After a spiritual awakening, is it common to feel depressed and unmotivated to do anything with your life?

Tagged:

Yes it is, it’s so common that every spiritual tradition has a term for it. Not the same term obviously, but I have adopted the term “Dark Night,” from Daniel Ingram’s book: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book: Daniel Ingram: 9781904658405: Amazon.com: Books. Daniel didn’t invent the term, it likely originated deep in the Internet on dharma forums.

Spiritual experience is rare and fascinating, it makes ordinary mundane life seem boring and useless by comparison. But spiritual experience is ephemeral and limited. When the high leaves, you’re left with only your own self. It’s quite similar to a drug high. You just want to chase the high, not continue with your mundane existence.

I went through many many many of these cycles in my twenties. They peaked in the experience I wrote about here: Vincent Guidry's post in Spiritual Musings. After the peak, there was another period of perhaps 6 months of intense study, then another few years of relaxed contemplation, and these days I interweave spiritual exploration with ordinary existence.

Eventually it is seen that ordinary existence is just another form of spiritual existence, that the two are not incompatible, one does not have to flee one to find the other.