Shedding Light on Spiritual Awakenings

Many who pursue paths to truth claim to have had so-called “spiritual awakenings.” While this term may sometimes be elevated to the cliché-level, shedding light on what exactly they are can facilitate achievement of them.

As a concept, a spiritual awakening is deep. It certainly signifies different things to different people and often varies with intellect, understanding, existing spiritual levels, and even faith. It begs many questions. Is it, for example, an absolute state—that is, either a person achieves it or not? Are there degrees of it? And can they somehow be gauged?

A spiritual awakening is profound and transformative. It cannot be attained solely by intellect. It results in self-realizations, elevates beingness, and usually leads to religious truths.

Paths to and Signs of a Spiritual Awakening

Although the idealized goal of a spiritual awakening may be to achieve this still-undefined level instantaneously, it often entails a path, whose length varies according to the person. But there are signs that he is making progress toward it.

The first of these is the realization that he is not just “hanging out there” alone—that is, that he has some degree of connection to others and to God or the Higher Power of his conceptualization. Indeed, despite a lack of understanding and even faith, this invisible link is so vital to his continued beingness, that loss of it would not enable him to take his next breath.

Tantamount to this identification is the subtle feeling that he is part of something bigger, greater, and more infinite than himself.

Another step toward this goal entails a shift in perspective from having or doing and to just being. Attachments and qualifications, such as “I’m tall,” “I’m a teacher,” “I live in California,” “I own a summer home in the Hamptons,” and “I’m rich,” only temporarily define and distinguish him from others in the finite, physical world. While many of them may be respectable and listable on a resume, what is more important is the realization that there is a soul behind everyone, whether that person lives on the poverty or affluent level, it is equal to all others and comes from the same Source. In this respect, all earthly manifestations only constitute “window dressings.”

Increasingly replacing the “I do” and “I have” with “I am” as a complete sentence and without further, following details, fosters a sense of beingness at the core and eliminates the need for qualification or ownership.

Another step toward a spiritual awakening is the very difficult one of separating inner peace from outer circumstance. The natural, original, and intrinsic state of the soul is beingness, essence, and love, but life’s problems, conflicts, struggles, and adversities usually wreak havoc with it, as it is harnessed to generate a myriad of negative emotions, defenses, and reactions.

Another sign of spiritual awakening progress is a shift from the traditional sensory channels of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste to that of the soul’s connection to others and the universe. Sometimes referred to as intuition or unexplainable awareness, this sixth-sense channel invisibly and intrinsically sends and receives information, bypassing physical-world means. God often communicates and guides a person to do something by this method. At other times, it generates a strong feeling of a pending event, even though it has not yet occurred and the person has no way of verifying that it will, such as that he is about to cross paths with a college friend he has not even thought about in the past decade. And it ends up happening when the friend coincidentally sits next to him at a sports event he attends the following weekend.

These coincidences, which can be redefined as “God-incidences,” are integral to spiritual awakenings by enabling a person to realize that he is being led to something for a reason he is yet able to determine by God, who is orchestrating the event from above. The desired byproduct of this synchronization is the realization that the person represents a piece of the larger puzzle and that his “piece” both belongs to it and fits into it, despite the fact that he does not quite understand how.

Another—and very strong—indicator of a person’s temporary corporeal state is the realization that he is immersed in the time element that is an integral part of it, but that it is not intrinsic to the soul’s eternal state. Like manila folders that separate files in a large filing cabinet, time only serves to separate events. But, contrary to understanding, all of those in his life occur simultaneously. He may, for example, witness something which generates a foreboding feeling in him, only to learn that the same thing will happen to him in the future, because it is already written on his soul and it has therefore already happened to it.

Twelve-step programs are paths to spiritual awakenings. Requiring concerted effort and sometimes long periods, they entail turning a person’s will and life over to the Higher Power of his understanding; plugging the holes in his soul by determining the harms he has caused others and then atoning for them through the direct-amends process; improving his conscious contact with that Higher Power; and achieving the spiritual awakening, which serves as the culmination of his return to a state of wholeness.

Perspectives of those in the Spiritual Field

Many in the spiritual field have offered insights about such awakenings.

The late Dr. Wayne Dyer, a motivational speaker and self-help author who focused on manifesting, stated that “we are not our bodies, our possessions, or our careers. Who we are is divine love and that is infinite.” He also said that there is a spiritual solution to every problem and every problem can be reduced to a person’s misbelief that he is separate from his Source.

Eckhart Tolle, a German-born spiritual teacher, said that “you find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement and an advocate of alternative medicine, stated that a spiritual awakening occurs when a person is no longer living in a dream world in which he filters everything through his ego and insists on focusing on his past and his future. Instead, he has a simultaneous awareness of his true, original, and individual self and its connection to everyone else’s and to God himself.

Religions define spiritual awakenings as not necessarily waking from spiritual sleep, but as being resurrected from spiritual death and understanding that sin separates a person from his origin or Creator. As a result, he cannot understand, experience, and relate to such an infinite force in such a state. Being spiritually awakened or even born again restores this connection and only in this state can a person receive sanctifying grace.

A Final Definition

Spiritual awakenings are progressive and may require great lengths of time and structured paths to achieve. Deliberate efforts can be considered the journey’s direction and realizations can be considered their milestones along the way. The most significant realization, perhaps, is that the person is more than his physical manifestations and qualifications suggest; that he is not autonomous and untethered; that the soul behind him is infinite and can exist without these earthly properties; that it was created by a power greater than he; and that that power is both his origin and destination.

Like a wave in a vast ocean, that wave knows that there are countless others like it, but that all are a part of the water body from which they came, are still connected to it, and cannot exist alone without it. This echoes the ultimate, post-temporal life goal of being gathered as one into the holy spirit in which each soul will remain distinct, but not separate from it.

A spiritual awakening entails realizing that a person is the creation, reflection, and extension of his Higher Power to whom he is progressively reconnected as he pursues this awakening and the earthly path that serves as the transition to the eternal and spiritual one, but that it sometimes doused and darkened his awareness of it; that he is separate from his physical form and can exist without it; and that so, too, are all others.

“Shedding light on spiritual awakenings,” as the title implies, both directly and indirectly indicates what they are: a way back to the light from which the person came.

Robert G. Waldvogel has earned the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Behavioral Health for Late Adolescence and the Emerging Adult and a Postgraduate Certificate in the Fundamentals of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment at Adelphi University’s School of Social Work. He has led Twelve-Step support groups on Long Island for the past decade, and created the Adult Child Recovery-through-Writing, and the Strengthening Our Spirituality Programs taught at the Thrive Recovery Community and Outreach Center in Westbury. He is a frequent contributor to Wisdom Magazine.