Once a person has experienced a spiritual awakening is it never ending? Meaning that they will continue to go through awakenings for the rest of their life.

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A spiritual awakening is a step on the road to enlightenment. Enlightenment is a step on the road to a more mythic existence. One does not have to complete the journey from awakening to myth in one lifetime, we have lots of them and so we’ll have a chance to experience all the variations.

But what does this mean? When you move from awakening to enlightenment, what’s changed? When you’ve awakened, you’ve been alerted to the existence of a world beyond the mundane. It’s a glimpse and adventure through this world. As interesting as a spiritual journey is, they always end. Leaving you in a ‘forced’ mundane state until one can muster up enough energy for another spiritual awakening.

Awakenings are ‘peak’ events. They are so meaningful that pleasure / pain cease to have meaning while you’re in the midst. Mind does everything it can to hold on to them. This holding on ultimately drives the state away, leaving you in a state of loss. This state is called the Dark Night.

Enlightenment comes after, among other things, recognizing that the valley is just as much a part of the experience as the peak, and being willing to move smoothly through states of awakening and mundanity. The world doesn’t always move at your beckon but it still does occasionally and its still pretty amazing. A few jaded souls seem to forget how amazing it is and I feel sad for their loss of wonder.

Each peak, each trough, has the effect of teaching you important lessons. The more lessons you learn, and again, this happens over the course of multiple lifetimes, the more they stick. One peak experience might have the spirits telling you you’re the literal second coming of Christ. 14 peak experiences and 3 lifetimes later you actually believe it, even if it doesn’t come to pass the way they promised it would.

One would think the process of becoming enlightened would, as a result of all the people telling you this is how it is, make you more humble and cause the death of your ego and all of that. But the simple truth is that it doesn’t. I find myself meditating on ego, self-image, and what it means to exist as an individual more and more and more these days.

Instead what happens is limits continuously get removed. 6 years ago I was grappling with the question of whether it would be possible to maintain a spiritual journey at the same time as a real-world career. This trips a lot of seekers up. I managed to figure out how to keep it up and even use my spirituality to assist with real-world tasks and difficulties. The lesson was that this life is the weird one, spiritual life is the normal one. If you’re seeing a conflict, your fear is keeping you from fully identifying with the spiritual.

People like Steve Jobs, Robin Williams, Bill Clinton, these are people who have managed to access the next level from enlightenment, that of mythic capability. This is where the universe starts to mold itself around you. The normal limits to ambition are erased, you no longer think in terms of what’s holding you back. And so the universe no longer needs to hem in your ambition. It just puts the exact situation you need to grow in front of you, and you just respond in exactly the way you need to and over and over again until the whole world knows your name.

I don’t know the inner lives of these people too well. What I suspect though, is that at this level, the spiritual part of the spiritual awakening starts to fade, you’re not literally interacting with spirits when you’re making decisions in the board room! Identification moves away from the world of spirit and towards the world of humans, who are just big, more solid spirits themselves. The world of spirits trains you to better deal with the world of humans.

I do think that every great person of history has had some kind of spiritual event in their lives where their inner selves told them they were amazing and to stop messing around and get to building something befitting that amazingness. These same voices are whispering in all our ears too but we just don’t listen to them.