What are major spiritual awakening symptoms?

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Awakening is not something you shoot for or reach. It’s something that just happens to you. Think about the word. If you awaken then that means you were asleep before.

Can a sleeping person decide to wake up? Not while he’s asleep. The only way is to do it before you go to sleep, by setting an alarm or asking someone to wake you up.

So it is with spiritual awakening. You set an ‘alarm’ before you are born and one day the alarm goes off and your spirituality just wakes up. Maybe you find a particular teacher, maybe you just happen to come to it yourself. The manner is not particularly important.

When I started doing meditations and visualizations and rituals, I always kept expecting something big to happen, for the pearly gates to open up in my mind and a whole new world of experience to just magically appear.

It did appear, it’s just that the new world I was to explore was the same as the old one. Chop wood, carry water, they say.

Ever watch The Karate Kid? Daniel goes to Mr. Miyagi to learn karate. Instead Mr. Miyagi has him paint his fence and sand his deck. Eventually Daniel gets fed up with all the chores he’s been doing and goads Mr. Miyagi into finally getting to the point. The weird ways Mr. Miyagi insisted Daniel do his chores were actually karate techniques.

Mr. Miyagi didn’t just teach Daniel karate, he awoke Daniel into a whole new way of seeing the world. Every little thing you do in life can be seen as training.

That’s the best way to wake up. I know people that awaken by what I call lucid dreaming techniques. By this I mean techniques such as hallucinogen use, super-vivid visualization, shamanic adventuring, astral projection, and yes, lucid dreaming. Anything where you explore a world that’s not this one.

I’m not going to say that that’s not fun, but ultimately all such techniques take your attention away from things that matter and put it on things that don’t. You don’t know how many times I’ve heard one of these spiritual adventurers lament how difficult it is for them to make money. Of course it’s difficult for you to make money! You’re literally devoting the best part of yourself to fantasy-land!

In my book, real spiritual awakening comes not when you go down into the underworld and confront the dragon guarding the horde of treasure. Real awakening comes after you’ve done slain the dragon, gotten the treasure, and married the princess. Now what? Are you just going to go look for another dragon? What’s the point?

Don’t just be a warrior, figure out how to be a king too.