Three Kinds of Spiritual Awakening

Enjoy this re-post! It’s always worthwhile coming back to Adyashanti’s insights and wisdom, as our spiritual understanding deepens over time. This is taken from a talk I took notes on.

“There are different qualities to awakening, and not everyone awakens to the same thing. It’s rare that someone wakens to the whole of reality all at once. We usually get a piece of it. Of course, any piece of the whole feels like the whole. Every aspect feels complete. That sense that “this is it” what ever it is. It can lead to certain misunderstandings.

The deception is that each aspect feels like the whole. So you might get attached to the part of the whole. Like getting a hold of the foot of an elephant. You think it’s the elephant, but it’s just the foot.

There are 3 qualities of awakening:

You can also awaken in any of these ways and go to sleep again. You can wake up in one and be asleep in the others. You might even want to go back to asleep to be with everyone you knew and the world you knew.

Spiritual awakening is based on a shift in our deepest identity. You thought it was one thing, and the reality is different. This is different from a spiritual experience which comes and then goes and your identity remains the same.

The danger is that each one of them feels absolutely complete. But if there isn’t completeness without all the other aspects, you can become a spiritual shipwreck.

If you are connected to deeper mind and space, there is clarity and freedom. Your ego can use your space mind to hide from your emotions. The ego will use its intellectual ability to out-think any different thoughts about reality. 

Awakening of the heart brings a sense of oneness and love, yet may be still asleep at the level of the mind. Everything is light and love, but you may do some stupid things. The ego attaches itself to the image of being  pure love and light.

The wakening of mind brings intellectual freedom and clarity but after a while is like a desert without feeling. The world is a manageable duality. They are spaciousness and dismiss having to deal with the otherness of life. But the disconnect will become more acute.

This feeling of total completion and awakening is like a spiritual honeymoon.

Like in marriage the spiritual honeymoon doesn’t tell you much about love and what it means to be together. There is a transition that can be easy or difficult. The agreement of how things are, has shifted and we don’t have a manual on how to live this way. Something will find its way in our experience to find a new balance in life.”

~ Adyashanti