Awakening as Initiation
Continuing a series of essays on the primary role of experience in our awakening and our inner transformation. Via Mystica, Part II
My understanding is that the whole point and purpose of human life is inner transformation both individually and collectively. This has always been the case even though our culture has lost sight of it and our religions no longer support it at the deep experiential level that is necessary. It remains nonetheless, the foundational truth of human life and our work in these times of global breakdown is to recover or remember the inner dynamics of awakening and pass it on to others where we can.
When I was a young child I already felt very disconnected from this life. I felt that I didn’t belong here on earth. I felt lost, alone, and even lonely, despite being part of a large family. As a child, I longed to get to wherever it was that I did properly belong but I had no language or understanding to know where that might be. I intuited that the hoped-for place of belonging lay somewhere far away from planet earth but beyond that, I couldn’t figure it out. Looking back from the vantage point of engaging with spiritual awakening and inner transformation I now realise these feelings were early expressions of the natural human impulse to awaken and transcend our human finitude.
I know that many people feel lost at a primordial level, at a depth that simply cannot be satisfied by human relationships or connection to the natural world. It’s at a depth that can only be satisfied by a relationship with the Sacred and with what lies beyond this earthly realm. Such feelings may start early or begin at midlife and for the most part they make us feel strange and alien, that there must be something wrong with us that we’re not able to fit in with ease. Yet what no one ever told us is that these are perfectly normal and natural feelings that signal the initiation of our inner journey to awaken. They are the early signs of the inner impulse to awaken, and in essence, they are themselves initiatory of our awakening.
Awakening is always an experiential event, not a theoretical one. It is initiated by our personal experiences of the Sacred. The early glimmers of it trying to begin are expressed in precisely these feelings of being lost, of not belonging, feeling detached from the life going on around you; in a growing desire for authenticity in your life; an increasingly insatiable desire for ‘something more’ without knowing what that is. It’s a sense of frustration with life, and dissatisfaction, even though your life might look like a success to other people. It’s a new desire to walk a truer path in life, and a growing sense of frustration that life no longer satisfies but we don’t know what will satisfy us. Most of us don’t know that these feelings in fact constitute the initiatory energies of awakening. In our ignorance we might ignore them, brush over them, or feel confused and lost, and maybe even despairing in our inability to understand what they mean.
What’s counterintuitive here, is that these feelings, whilst deeply personal and intimate, are not our own. They come from beyond us, so that, whilst inner transformation, rebirth in spirit, or awakening to our True Self happens in the depths of our interiority, it is set in motion from beyond us. God makes the first move – sets something in motion is us to which we are invited to respond, and if it is to succeed it requires our conscious engagement and co-creation. These initiatory experiences that set our awakening in train aren’t activated by us in any voluntary way. They simply arise, unexpectedly. They are involuntary, natural spiritual events, much like the involuntary nature of the breath or of our heart beat, but operating at the level of consciousness. They occur independently of our will. We don’t choose to them, and nor can we prevent them from arising, or make them go away when they do. In essence, these feelings initiate our awakening, they signal the potential for our awakening has begun.
Awakening then, is a living process, guided from beyond us but requiring our cooperation. It begins, as any living thing begins, small, quiet, hardly noticeable at first, but the more it is nurtured, the stronger it grows. Awakening is a lifelong process that never reaches completion. We live into our awakening for our whole life. But what we do need to know is that these initiatory feelings are valid, natural, normal and necessary. We need to affirm them for each other and help restore the context for understanding them. The emerging of our inner divinity is a co-creative process that continues in relationship with the Divine. Ideally it would be supported by someone who has walked the path before us but if not, the Divine itself will guide us. Awakening begins and continues through the sacred energies of our spiritual experiences in co-creative relationship with the Sacred. And, whilst doctrine and theory ought to support it, they will never deliver it on their own.
Experience, as I’ve said many times, is the active ingredient of awakening. It begins with these quiet whispers in the soul but somewhere along the way the living experiential nature of our awakening was replaced with the idea that if we follow the rules, obey the laws that we’ll be right with God. How many times did priests of my own church, and spiritual directors I paid for help, tell me to ignore what was happening in my inner life. No one said ‘this is all a natural part of the process of awakening’, no one affirmed or validated what I was experiencing. In fact, they told me to ignore it all and left me to figure it out for myself.
I know first-hand, that it’s up to ordinary people like us to recover a natural confidence and sovereignty in our awakening and to pass on whatever wisdom we learn along the way. The motto of the Enlightenment was, ‘Audere Sapere’ ‘Dare to know.’ It was coined by Immanuel Kant, the so-called father of the Enlightenment. I think we need a healthy counterbalance to the lack of support from the institutional churches and the narrow one-sidedness of the rational attitude, and so I suggest that we might begin to, ‘Audere Experiri.’ Dare to experience.’
Image, The guiding light, Andrea Fossati