How do I become spiritual and enlightened? Does anybody have experience?

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Spirituality is not like any other form of knowledge / experience you’ve ever had to deal with. You can’t take a class to learn how to contact the deity. Spirituality has, traditionally, been passed down from individual teacher to individual student, over and over, throughout history. Nothing about it is conducive to academic methods.

This is primarily because it is a highly individual thing. You learn the same algebra the same way with all the other bored kids from a similarly bored teacher. You have to learn at least enough of it to pass your class and not be totally lost in the next class which builds on this one. You do homework once on each lesson, just enough to grasp the day’s idea.

There’s, well, a little of that in spirituality. There are things you can learn, and they’re usually taught through books. For instance, a lot of people get started through astrology, and that’s just rigorous enough to be teachable through books. Astrology isn’t terribly useful on its own as a method to get you closer to Spirit, it’s more like putting inflatables on your arms and legs and jumping into the pool. You won’t learn how to swim, but you’re at least in the water and getting wet.

Knowledge in the spiritual realm is called esoteric understanding. (exoteric spiritual knowledge is generally called theology. Theology serves the purposes of the world, not personal spirituality) Astrology doesn’t sound very esoteric, but you don’t have to go very far before you get pretty deep. If you really understand what the houses are you’re already deeper than 99% of people who get into astrology ever get, and houses are just the barest scratch on the surface of the discipline.

What makes it esoteric, traditionally, is that you had to be initiated into the knowledge, a layperson would look at all the signs and symbols and formulas and just never really get anywhere. The true meaning behind the words is hidden, and you need a priest / teacher to light the way.

The real utility of this knowledge, once you do get a handle on it, is in providing landmarks for a further meditative journey. This is where you sit down, clear your mind, wait around for a trance state to come up, and once in trance, random thought forms arise and you basically dream while awake. If you did your spiritual homework, your visualizations will take on the esoteric forms you’ve discovered.

In trance explorations, your mind basically throws everything it’s been mulling over subconsciously, onto a kind of television screen for you to experience. If you’re young, the experiences will tickle your libido at some point, basically it’s a stage for your true personality to interact with your conscious mind. Biology and physicality meets imagination and spirit.

It’s fun, until, well, you just run out of steam. The journey seems to find its way to a dark, tangled wood with no real way through. I was initiated into a Wicca coven and my journey was going just swimmingly until life events conspired to have me move away. Nothing lasts forever and eventually you will find you need to continue the journey with less support and more autonomy than you did before.

If you didn’t have the luxury of an initiation and a group of people to help you along and make it all seem that much more worthwhile, then you’ll be at this step from the beginning. But basically you find your way through it by putting a ton more effort into it. There was a point in my life when I did trance meditation every single day, sometimes multiple times in a day. I was at the bookstore several times a week picking up whatever book took my fancy. You have nobody else prodding you to do it, so you have to get disciplined.

Discipline is one of the ingredients needed for spiritual awakening to mean anything to you. Anybody can have spiritual experiences, but only if you’re prepared to understand what they mean can you really do anything with them. Awakening blows open the doors of reality and takes spiritual experience off of the cushion. Without the study, prior meditation, and discipline, a spiritual awakening is called by everyone else ‘psychosis’. There is very little daylight between ‘real’ spirituality and madness. Only the disciplined mind can stay on the right side of that divide, and luckily most of us never have to deal with the full brunt of spiritual reality before we’ve built it up.

These experiences don’t just blow open the doors of reality, they severely tax our minds ability to process experience emotionally. The brain doesn’t feel like a machine to us, but all those hormones and neurotransmitters and receptors and stuff are real too. It doesn’t take long for spiritual experience to blow out your dopamine pathways and leave you in a despondent state.

You’ll cycle between highs and lows for a while after your awakening. Some people call the lows Dark Nights. They suck. But what they point you to is something that you had always considered to be part of yourself but really isn’t. Ego. The primitive, child-like part of the mind that has simple tastes and programmed responses to things.

The more you continue on your journey, through the highs and the lows, the more you become aware of this ego. The more you’ll see it in others. Moreover, what you thought the ego was when you started, will be laughably revealed to just have been a product of the ego. Ego thinks of itself very highly and everyone else very poorly. Ego wants ‘good’ experience accumulated to itself, and pooh-pooh’s other people’s journeys as not really real.

And along with this awareness of ego comes love. One must first love oneself before they can truly love others. One’s ego wants love, but doesn’t really know how it needs to be loved, only how it wants to be loved. Ego wants to be the center of the universe. You are not your ego, your ego is but a part of you.

It’s a super-tricky pickle, but resolved at some point through the divine. The logic is simple enough to state, but as I said before, this is an individual journey that everyone who explores spiritually goes through. Ego wants to be the center, limited self will never be able to satisfy the ego, only God can provide self and ego with enough love, so self and ego learn eventually to turn to God.

Simple, but you can spend eternities really grasping it. Ego will always find more ways to take the focus away from God.

The fight between ego and God will never truly conclude, but one can learn to master the ups and downs. This, finally, is enlightenment.