What do you do after experiencing a spiritual/nondual awakening?

I'm going to share this analogy with you in the hopes to explain what needs to be done after experiencing a spiritual/nondual awakening. So, for a second, imagine you are in this dark room. You've spent all your life in this dark room and it's all you ever know. There's no doors, no windows, nothing. It's just pitch black darkness. So what you do, after some time being there, you start to question why you are hit. What is this all about? You try to really get to the source, turn yourself around and ask, who is witnessing? Who is observing? Who am I? You may actually just walk around, wander in the room, fall over an obstacle, smash your head, and then all of a sudden, you wake up.

The Awakening:

Now, the awakening that takes place in this case is a light. A light is suddenly switched on in the room. You realise that as you tripped over, you smashed your head, and your hand landed on the lightswitch on the wall. It switched the light on and now the room is filled with light.

You are now able to see what's going on and what you see is a huge mess. Since the light has been switched on, you also feel a tremendous relief, a sense of liberation, something that you've always wanted. Because all of a sudden there's clarity and you are able to see. You may not necessarily like what you see, but the clarity or the peace that you now feel far outweighs whether you like or dislike what you are seeing in the room. After some time, you may get distracted again with what you are now seeing in this room: a whole load of rubbish, a mess, obstacles, loads of suffering, trauma, and memories.

When these get the best of you, you may decide to switch the light off. So now you are back in this darkness, but you also deep down know that the mess is still there and it needs to be dealt with. But you just don't feel ready because you don't want to revisit all the bags of rubbish. The bin bags filled with the trauma that you've just accumulated over time, thrown in the corner and you just don't want to deal with it anymore.

So after some time, you actually decide this is not it. I need to deal with this stuff. You switch the light back on and you slowly start with picking up the bag that is nearest to you. This bag is full of past memories, full of trauma. For example, a heartbreak. It's full of addictions, maybe something that is really acting as an obstacle in allowing you to maneuver around this room, or life, for instance. So you say, “That's it! I need to pick this bag up and I have to clean it out. I need to put it in a bin.”

There's a hatch in the wall. You can put the bag in the bin. However, the problem is, when you pick up that bag, the bag may rip and may leak. All of a sudden you are re-experiencing everything that's been accumulated in this bag: the trauma, the memory. When the bag leaks, you feel as though it's happening all over again and you hate it because you don't want to revisit it.

However, you decide to persevere. You decide to pick up this bag. It may leak. It may rip. You throw it down the hatch. You experience the fullness of what is in this bag and realise that you are okay with it. There's a sense of mercy that the light shining in the room is bringing to you; a sense of peace and you abide in that peace. You choose to abide in that peace, regardless of the trauma that you are feeling.

So you also bring a brush, you pick up what's falling on the floor and you deal with that as well. There's no more remnants of that memory, this traumatising memory. Once it's dealt with, when you do think back about it again, you realise it's okay. It's absolutely fine. You do the same with the rest of the things or the rubbish. Then you decide to carry on.

There's also a carpet. You've put a lot of stuff underneath the carpet, which you keep tripping over every now and then. After some time the room is clean, it's pristine, and you can just walk around and eventually can jump around, skip around in this room. There's a sense of liberation that is unfelt.

Sometimes, though, over time, some rubbish may accumulate again, but this time it goes straight into the hatch. It's dealt with immediately. So in this way, the room is maintained. You don't necessarily have to go through a huge deep clean again, because you are maintaining the cleanliness in this room.

The Analogy:

So this analogy is an analogy I came up with to show and point towards what needs to be done after a spiritual/nondual awakening. In essence, you have this glimpse of liberation. You now see, you've realised the true self, and you've seen through the illusion of the separate self. But you can very easily fall back into the illusion because you have not reconciled with the remnants that are in the body or in the mind. These can come in so many different forms.

They can come in the form of memories, previous trauma, so strong, so binding to a strong emotion, and in addition linked to a very powerful belief system. So there's this feedback loop. This trauma that you have felt in the past has somehow shaped your character in a way. You are now protecting this character from reconciling with this trauma because this trauma is now giving you a sense of identity somehow. However, it also doesn't take long to realise that this sense of identity is not serving you either. But with this light, with this flash of light that fills all these dark crevices within yourself, all these dark parts of yourself, you are able to see.

