Spiritual Awakening Success (Do This 1 Thing to Overcome the Biggest Obstacle)
It sounds so simple that it’s easy to overlook, but if you want authentic Spiritual Awakening you must focus on this…
Prefer to read it? See below:
Hello there, this is Jeff Craft or Kali Das, and I wanted to take a moment today and talk about the essence of spiritual awakening and part of that conversation also overcoming one of the biggest obstacles.
There are, of course, some other obstacles, but this is one of the biggest obstacles.
It took me decades to really get clear on this. And so even if the topic sounds familiar, I encourage you to hear me out, because the success of the spiritual path really depends upon being able to be really clear about this.
So it wasn’t until after I met my guru that I really got what spiritual awakening was about. But understanding the true goal of spiritual awakening and the spiritual path is essential to making progress.
And one of the biggest obstacles to the spiritual path or to the spiritual process of spiritual awakening is not understanding what spiritual awakening is or not emphasizing it enough.
The reality is most people have actually heard the essence of the truth. But sometimes it seems so simple, so obvious, that we forget the importance of it.
I began my spiritual path over 30 years ago. Hard to believe over that period of time I’ve read and heard the essence of spiritual awakening explained what feels like probably a million times.
But especially in the beginning, I brushed it aside and I thought, “oh, yes, I get that”. And then I would order 10 more books from Amazon about healing, chakras, spiritual development, various different things and continue to study and read.
Even after I met my guru in 2002, he clearly explained the essence of spiritual awakening to me and it sank in deeper, and it definitely planted a lot of seeds, But I still had the habit of continuing to search for other answers.
And so I want to share the essence of spiritual awakening with you today. Yes, you’ve probably heard it before, but I want to emphasize that this is really the main goal of what the spiritual path is trying to accomplish.
A Big Obstacle to Spiritual Awakening
The biggest obstacle to spiritual awakening is actually not knowing what spiritual awakening is or forgetting what the goal of spiritual awakening is.
So spiritual awakening and the spiritual path are not about chakras and psychic development and experiences of other dimensions. It’s not even really about healing or personal empowerment in the way that we often think about it.
Now, these things can be helpful. Healing, personal growth, even developing intuition all have their own value and they can be beneficial in many ways, but they by themselves are not actually signs of higher consciousness or spiritual development.
And so, as I know from my earlier days especially, it’s very easy to get distracted by different concepts like chakras developing intuition, energy, healing and forget the deeper goal of the spiritual path.
When we forget the deeper essence of the path, then other pursuits can become distractions even while appearing to be on the path so they can serve the process of spiritual awakening.
If you remember what the actual goal of spiritual awakening is and understand how they support the process, though.
So What is Spiritual Awakening?
The essence of spiritual awakening is this: Your true essence is not as a person living in the world, but instead your true essence is the awareness or consciousness which allows you to experience being a person world.
So your true, essential nature is defined as a being of awareness or as pure consciousness.
Now, most people may have even heard this, and maybe even you have. But what typically happens is that we can habitually continue to think of ourselves as a person in the world. We focus more on our essence in the world or the character that shows up in the world.
But it’s not until we really get the truth of this simple statement and invited it into our direct experience that we begin to make lasting progress on the spiritual path. That your essential essence, your true self, is pure awareness, pure consciousness.
Reflecting on Your Own Experience of Self
So if you take a moment to contemplate your own experience of being alive, reflect on yourself as a child. On yourself, as in your teenage years. Reflect on yourself at various times between then and up to the present moment.
If you reflect, you’re going to agree that the person that you know yourself to be in the world has changed in many ways. Your body has changed life experiences have changed. Your attitude about life and others and yourself has changed.
And as humans, we have all grown and evolved. And I’m sure that you have too. But most people base their sense of identity or self on the experiences that they have in life that are happening to the person in the world, they think of themselves as their name, their body, their experiences.
We think, for instance, I’m male or female, I’m short or tall. We give ourselves lots of descriptors and we think about ourselves as I am these things that reflect how I show up, how this person shows up in the world.
But if you pay attention, this version of you is changing over the years.
So the question becomes, “which version of you is the real you?”
Of course, the current version of yourself in the world might be a reasonable answer. Of course, the emphasis of being here, being now, being in the present moment.
But there’s a deeper essence of who you really are. And the various spiritual traditions point to something else as being the real you.
So as you reflect over that timeline of your life in the world, I invite you to step back for a moment. Your body and your character, as you’ve shown up in the world, have changed. But if you pay close attention, there’s a deeper sense of self that has remained constant.
In childhood, in high school and various ages and experiences of life, there is an underlying sense of “me” that does not change. A part of your essence that has been witnessing and experiencing the unfolding of your body and mind in the world, that unchanging sense of self.
The “witness”, the experience of which is said to be your true self, your true essence. The true essence is not the body, the mind, the emotions, the thoughts, or the story of the life that you’ve been experiencing in the world.
Your true essence is the consciousness or awareness in which the world arises.
