Spiritual Awakening

The mingling of our innate humanity with the spirit deep down within  

A Spiritual Awakening can be like a rude awakening, sudden, dramatic, unexpected, and life changing. I know folks, especially amongst the sober-booze community, who have experienced these remarkable turnarounds. More often, though, a spiritual wakening is a slow transformation that happens over time, usually an entire lifetime.

We are not talking here about some rarified higher realm of esoteric knowledge and experience. Spiritual awakenings are entirely accessible to everyone. At their core, they simply represent a root-and-branch inner change, especially of the heart. Or to put it another way, a spiritual awakening is becoming more aware of who we are, and why on earth we are here? In this sense, spiritual awaking involves change, awareness, and purpose.

At their core, they simply represent a root-and-branch inner change, especially of the heart. Or to put it another way, a spiritual awakening is becoming more aware of who we are, and why on earth we are here? In this sense, spiritual awaking involves change, awareness, and purpose.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl believed that the purpose of life is to find meaning in it. And the meaning of life is to discover deep within ourselves what our true purpose in life is.

No two spiritual awakenings will be the same. Each one will be unique because it pertains to the special mission, the deep inner calling within each one of us. It is impossible to codify this into a one size fits all. Your awakened vision of your mission in life is the only one that counts. It may have similarities to others, but it is intentionally yours alone to pursue. To become awake to this is to become fully alive.

Frankl writes:

Everyone has their own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. They cannot be replaced, nor can their life be repeated; thus, everyone’s task is unique, as is their specific opportunity to implement it.

Frankl’s insights are not the detached, mind-bending musings of an uninfected philosopher. They are born of the suffering he encountered in the Nazi death camps. His conclusions, are, that those who were aware of the deep and unique calling (spiritual awakening) within themselves were much better able to cope with the daily unspeakable suffering inflicted on them:

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst of conditions, than the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. —Viktor Frankl

I write a lot about the heart, because for me this is the holy grail, the center of gravity in my spiritual life. When change occurs in the heart, our entire outlook on existence gets transformed. The bigger the inward change, the more magnificent the outer world appears.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Spiritual awakening necessarily involves the spirit. But it is not otherworldly. It is the mingling of our deepest humanity with the spirit deep down within. This is the space where we find true purpose and meaning, the place where no worldly vastitudes can easily bend us from our unique cause and calling.

It took me many falls to arrive there, and there have been a multitude of wrong turns along the way. But a spiritual awakening requires all of this and more, to ultimately become clear as day, transformative, and unshakable.

The greatest journey known to humanity is into depths of our-own very being, comrades. What we discover is available to all, a spiritual awakening that manifests as an empathetic heart in harmony with the world, soul centeredness, and radically inclusive other-centered love.

Keep it real, do the deal, dive deep and don’t go to sleep. When the heart gets changed, everything changes.  

– Cormac Stagg, author of The Quest for a Humble Heart