The Five Stages of Awakening
How to awaken to your true self: which stage are you in?
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The five stages a person undergoes to attain spiritual enlightenment from spiritual awakening are as follows:
1. Transition to Awakening:
Your first shift toward awakening, which separates thinking from awareness, occurs by fierce grace. People sometimes lose their possessions, businesses, family members, social status, reputation, and physical abilities due to their life’s situations. Whatever you identify with is no longer there, so your mind's identification breaks with it. Consciousness becomes free from identification with forms, and you become more conscious. Hence, the breaking of the ego shell due to disaster or tragedy marks a turning point in your life.
Shift from Mind to Being
Due to this tragedy, the grace of the divine falls on you. Your inner Being, which people traditionally call God, gets activated 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 uncovering of 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 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 article is to help people recognize that they have begun to awaken and to help them intensify and accelerate the process.
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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 is awakening so painful?
You may feel confused, questioning why awakening can be so painful instead of blissful. Why isn't it free from negative states? This marks the beginning of the Dark Night of the Soul. Your mind might make you feel like an impostor when you don't experience the blissful state that those contemporary spiritual teachers you follow seem to embody. But why do you fluctuate between awakened and unconscious states? Why do you oscillate between inner fulfillment and anxiety? This leads us to the next stage of Spiritual Awakening.
3. The Dark Night of the Soul - 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 has not yet dissolved and awakening has not fully integrated into your life, your mind still makes you identify with unconsciousness.
Why Does the Universe Give You Suffering?
The universe will give you suffering to deepen your awakening in the form of "Fierce Grace," which is trials and tribulations. The ego will make you suffer because it is dying and 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 identify with egoic thoughts 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 this 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, no one is 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 ego-conscious. 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, dissolve all your karma, and become liberated.
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 cleansed of egoic conditioning and dysfunctional thought-emotional patterns. Your mind and body are unified and have surrendered to your Being, which is God itself. The Bible says, "Be still and know that I am God.”
In this stage, you will be withdrawn from the world and go to solitude. You realize that you are the divine being in your human avatar, and in solitude, you are romancing with the whole cosmos. 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 Purpose and the Death of Ego
In a spiritual 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. In this you are true to your inner purpose of enlightenment as your ego is no longer running in your life. A vital life force awakens in you. You feel this radiance from the head to the toe.
At this stage, you start to experience what I call "spiritual autonomy." This absolute inner conviction arises from realizing your divine being. Jesus navigated his life carrying this spiritual autonomy. At times, it felt like the whole world was against him. Nobody understood him; his disciples didn’t comprehend him, nor did the authorities and Pharisees. However, he knew what his mission was, and nothing and nobody could deter him from it. The price he paid for that autonomy is his own life.
Your Mission in the World
People with spiritual autonomy have a specific mission in this world, and they live it out until their death. This mission may involve living an inward life of inner stillness or creating and sharing an outward purpose derived from that stillness.
After enlightenment, the outward purpose does not manifest equally among all awakened beings. Some feel a strong urge to express and spread their outward mission, while others remain in their inner being, leading a seemingly more passive and uneventful life. They are more inward by nature and have no desire to engage with or transform the world deeply.
As Eckhart Tolle mentioned, they are "frequency holders" of the world who maintain the energy frequency of the planet with their inner stillness. Others feel 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 express their inner fulfillment and not chase 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.
Overcome your greatest challenges or struggles with a one-on-one counseling session for only $67 (originally
$97)for a limited time. Book today and take your session till March 31st.
Join the online course “Surrender to Awaken” and stop oscillating between peace and anxiety by awakening to your True Self. Only $97 (originally
$150) for a limited time.
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How to awaken to your true self: which stage are you in?
I am in stage 4. Yesterday I had an insight that in order to move ahead I would need to face and engage into daily activities (without identification of course) that present to myself. So only yesterday I realised that because I am no longer attached to anything, and because I became a full time observer of Maya I have surrendered myself to a state of naturally avoiding all those mundane things just because they no longer attract me. I will give you an example: instead of going out of the house and walk observing the impressions that occur by observing them I simply stay at home reading or meditating (for example) because my mind finds that there is nothing out there that will add to my being. This realisation seems to be pointing out that I'm still driven by likes and dislikes. "Why shall I go out if nothing out there causes "pleasure"? So you see my mistake? What I'm doing is just staying home because it's more appealing than going out".
I have a question regarding the perfect living master. I have read an article from you that anything that you find in your spiritual journey that helps you make progress is like finding a Guru. Be it a written article, books, YouTube clips, etc. anything can be considered a Guru. How do you go through these stages without a guru, perfect living master or guide?
But without a Guru or a perfect living master, who can help address your questions? Who do you go to for your burning questions- how do you know whether it is intuition (soul answered) or your mind answering?