The Initial Moment of Spiritual Awakening
So the essence of spiritual awakening is when you have a direct and clear experience that your true nature is the witnessing consciousness. That your true identity is not the person you have been experiencing the world, but your true identity is pure consciousness or awareness.
That’s the essence of spiritual awakening.
So it’s said that when we have that first direct moment of I am not this being, I’m not this body, I’m not this person in the world, that there’s this other part of me that’s consciousness, the witness that experiences this.
And there’s a feeling of there being a little separation, even ever so slight in the crack of your experience of life.
That’s when spiritual awakening begins: when you have a strong enough experience that I am not just this person. I’m not this body. I’m not these thoughts. I am consciousness. I’m awareness. I’m spirit. I’m something beyond what this individual self in the world is.
So realizing this to be your true experience by direct experience is the first moment of spiritual awakening. And then the remaining steps on the spiritual path are to continue to cultivate that truth, which deepens spiritual awakening and changes your relationship to life and self.
So cultivating awareness of your essential nature as awareness is what brings deeper, sustained peace, love and joy. And it also is what brings about the transformation many people experience on the spiritual path.
The Most Important Focus to Deepen Spiritual Awakening
So the advice from spiritual traditions is simple: focus on cultivating the direct experience of yourself as consciousness, awareness or spirit.
If you make that your number one focus, all remaining spiritual knowledge will unfold and reveal itself
through the process.
Other topics may be helpful and interesting, but it also is easy to get distracted.
And so if we continue to remember the primary goal, then we use other teachings, other practices, other perspectives, and we give them a litmus test.
We can keep asking:
- Does this serve me discovering the truth of myself?
- Does this serve the path of discovering a deeper relationship to myself as consciousness, as awareness?
- Does it deepen my process of spiritual awakening?
And from that perspective, the spiritual practices we do and the things that we study and learn, it should be in support of cultivating awareness of the true self and deepening that awareness. If we are truly focused on spiritual awakening.
The processes of healing and other topics, again, can be interesting. They can be helpful, they can be fun. We’re not saying they’re wrong, but we want to give them context.
We must keep this question in mind as we explore different practices and topics: Does it serve deepening of self-awareness?
Focus on What Really Matters
So I encourage you and invite you to really contemplate the possibility that your true self is really the awareness or consciousness in which your life has been arising.
And if you’re serious about the spiritual awakening and deepening spiritual path, then I invite you to really take this in and let it plant that important seed that’s going to help you focus on the one goal that really matters.
Your true self is not the body, the mind, the person that you have been experiencing in life. Your true self is pure awareness or pure consciousness.
And the “true self” nature is that of love and being in peace. Like that’s the essence of what we’re doing.
So healing, developing your intuition, exploring different spiritual practices can all be part of that spiritual path. But for real progress to be made, they must be used in context to support that simple and single goal of spiritual awakening.
The essence of spiritual awakening is to cultivate the direct experience of yourself as pure awareness and then deepen it until it remains a constant lived truth.
And when we get distracted by other concepts and we forget that when we forget that the essence, the goal of spiritual awakening is that simple, then we can become distracted and it becomes an obstacle for us.
So thank you for your time. Again, if you resonate with this message, just leave a comment below and I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful day.
What are your thoughts or experiences about the Essence of Spiritual Awakening?
Thank you for this, Jeff. I completely agree! The simplicity of awareness and experiencing the self as consciousness really doesn’t need anything else except that experience, and the more one connects with this, the less one is compelled to keep accumulating skills, knowledge, tools–although these can add nuances to human understanding. I love the imagery of planting the seed of awareness and cultivating it…nurture this seed with love and attention and direct experience as we grow ever closer to the divine and love that we are.
Thank you so much for watching and for sharing your thoughts and insights. 🙂
Wow Jeff, this REALLY hit home. It resignates with my true self. As a matter of fact, lately I’ve been feeling this calling/pulling to go back to my Self when other ‘subjects’ are confusing and/or distracting me. This is the place where Keisha feels most at home. 🙂 And now I understand why. It’s because this Self (my consciousness) has remained the same throughout my whole life. Thank you for posting this article. It helps to clearly define my goal while releasing some of the tension that I’ve been feeling surrounding my spirituality and life in general.
Namaste 💕
Awesome! And thanks for sharing. 🙂
Yes! Cultivating deeper awareness of the Self (as pure Awareness or Consciousness) is the most important focus of an Authentic Spiritual practice…. When we focus on re-experiencing our True Self, everything else begins to take care of itself…
I am glad this helped bring some new clarity and focus, and dissolved some of the tension and pressure you may have been feeling around navigating your life and spiritual path.
Re-centering in your True Self is the best remedy for life’s ups and downs… 🙂
Namaste 🙏
Since I began researching spiritual awakening 2 weeks ago I have read a lot of information on spiritual awakening and what it is and this is honestly the first time that the information really resonates with me and made complete sense without having to really contemplate it. Thank you so much for this guidance and insight.
Thanks for sharing, Kelli! I am glad this has brought some new clarity for you. 🙂
Jeff