What is the biggest blocker for spiritual awakening?

Home - Quora Link

Whether you're ready or not.

The main driver of experience is meaning. In order to find meaning in something you need to be excited by the possibilities by it. You have to actually need to have those kinds of experiences. On some level. If you don’t, then you won’t find meaning in them.

So what makes you need a certain kind of experience? Let’s look at, say, a gambler. A gambler is wont to find meaning in every roll of the dice. He wants, needs the kind of experience that gambling offers. If you don’t want / need that kind of experience, then you won’t find any meaning at all in going to the slots and losing $50. If you do, then you might be like, “oh well I didn’t wear my lucky shoes,” or “karma is drilling me for not calling my mom last week.”

Being able to find meaning in something is reliant on both your identity and your level of consciousness. Identity is crafted from the sum total of all the experiences you’ve had in this life. So if your mind / psyche isn’t geared towards examining really minute things, you’re not going to get much out of gambling.

Similarly, there are all kinds of things that will disqualify you from a spiritual awakening. I wanted for years to learn how to do astral projection. I’ve done many exit attempts, I’ve bought and tried a bunch of products that purported to teach it. I talked to many people who had similar experiences and asked what their techniques were.

Eventually through self-inquiry I realized I don’t need that kind of experience. I don’t think it’s anything I can’t literally do, it’s just I won’t be able to get my subconscious to play ball. It’s the same reason I’m not particularly drawn to psychedelics.

Instead I have a different kind of spirituality. Everybody ultimately finds their own. My own awakening came many many years after I’d experimented with meditations, visualizations, chakra work, self-inquiry, reading, discussing, digesting. I’d done so much of it that I got to a point where I didn’t think a ‘real’ awakening was in the cards.

Until it happened. When it came, it was perfectly tailored to what I needed from it. It gave me the abilities I needed to explore that realm the way I wanted and needed to.

My advice to anyone wanting a ‘real’ awakening is to do 10 times more reading, studying, experiencing, and meditating than they are doing now. It’s only that level of effort that really gets you to a point where the ‘real’ experiences become meaningful. My spiritual experiences built on everything I’d done before. It just wouldn’t have been the same without it.