The Crisis of Awakening
Spiritual awakening is a major life transition and often experienced as a turbulent crisis. Everything that once appeared solid, graspable, certain, is no longer so. You awaken to the reality of impermanence, death, and the ultimate responsibility you have towards yourself and the world around you – it is your world, after all. Every apparent form is your own face.
How to explain timelessness to one who is bound by time?
How to explain spaciousness to one living from inside a self-made prison?
How to explain true humility and love to one bound by greed and hatred?
How to explain anything to one who does not really understand?
The process – which in reality is not a process, it is just the truth establishing itself more and more – of awakening is the process of realizing the impersonality of consciousness and its reality as our true self, independent from phenomenal perceptions, names and forms. It is recognizing that, that which I am, that which understands, that which is humble, loves, is spacious and timeless, is not a separate entity. Awakening is realizing our mortality as this separate body-mind individual and, with it, our immortality and absolute reality as consciousness.
The sense of being a separate doer, a separate thinker, a separate thing in a material universe is seen through for the illusion that it is. You see that most people in our society are living in this collective hallucination that there is anything other than this. That this somehow could become divided -- something other than what it is.
This ultimate spiritual realization is at the same time what we most long for and what we most fear. It is the death of the illusion of separation. The death of a belief with which we are infatuated. It is a confrontation with the rawness of reality. It is seeing through all the layers of what is false to get to the core of our being—the this-ness of this moment. It is not a rosy path, but it is true. There is pain, but there is truth. And in truth we find a comfort that goes beyond the senses. The comfort of being. Like a child resting her head on her mother’s lap, we surrender all our efforts and limitations to our Eternal mother.