enduring awakening and don’t have many karmic tendencies to work through, but it’s rare. For most of us, the path to awakening is difficult. We need to be courageous enough to acknowledge this, or else we’ll continue heading along the path of what feels good. This is not the true path of waking up, rather it’s a path where we project an illusion of what’s supposed to happen.
I am not saying that awakening has to be difficult. Even that is an illusion. Awakening itself need not be difficult. But the transition from enduring awakening to non-enduring awakening often require us to detach all our identification with dream state. In fact, we have to be willing to lose our whole world. After an awakening, most people see the world differently, and their old career, relationships, purpose, or habits fall away.
Spiritual awakening is not about perfect life, perfect job or perfect mate
Awakening calls for a transformation of both our inner and outer lives. This transformation is not about having a perfect life, perfect job, perfect mate, or the perfect marriage. It’s about seeing beyond the illusions of our dream state. To achieve perfection is impossible. We can have wholeness where things are as they are, not perfect.
For most people, the path of awakening has wonderful, profound moments and realizations. But you don’t expect and attached to them. The authentic intention toward enlightenment is that internal prayer asking for whatever will bring us to full awakening, no matter whether it turns out to be wonderful or terrible.
Most people spend their lives trying to avoid painful situations. Our mind always believes the best way to grow is through avoiding discomfort. A lot of people seem to think that the best moments reflect our greatest leaps forward in consciousness, but I’d say most people realise their greatest transformation during difficult times.
How our greatest suffering, which causes us depression and anxiety, fuel our awakening
Many people refuse to admit that our most significant challenges, suffering, and agony are gifts of fierce grace. If we’re ready for them, they’re powerful and crucial components of our awakening. We can see and receive the gifts they have to offer if we’re willing to turn and face them, even though the gifts sometimes feel forced upon us. Whether it’s an illness, the death of a loved one, divorce, addiction, or employment troubles, it’s critical to confront our circumstances to see the inherent blessings available.
In this age, there’s a trend of people wanting awakening but they don’t know what it is they really want. They want their version of awakening. They want to be happy in a dream state where everything is perfect. When you let go of all the conditions—let go of how you want your own awakening to be and what you want the journey to be like—you have let go of your illusion of control. Then you will have freedom with no boundaries.
What do we need to practice to transform depression and anxiety into inner peace?
Do this Inner body Meditation!
When you are rooted in your inner body, you are forever one with God. Your inner body is the doorway to the soul. Your gateway to the kingdom of Heaven.
If you want to transform your life and taste the spiritual awakening be in touch with your inner body.
As Spiritual Teacher, Eckhart Tolle says, Spiritual Awakening is your “natural state” of feeling oneness with your being (soul) and staying in that state of feeling oneness with your being. You are not feeling your being because your mind is making too much noise.
The more awareness you direct towards the inner body, the higher its frequency becomes – like a light that grows brighter when you increase the flow of electricity. Negativity will not affect you at this higher energy level; instead, you’ll attract new circumstances that reflect this higher frequency.
In this way, you will make your home in NOW. The external world will not have the power to devour you, and you will not identify with dysfunctional mind noise that is driving you crazy
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