Let’s clarify the terms awakening and enlightenment, particularly their use in the realm of spirituality.
These words are a key part of spiritual parlance, but what do they really mean in this context? Do they refer to the same thing? Is it a shift in worldview, values or life priorities, or something else? Is it permanent or fleeting? We’ll also go on to look at how spiritual awakening and enlightenment are trainable, not accidents.
And I’ll introduce you to my six-week online meditation course, where you learn the mindfulness techniques that are crucial to the path of awakening and enlightenment.
What are Awakening and Enlightenment? The Spiritual Definition
The trouble with these terms is that often they’re used haphazardly and to describe several fundamentally different aspects of growing as a human being.
When I use the word awakening or enlightenment, I do so specifically, and if I don’t, I’m careful to warn people that I’m being unspecific.
What I mean by the terms awakening and enlightenment is a glimpse into a deeper sense of identity, a sense of identity beyond your everyday self and the person that you identify to be.
In a visceral sense, we identify with our body, our mind and our emotions. We also have a psychological sense of identity, which includes things like our habits, the clothes we wear, the, our age, where we’re from, the things we do.
The core message of all spiritual systems is that this identity is a kind of illusion, a suit that we wear in the world, and that it’s possible to see what you really are beyond it, beyond all forms of mental, emotional, visceral and psychological identification.
What would you be if you dropped all attachment to ‘your’ self and ‘your’ body, mind, habits, labels, emotions, personality traits and so on? And beyond that, what if you dropped attachment to all perception, all sight, sound, touch, all thought, all sensation?
The Witness and Non-Dual Perspectives
Realising those identities that lie beyond your habitual self-sense is called awakening or enlightenment, and there are two main levels to them: the Witness and Non-dual perspectives.
Very briefly, in the Witness perspective, you directly perceive there is a pure Awareness or Beingness within which your first-person experience of our mind, body, and senses arises, and that fundamentally you are that, rather than any of the content. You realise all sense of identity is simply an arising, and watch it collapse into pure awareness. This is the Face You Had Before Your Parents Were Born,Emptiness, Nothingness, Emptiness, Beingness.
In the non-dual perspective, you discover that this pure Beingness is fundamentally not separate from your first-person experience of the mind, body and senses. Your sense of separation from your senses falls away. You realise that any sense of separation is just more sensory content. “The bottom of the bucket breaks”, “The sky turns into a big blue pancake and drops on our head”, and you’re one with the entire world, not as a feel-good catchphrase but as an unmistakable, directly perceived, moment-to-moment experience.
And that’s where most spiritual paths aim us, whether it’s mindfulness, Vipassana, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity in its contemplative form, or others. Practitioners all go through the same fundamental stages to realise their deeper identities, with the Witness and Non-dual at the top of the tree.
Now it’s time to sort through the confusion that surrounds the terms awakening and enlightenment.
Sudden and Temporary or Slow and Permanent?
Even when they use the terms awakening and enlightenment in this way, sometimes people say that they’re two different things. In everyday language, we use the terms awakening and enlightenment to describe moments of epiphany, which confuses this further.
What they’ll tell you is that awakening means a sudden experience of the Witness or Non-dual, whereas enlightenment means a more permanent embodiment of them.
I don’t agree with that: people often talk about an “enlightenment experience”, implying a moment of sudden insight. And others talk about the “process of spiritual awakening”, as opposed to a moment of spiritual awakening.
That is, both are used to refer to a permanent transformation and its process, and sudden moments. And I agree that both are aspects of the spiritual path and both are crucial. So, in my mind, enlightenment and awakening refer to experiencing the Witness or Non-dual state, and can refer to moments of insight, lasting transformation, or the process of transformation.
You might like my video on why enlightenment isn’t so serious.
The Problem with This Confusion
There is a lot of confusion around these two terms because they’re used to describe different things by different people, including things that have little to do with direct spiritual realisation. That’s no problem. I’m not here to try to command people to use these terms in the spiritual sense.
But if you’re on the path of awakening and enlightenment, it’s crucial you know which definitions refer to that path and which don’t. If you don’t make that distinction, you might lose that spiritual meaning amongst the noise. When someone uses the words awakening and enlightenment in that way, you aren’t able to hear it, because you’re confusing it with other uses.
For example, some people refer to shifts in worldview or paradigms as an awakening or an enlightenment. “I had an enlightenment, I had an awakening that materialism wasn’t fulfilling me. So I decided to give up all my possessions.”
Transformations of this kind are definitely a crucial part of human growth, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same as the direct spiritual realisation I discussed above. Instead, these are moments of insight that lead to shifts in worldview, in values, in motivations, in desire, in life focus. They far from guarantee awareness of the Witness or Non-dual perspectives, though you could argue that being ultra-materialistic blocks you from those perspectives, and may in part be a result of lacking them.
Awakening and Enlightenment are Trainable
Besides, we often miss the fact that awakening and enlightenment are trainable.
When it comes to direct spiritual realisation, 99% of people never have one. At best, they have them spontaneously towards the end of their life or in times of hardship. They certainly don’t train these perspectives.
Before I took up meditation, I had a glimpse of the Witness awareness when I was going through a difficult time. I didn’t know what it was, or have any kind of framework for understanding it, but have it I did.
That’s pretty rare, though. Most people don’t understand the spiritual realisation component, even if they identify as spiritual, because they have never experienced it and don’t systematically train it.
The good news is that there are many, many paths for systematically training awakening and enlightenment, and they’ve been around for millennia. As one example, all of Buddhism is geared towards training these states. In recent times, Buddhist methods have been resold in secular packaging as mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness, done deeply, can also take you there.
And you’ve come to one of the best places to learn: I’m a double-certified meditation teacher with nearly a decade of meditation experience, and in my six-week online course you learn the crucial mindfulness techniques.
Warning: that doesn’t guarantee that mindfulness teachers have ever entered the Witness or Non-dual perspectives or will teach you methodologies for doing so.
Enlightenment is an accident, but spiritual practice makes one accident prone.
Richard rose
Awakening and Enlightenment are Life-Changing
I must also mention that awakening and enlightenment are life-changing. Whether you have a moment of it, either strong or fairly weak, or you go through systematic training, like meditation, this is life-transforming.
And when you’ve had enough glimpses or have walked far along the path, you start to see that it’s a fundamental component of living a full life as a human being.
Unless you’ve had these insights, in a way you can’t live fully, because you’re addicted to your identity. And this identity is often marred in suffering and delusion. The First Noble truth is that life is tenuous, impermanent, never entirely fulfilling. It’s Samsara. And our limited identity suffers its way through this nitty-gritty world, picking up all kinds of obscurations on the way.
Awakening and enlightenment, whether permanent or a glimpse, fundamentally changes your view of yourself, of everyone else, and of life itself.
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The post Clarifying Awakening and Enlightenment first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post Clarifying Awakening and Enlightenment appeared first on Deep Psychology.
