Awakening is at the source of our spiritual life. It is a realization that the world is a manifestation of the ineffable. Awakening is experiencing an aspect of the transcendent, making spirituality immediate and intimate. Without an awakening, spiritual development is remote and abstract.
Awakening is a shift in consciousness that can arise spontaneously or be cultivated through spiritual practice. Religion and structured spiritual teachings serve to guide and sustain our awakening, helping us to experience the true depth and breadth of the surrounding universe.
Topics below:
Spiritual Awakening
P. D. Ouspensky
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Peter Kingsley
Finding Ones Path to Awakening
Spiritual Awakening
Awakening is a shift in consciousness. We are all familiar with minor shifts in consciousness such as a feeling of deja vu, or a sudden “aha” realization. We can also experience the profound in awareness during a traumatic event or the loss of a loved one. These are times when we momentarily see the world with different eyes. Less imposing experiences of awakening can arise during meditation or contemplative prayer. There are many ways to awaken, but a common realization is that our current consciousness is a form of sleep.
Spiritual practice helps reinforce our connection to the transcendent, to a supra-ordinate reality. Sustaining the consciousness of being awake is the essential goal of nearly all mystical teachings. This primary focus on awakening distinguishes these mystical teachings from other spiritual teachings. These teachings inculcate the ability to experience alternative layers of reality.
Three twentieth-century masters of awakening are P. D. Ouspensky, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Peter Kingsley. Each of them has their own unique teaching on how to awaken, but all three teach that our familiar consciousness does not reflect true reality.
The mystical teachings of Krishnamurti, Ouspensky, and Kingsley are not focused on attaining goals, but emphasize the force behind manifestation without action. This force is one of creation without a goal or action to create, and its manifestation is inherent to the act of awakening. For example, when we open our eyes we see color; but opening our eyes did not create the color. Manifesting the transcendent is like opening your eyes, it is not creation, it’s just there when you look.
P. D. Ouspensky
Ouspensky views the universe as composed of a complex hierarchy of energy levels and teaches us how to access our inherent capacity to participate with that energy. This energy permeates each of us and is a manifestation of a powerful creative force. When we awaken, we become aware of how we emanate that energy.
Ouspensky, a student of the mystic Georges Gurdjieff, shows us how to awaken to our energetic emanations of a powerful creative universal force. Through a process he calls self-remembering, we begin to awaken to this profound universal energy. The first stage of awakening is the realization that we are in a continual mechanized somnambulistic unconsciousness.
“All new powers and capacities of realization come always in one and the same way. At first they appear in the form of flashes at rare and short moments; afterwards they appear more often and last longer until, finally, after very long work they become permanent. The same thing applies to awakening. It is impossible to awaken completely all at once. One must first begin to awaken for short moments.”
In Search of the Miraculous, P. D. Ouspensky
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti teaches us to awaken from the emotional conditioning that restrains our true experience of self. He exhorts us to break free of the conditioning of our past, of our roles, and of our feelings. Even our very use of language entraps us in the constructions of our mind, and distances us from connection to the real manifest world. We can awaken and experience the true reality of being in the world only by breaking out of the traps inherent in our conditioned mentation.
We can break out of our condition through challenging how we look at things and how we automatically create meaning as a source of reassurance through the familiar. Krishnamurti does not offer a new set of teachings, but admonishes us to open up and widen our cognitive horizons.
“If you are a very good driver, you see three hundred to four hundred yards ahead, and in that seeing you take in not only the near— the lorry, the passenger, the pedestrian, the car that is going by— but you also see what is far ahead, what is coming. But if you keep your eyes very close to the front mudguard, you are lost— that is what the beginners do. The mind can look far as well as very near; it sees much more than the eye when you are driving.”
The Collected Works of J. Krishnamurti: 1961: Volume 12: There is No Thinker, Only Thought, J Krishnamurti.
Krishnamurti’s admonition to open our eyes is supported by modern research in psychology and cognitive science. Our awareness is a construction of memory and emotion that shapes our thoughts and our perceptions. When we understand this process of mental construction we become able to truly see.
Peter Kingsley
Peter Kingsley teaches Activation, an awakening, by focusing attention on total inner quietude. When we quiet our inner and outer speech, we can center ourselves on the internal spark of the divine. We can awaken to this divinity through Kingsley’s process of Incubation, a deep-sensation quietude evoked by trance-meditation, a virtual death to the sense world.
Kingsley, a British philosopher and mystic, sees Western philosophy as built upon a profound error. This awareness emerged from his channeling of the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. For Kingsley, Empedocles is a transpersonal universal force and through his deep connection to Empedocles, Kingsley can see our human existence as a delusion. As Kingsley see it, we are not human we are divine.
“Our consciousness encompasses the whole of reality; our consciousness does not create reality, it is reality. Our thoughts are not our own, they are the experience of the reality.”
Finding Ones Path to Awakening
These classic masters of Awakening represent patterns of awaking that can be found in many contemporary spiritual teachings. This redundancy reflects the unitary nature of their fundamental teachings. Each teacher has a language and an eschatology reflecting their source of awakening. Each of us must seek out a teaching that suits our immediate capacity and needs. However, invariably the first step is the acknowledgement of alternative experiences of reality. Out of the acceptance of this possibility arises our opportunity to experience that altered view. It is this actual altered experience that is the awakening.
Awakening must be found but cannot be sought, as the ancient Zen Koan tells us. Finding without seeking requires a curiosity and openness to fuel our engagement. Since we must find awakening, there is a need to explore; but the desire of seeking will preclude the required curiosity. The experience is one of active wonder, rather than active pursuit. Carlos Castaneda’s shaman, don Juan, tells his protégé that he must listen for the quiet moments that exist in the continuous rushing water of a mountain stream. Although at first attempt you hear only continuous water running, your awareness remains fixed on that, which is not there. This openness to connect to “that, which is not there” is an awakening and as you continue the focus, the awakening expands.
Awaking proceeds through entering into a state of consciousness that is not grasping at your current reality. Detachment is essential, with an abandonment of the familiar and an embracing of the unknown. This process is not based in feeling and thinking, but is a momentary shift in awareness that reveals a never-before sense of unity and timelessness. This experience is not readily translated into our familiar conscious states.
Awakening is not limited to mystical teachings, and appears in most all religions. Many religions support awakening, but within the context of a more ethical, earthly or heavenly goal. In the sixteenth century, Saint Teresa of Avila wrote of her ecstatic spiritual joining with Christ. For Saint Teresa, the focus was not on this ecstasy as a new form of consciousness. It was merely an epiphenomenon to the depth of her dedication to Christ. Similarly, the teachings of Tibetan Buddhist mediation are aimed at something beyond the shifting states of consciousness, inherent in deep mediation. The shifting consciousness of Buddhist mediation is treated as another form of attachment, not the desired outcome of attaining toward Nirvana.
We must each find our own way. One of the many wonderful metaphors that Joseph Campbell shares concerns the Knights of the Round Table. Campbell describes how when each of the knights set out to search for the Holy Grail, only those who entered the forest in a place where there was no path, would eventually encounter manifestations of the transcendent. Likewise, as we each open up to the possibility of new conscious awareness, we must bring curiosity to our unique point of entry. The Grail, allegorically, is the destination described by the mystical teaching, but our journey into awakening must be uniquely our own.