The 5 Life-Changing Stages of Spiritual Awakening

Which One Are You In?

These are the five stages a person goes through to realize the enduring awakening or enlightenment from non-enduring awakening:

1. Shift to Awakening:

Your first shift to awakening-which separates thinking from awareness, happens by grace. People sometimes lose all their possessions, family members, social position, reputation, and physical ability. In some cases, the loss can also happen through disaster or war. Whatever you identify with, it's no longer there, so your mind identification breaks with it. Consciousness gets free from its identification with forms, and you get more conscious. Hence the Breaking of Ego Shell Due to disaster or tragedy is a turning point of your life.

Shift from Mind to Being

The grace of god has already been given to you. This inner calling from your being can happen anytime due to grace. You might forget this moment of grace for years or even decades because your mind will take over. Many people may not initially realize or fully experience the beauty and wonder of calling from the being until a particular event or experience allows them to see it. Whether it's a grand moment or a small one, when you realize there's more to life and yourself than you previously felt from the limited perspective of thinking, your journey truly begins. From that moment forward, your path in life takes a new direction and opens up possibilities you may have never imagined before.

Awakening cannot be earned or achieved

The beginning of the awakening process cannot be forced or earned, but rather, it happens by grace. There is no clear set of steps that can be taken to reach it. The first awakening occurs without any doing on your part and cannot be reversed, though the ego can delay it. The purpose of this post is to help people recognize that they have begun to awaken and to help them intensify and accelerate the process.

Relationship between awareness and thinking

Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become aware of itself. Once you have experienced awareness, you can choose to be present and rest in your being rather than getting lost in useless thinking. With awakening comes responsibility, and it's up to you to recognize its significance and bring its light into the world.

2. The End of Your Mind's World:

Due to this profound shift in consciousness, Whatever resonated with you before is not resonating with you anymore. Your career, habits, relationships, inclinations, and likings all fell apart. You fluctuate between awakened and egoic states of mind. You feel "out of place." It might feel like the End of your world with its known habits and conditionings. You are going through physical and emotional pain after the spiritual awakening.

A significant reorientation occurred in your life, and you pondered,

what do I do with my life?
What's my role?
What's my relationship with my family, friends, husband, wife, and children?

Why awakening is so painful?

You are confused, wondering why awakening is so painful instead of blissful and free from negative states. It is the start of the dark night of the Soul. Your mind makes you feel like an impostor when you don't feel the blissful state like those contemporary spiritual teachers whom you follow. But why do you fluctuate between awakened and unconscious states? Why do you oscillate between inner fulfillment and anxiety? That brings us to the next stage of Spiritual Awakening.

3. The Dark Night of the Soul - We can also call it Trials and Tribulations: 

You may not realize that the most significant thing that can happen to any human being has already happened within you. The whole world is waiting for it, but you are blessed with it now: The separation process of thinking and awareness. Now, the universe wants to act through you and fulfill its divine purpose through you. But as your old mind conditioning is not yet dissolved and awakening is not integrated fully into your life, your mind still makes you identify with unconsciousness.

Why does the universe give you suffering?

The universe will give you trials and tribulations to deepen your awakening in the form of "Fierce Grace," which is suffering. The ego will make you suffer because it is dying, and it is not resonating with this fierce grace of the universe. Your psyche is in the process of cleansing through this fierce grace. But be intensely aware: If you meet your trials and tribulations with your own deepest realization, you will be purified of your egoic conditioning and your divine being will shine through your human form. You need to act from the depth of your being. If you act with your egoic mind, you will again and again get identify with egoic thought and emotional patterns. You will halt your awakening process and in some cases, reverse it. The divine weapon you have against unconsciousness is your alert awareness.

Karma and Destiny

Karmas are only applicable and act on you as long as you believe yourself separate from the Being(Self, Atma). As you are not conscious of inner Being and only have mind-body awareness, you will pass through a series of pre-destined activities and experiences, all of which are the consequences of previous birth acts and thoughts. In that way, you are bound by destiny. For a person who lives from ego, every act and experience in his life is determined at birth. He also has the greatest free will or freedom to surrender to being and realize Being. However, when one realizes the Being, there is no one left to experience the consequences of actions, so the whole structure of karmic laws becomes redundant. Then he will be free from karma as Being (that is God) is the doer, and no person is acting and experiencing. Whenever we act from the mind, we are in ego-consciousness. If you want to be in ego consciousness, you must experience and live your allocated karma. Or you have the choice to surrender to being and absolve all your karma.

