How does one become awakened?

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What you awaken to depends on how you’re wired. If, deep down, you are a materialist, meditation and/or prayer concerning God is unlikely to provoke awakening in you. One’s surface beliefs are not a hard and fast rule, many people have been atheist materialists right up until their spiritual awakening, and then they couldn’t hold onto the belief. But something from the surface belief will be held onto even when the deep inner position changes, what we call awakening.

It can involve a personal, direct spiritual experience, or an impersonal satori-like one. Either way, you are now aware of the fact that reality wasn’t what you thought it was. And this awareness is brought about by direct experience, not through received wisdom or whatever.

The sheer diversity of ways in which you can awaken rules out a direct path. But some groups have created maps that you can follow. Buddhist dharma, and Christian faith are two of the most well-known pathways to awakening. They do demand that you accept their dogmas as belief first, which means if you’re not wired that way, they won’t be accessible.

Individual mystics, also called gurus, have produced maps that can be followed. I myself have done spiritual techniques from several way-showers. Osho, George Gurdjieff, a High Priestess from a Wicca coven I joined many many moons ago, a Dark Night Yogi who had the most vivid visualizations I’ve ever seen, Emanuel Swedenborg, Dr. David R. Hawkins.

It was the last that finally provoked my awakening after some ten years of focused exploration and study. That story is told here: Vincent Guidry's post in Spiritual Musings

With that groundwork laid, let me try to sketch out a “universal” pathway to awakening. The first thing to get clear about is that having a spiritual experience is not the same as having a spiritual awakening. What’s the difference?

Well, awakening makes it real. What is real? Real is when it doesn’t go away after you stop thinking about it. When you go to sleep, and wake up, and the experience you’d had is right there with you after you wake up. When you couldn’t get rid of it even if you wanted to. That’s real.

I’ve had many, many spiritual experiences in my life, but only one awakening. That’s when I realized we were playing for keeps. That this thing I’ve been dealing with has real, serious power. And it kicked me into the most intense Dark Night I’d ever had before or since.

So what to do if you actually want this experience? Well, let’s examine the idea of reality a bit more. Another characteristic of reality is that it’s continuous. It doesn’t jump around. There are invariants that it observes and reasons why it does that. And if it’s a spiritual awakening, then you have to be able to perceive it somehow.

This is where studying esoteric material is useful, such as the dharma maps of Buddhism or the consciousness scale of Dr. David R. Hawkins. You’re building up a large collection of ‘knowledge’, that seems silly at first, but your brain winds up putting together in weird ways that generate weird insights, that, when applied to the ordinary mundane world, bear a strange uncanny truth.

This uncanniness explains why astrology still remains relevant, thousands of years later, even though probability theory and statistics should have obliterated it a hundred years ago. Once you dive deep enough into it, the correspondences turn into a sort of language, a way of relating ideas to other ideas all tied to the time of year in which they happened. The materialistic mind can’t make sense of it, but the divine mind can still make use of it and push insights into your mind using it regardless.

Gathering this sort of knowledge in a kind of spiritual ‘curriculum’ greatly aids in provoking an awakening event. In fact, I would state with all the authority that having a Quora credential of “Mystic Scholar” gives me, that this is the fastest and most reliable way to produce an awakening. Study all the weird esoteric correspondences you can find and don’t stop until you’re seeing them literally everywhere. You’ll be a veritable information super-highway of divine communication. I just hope you manage to retain your sanity…

All jokes aside, providing the universe/God/Spirit-with-a-capital-S with a way of keeping your relationship with it alive by teaching yourself a language through with you can communicate with it is probably the most crucial part, and the key separating difference between spiritual experience and awakening. It seems almost certain to me that once you lay that groundwork, awakening, and it becoming way more real than you can ever fully handle, is sure to follow.

I can’t leave you without discussing the other criteria by which the universe decides who gets to be awakened and who has to live in normal reality with all the other shlubs is the concept of readiness. Many, many things can affect readiness. The divine is going to pick an opportune moment. My awakening event happened just as I was ready to turn a new chapter on my freewheeling twenties and to grow up as an adult and get like a career and a place of my own and all that other stuff. It was the perfect time and every time I’ve investigated the timing of a spiritual event in my own or anyone else’s life, I’ve always found a sort of perfection in the timing.

If it’s not happening right away, just keep expanding your search as you get bored. You won’t be disappointed. Everyone I’ve seen who has been disappointed at never achieving an awakening has displayed a ‘deal-breaking’ impatience. They thought the universe owed them awakening. That’s not how it works. Awakening is reserved for those that can use it properly, not those who are going to be constantly dissatisfied by it.