There’s Awakening Then There’s Awakening

The topic of “shifting towards an awakening” has come up quite a bit recently, so I thought I’d share part of a post from Tom Stine’s blog that deals with it.

I’ve excerpted commentary given by Adyashanti at one of his satsangs that Tom uses to introduce the subject:

There’s awakening and then there’s awakening, isn’t there? There’s a moment that we can call an awakening moment… An awakening moment isn’t any old spiritual experience. As a matter of fact, it’s almost none of the spiritual experiences that we’re told that it is. But there can be a moment of awakening.

So there’s a moment of awakening, and then there’s actually being awake. And very often the moment of awakening, actually, it’s significant in the sense that something has fundamentally shifted, that you can’t go back on, even though you might re-delude yourself and lose sight of it and start a whole long process of struggling and then trying to maintain it. And all that stuff.

But ultimately something at the seat of consciousness has fundamentally shifted. Then there is the other awakening. It’s the other awakening that sort of is the process of awakening, which is that thing where it starts to dissolve the spiritual ego, dissolve the “me,” dissolve all those things that you immediately apprehend in the moment of awakening but doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be living it a year later.

Then there is this dissolving away of all that which divides. And that for most people takes quite a bit of time. That’s the honest truth. Very few people are going to have, “Ah ha! Alleluia!” The lights turned on. And the lights are just going to stay turned on. Every now and then it happens, but usually it’s like, “Okay, now the other thing’s going to happen, and it’s going to be called the dissolving of you.”

Even though you’ve seen in that moment that there is no you, nonetheless the dissolving of you has now begun in earnest and you can expect it to continue in ways and to a depth that you never imagined. And that’s basically what it’s about.

And once that process has started, it doesn’t really need your help. It just can use you not hindering it. The “me” can’t help it along, but the “me” sure can kind of slow the whole thing down.

via Tom Stine | Living as Consciousness » Blog Archive » Spiritual Awakening – Adyashanti’s View.