What is meant by spiritual awakening? There appears to be at least 2 views.

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The sense in which you’re ‘finished’ refers to enlightenment. There is also awakening, which is a step on the path to enlightenment. I write a lot about the subject so check out my other answers because this one is bound to be incomplete.

Enlightenment is only the feeling that you are finished. You are not actually finished learning and growing. Instead you’ve managed to find an ‘inflection point’.

Have you ever reached a point of diminishing returns? You do something, you get something back, so you do more of it. Soon, you stop getting so much back. Eventually, you hardly get anything back at all. That’s what enlightenment is.

Now we have to talk about another difference in terminology. When Zen folks use the word enlightened, or enlightenment, they’re referring to a point in time where a student learns a particular lesson. “The master strikes the student on the head, and he was enlightened” is a common construct used in Zen literature. It doesn’t mean the student suddenly becomes a master, it means he instantly apprehended the particular lesson the master was trying to teach him.

But a lesson, if you learn it well and take it to heart, the way a Zen master is aiming to teach it to you, goes down to the core of your soul and you lose the capacity to really make that mistake again. You move out into the world again unencumbered by that particular egotism.

Notice how it took this long into the answer before I had to use the big E-word. Ego is the word we’ve settled on to define the thing keeping you from being enlightened. Like everything else in this space, ego has many different meanings and definitions.

I define it as a complex system of wants and desires that gets in its own way. When you’re enlightened, the ego no longer gets in your way. You are no longer identified as your ego. Ego can want things, but you don’t have to satisfy it.

Awakening, on the other hand, is the process of discovering a different part of the self, one that, rather than getting in its own way, brings everything it touches into peace and harmony. When you awaken, you discover the thing that eventually replaces the ego with enlightenment, should you ever happen to reach it.

You should go watch The Karate Kid if you haven’t already. The original 80s version, not the terrible remake. Daniel-san, up until he receives awakening at the hands of Mr. Miyagi, is a typical unenlightened seeker. The specific point at which he is awakened comes after he gets fed up and tells off Mr. Miyagi. Mr. Miyagi, then, in a single instant, brings Daniel-san into a completely new world. The chores he was doing before was actually karate training.

Daniel-san was awakened here. He does not reach enlightenment during the film or any of the sequels. It’s Mr. Miyagi, on the other hand, that becomes enlightened as a result of the events of the film. The terrible events of his past, he was able to find peace from, through teaching and helping Daniel-san solve his own problems.

The big difference between the two is that when you are awakened, you need more spiritual experience to keep growing. Daniel needs to keep practicing karate, keep pushing his limits, keep learning lessons.

When you’re enlightened, the world changes and more of the same won’t help. Winning a karate tournament helped Daniel-san immensely in his life. But you cannot think of any kind of accomplishment that would help Mr. Miyagi overcome grief for his wife and child who died during WW2.

Spiritual techniques, such as karate, work by forcing you to overcome your ego in order to solve problems. They need to be hard, you need to learn from them, and you need to be extremely motivated to do them. that’s all that’s needed for a technique to be spiritual. In doing them you are drawn into a deeper world.

The awakened need more and better spiritual techniques to make their lives better. The enlightened are so attuned to spiritual adventure that can’t really invest any more. Mr. Miyagi had reached the point in his awakening that he needed one last push to reach enlightenment. He was listless, sad, had nothing really to give him meaning in life. Daniel-san was that last lesson he needed.