After the Dark Night of the Soul recedes, your Being shines like a sun, and deep down, you will start to feel its presence. A spiritual awakening is the process of rebirth of everything you are, while the Dark Night of the Soul is the process of dying of everything you are not!

4. Complete Inner Transformation: 

Due to divine trials and tribulations, your body and mind are purified. Your human form is literally cleansed of egoic conditioning and dysfunctional thought-emotional patterns. Your mind, body, and heart are unified, and they have surrendered to your being, which is God itself. As they say "Be still and know you are god". In this stage you will be withdrawn from the world and go in solitude. You realize that you are the divine being in your human avatar, and in solitude, you are romancing with the whole cosmos. And nothing is resonating with you more than your inner stillness and solitude.

Transmutation of a butterfly from a caterpillar

You are completely transformed from within. This metamorphosis is like the transmutation of a butterfly from a caterpillar. Now, instead of crawling due to worldly resistance, you have been given wings of awakening. You are no more pushed and pulled into wild mental states by your mind. The fluctuation from awakening states to egoic states stops. Your underlying emotion is inner peace, though you can still feel a range of human emotions like anger, jealousy, and anxiety. The only difference is these emotions now generate on the surface of your mind and fail to identify with you. As soon as they appear, they disappear, too. Worldly worries are not acting on you; neither are you driven and compelled by the world. You are surrendered in enduring tranquility. It feels like the zenith of spiritual awakening- but it's NOT.

There is one more stage your mind needs to go through to attain enlightenment.

5. The Ultimate Life Purpose and the Death of Ego

In non-enduring awakening, the ego was not dead. It may change the nature of the ego, making it more unified and whole, but the ego is still there. Now, as you realize enduring awakening as you are true to your inner purpose of enlightenment, ego is no longer running your life. A vital life force awakens in you. You feel this radiance from the head to the toe. At this stage, you began to move with what I call "Spiritual autonomy". Its kind of absolute inner conviction comes from realizing your divine being. Jesus walked through his life carrying this spiritual autonomy. At times it seems like the whole world is against him. Nobody understood him. His disciples didn’t understand him. Authorities and Pharisees didn't understand him. But he knows what his mission is, and nothing and nobody got in the way of that. The price he pays for that autonomy is his own life.

Your Mission in the World

The people with spiritual autonomy have a certain mission in this world, and they live this mission out until their death. This mission can be living an inward life of inner stillness or creating and spreading an outward mission from your inner stillness. After enlightenment, the outward purpose does not express itself equally in all awakened beings. Some feel a strong urge to create and spread their outward purpose, while others abide in their inner being and live a seemingly more passive and uneventful life. They are more inward by nature, and they have no desire to get strongly involved in or transform the world.

As Eckhart Tolle mentioned, they are "frequency holders" of the world who maintain the energy frequency of the planet with their inner stillness. Others feels a strong urge to create and spread their outward purpose. They want to build, create, become involved, achieve, and transform the world for the better. Their main intention is now to serve the world selflessly.

Awaken Beings acts like the Mother of the World

Awaken Beings acts like the mother of the world in their outward mission. They realized all too well that if they wanted to carry their outward mission, their existence was only possible with the intention of serving the world selflessly. They emphasized the significance of acting from a place of inner fulfillment rather than an inner desire to be this or that. Their life is an expression of bliss rather than a pursuit of it. Now, in their outward mission, they are expressing their inner fulfillment and not chasing it. Their desire does not vanish; rather, it becomes a conscious intention for the well-being of others. Their unconscious fuel for their personal identity transformed into a conscious instrument for the well-being of the entire world. 

If this article resonates with you, could you please help by clicking ❤️ or 🔄 on this post, allowing even more people to discover it?