awakening

Here's a perspective I like on spiritual awakening, elaborating on a metaphor used by NameRedacted.

Suppose you awaken from a dream: a terrible nightmare, an amazing fantasy, whatever. In the dream it felt like there was something really important you had to do. There was a whole story, a cast of characters, a sense of narrative, of you being a specific character. Maybe there was strong emotion: a sense of dread, of impending doom, or maybe a sense of accomplishment, of succeeding or failing at something significant. In any case, in the moment (or period - it can be a process) of awakening comes the realization that none of that was real. It was all empty, simply a fabrication of your mind.

Compared to the fabrication, the 'real world' that you awaken into might seem quite mundane. The experience of waking up doesn't necessarily feel magical or special. Still, it is, often, a relief to realize that the thing that you were dreading, the situation that seemed so terrible, the crescendo that everything seemed to be building to, was actually just a dream: sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Spiritual awakening is the (possibly gradual) process of coming to see that everything is like this, that the world is in your mind. Like waking up from a dream, this can be extremely liberating. But it can also feel, in some sense, disappointingly mundane. So it goes.

This idea of waking up from a dream is not just a metaphor. The mind tries to avoid feeling the present moment by day-dreaming: moving away from sensation and into thoughts and fantasies. Each time the mind catches itself in a distraction while meditating, and moves back to the present moment, is a literal moment of awakening. It's not fireworks - it's just returning to an awareness of what is currently real in experience.