This past painful moment that just keeps coming back to me. This is something that needs to be dealt with. The way you deal with it is you embrace it. A previous heartbreak, a lost one, a childhood trauma. You name it, you embrace it, whatever it may be. Whatever it may be, you can always come up with a good justification as to why you should not revisit it and why you should not embrace it and why you should not forgive. Why there shouldn't be mercy, but forgiveness and mercy and embracing this is all for you to liberate yourself from the previous trauma. So you revisit it and you embrace it with arms wide open, as though you were embracing a very happy moment in your life. Eventually you experience the depth. You put yourself in a position and you are like, “Okay! I am going to experience the depth of this pain that I am feeling right now. I'm going to dive straight in. I want to get to the bottom of this and feel it.” Eventually, naturally, it just dissolves.

What keeps these moments or these traumatic memories intact is the resistance to dealing with them, to observing them. So once you've decided to fully embrace this, there is no more resistance. It loses its power and eventually it just dissolves. You are not resisting happiness and joy in your life that's why eventually it subsides. In this way we’ve got to look at other situations.

I've spoken about traumatic memories in the past. There are also certain anxieties projections that we create in the mind in terms of what may happen in the future. These can then hold themselves in a belief system and it's something that we really don't want to look forward to. However, it may still inevitably happen. We may have the strong conviction that this particular thing will inevitably happen in the future and we're trying to avoid that and numb ourselves from it. However, all we're doing in avoiding a created projection or an imagination of what may happen in the future, is we are sacrificing what's happening now. You are sacrificing being here now.

So if we get to the bottom of the scenarios that we have projected the same way we're getting to the bottom of the previous traumatic memories we've had. Eventually this too will subside and they lose leverage. They dissolve.

Then you have other things that just keep you bound such as addictions and addiction could be your typical addiction like overeating, smoking, whatever it may be. Or it could be something that isn’t typically labeled as an addiction. It could be something as simple as scratching a particular part of your arm or biting your nails. However, with that light shining in the room you are able to notice that you always refer back to this particular itch or this particular micro habit that you do. Simply because you're feeling in a particular way there’s some form of anxiety, there’s some form of development of stress. Something is taking place and so you observe this and eventually that too reconciles.

The Takeaway:

So what you want to do is to use that light, use the bright light of awareness that you now recognize. It seeps through your entire existence and seeps through the entirety of your being. Look at places that can be cleaned up. It’s so joyful when you are in a place where you can just skip around in happiness and joy. Eventually you find yourself in a place where you look forward to recognising something that can be reconciled. You look forward to recognizing “hey this is a trapped in motion or trapped addiction” or whatever it maybe that I can deal with right now because you know you're creating space. You sit down and it creates space. Eventually there’s just not much anymore.

It comes to a point where maybe once a week you might find something that triggers you or annoys you. Some sort of psychological habit, some sort of typical reaction that you take when someone says something whatever it may be. You might have these once a week and then eventually once every two weeks and then once a month and then eventually there just aren’t anymore. There was just light, just pure liberation and it’s felt deep in the body. The body feels at rest. There is literally no physical tension in the body that you’re feeling anymore.

I have fallen victim to this when I experienced in the past a glimpse of spiritual awakening. What then happens is like, “Wow! I see now. I understand now.” But then you fall back into the habits of the old ways of living and then you find yourself in a loop of suffering. The suffering may have less weight than before. The suffering may be short lived but there is still a lot of suffering taking place. You find yourself entangled in the narrative in the story but when you rest in the light of being, when you reconcile with all of these obstacles in the dirt that may dim the light of being. Well, the light can never be dimmed but it may be covered.

What you'd like to do is just reconcile with all of these obstacles. Face it head on! Embrace it fully like you'd embrace a small child who’s just tripped over, scratched their knee that's bleeding now and you tell them it's ok. That is the way you want to embrace every single one of these traumatic experiences you may have had in the past; the addictions, the projections, all of it. Liberate yourself. We're all on a journey towards the truth.

Thank you for reading, click here to watch the video version of this blog.