How real is the spiritual awakening process?

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The spiritual awakening process is, quite precisely, the realization of the fundamental diversity of experience. What this means in plain English is that before you are spiritually awake, spirituality is not real to you. After awakening, it is very real. It’s a progression, at no point was spirituality ever completely not real, and at no point is it ever totally real.

This is where the terminology I used, “diversity of experience” becomes important. Reality is only important as a vehicle for experience. Is the material world more solid and therefore ‘real’ than the spiritual one? Absolutely, at least to us humans at least. But at a fundamental level, a reality is just a bunch of stuff interacting with other stuff according to rules. Our experience of those interactions and understanding of those rules grows as we do. And when we grow spiritually, that means our understanding of spiritual rules and stuff unfolds like origami.

And so to the spiritually aware person, it’s the material world that looks increasingly false and hollow. Ideas and convictions and actions taken from the point of view where the material world is the only one that’s real are seen to never really get anywhere. But that’s all that we perceive, and so one can now understand the Judeo-Christian understanding of humans as being completely helpless without God, when you understand ‘God’ as not just a mythological being with jealous and unjust morality, but as omnipotence and omnipresence itself. Without spiritual awareness, humans are no better off than animals.

For most people, their spiritual awareness isn’t self-aware. Meaning when they are perceiving spiritually, they don’t conceive of it that way. Humans generally deal with the spiritual through other media rather than directly, such as stories and myth. There’s nothing directly spiritual about the Homeric epics, but when read as intended, they bring about a certain state of mind that’s anybody that’s spiritually awake would recognize as a spiritual state of mind. Everybody has their preferred means to access these higher states of mind.

But with awakening, the higher states become normal, and the lower, unaware states, diminish in perception, often to the point where one loses all connection with how others perceive. Awakening can be too real. The psychic backlash pushes you into a despondency that can take months to resolve.

Even if nothing physical can be perceived by self or others concerning awakening, the psychic effects, here I’m using the word as a synonym for “psychological,” are quite observable and can lead one to lose motivation for keeping one’s material lifestyle stable. One’s spiritual self often has to break down our physical self so that we can be remade with a better foundation.