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My spiritual awakening was quite profound. By this I mean it was certainly attention-getting and marked a significant inflection point in my life.
When it occurred I was in my early forties, hovering at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, suffering and in despair because of my dissatisfaction with life and with who I was.
I now have a greater understanding of consciousness (although it is certainly a complex subject) and see as its essence that which acts as some kind of operating system to allow us to understand the self, our environment (life or the universe), and to grant us an interface for interaction between the two.
But the flow of my greater consciousness had been stopped-up fully and was, in a figurative sense, backing up sewage into my life.
I hated who I was. I felt incompetent and I really was incompetent, unable to influence any sort of positive direction in my life. The world was only influencing me and I had no functional ability to influence it back. I was overwhelmed.
On the day of my awakening, I experienced what was apparently the straw on top of the camel’s back. My wife and I went to a friend’s house after work because she wanted him to look at a car she was considering buying. This was already a stressful moment for me because I did not want to purchase another vehicle. But I also felt subjected to a great deal of shame because I am not a car guy and my own wife had to defer to a “real” (my emphasis, not hers) man to give her mechanical advice.
After a very quick look at the vehicle, Jeff very convincingly told us to not purchase it. He suggested instead another vehicle he knew of which was for sale. But, at this time we did not have enough money saved to purchase a vehicle outright, only having the ability to make payments as the owner of this vehicle we were looking at had offered. This was a secondarily shaming moment because our friend was an entrepreneur and had no such difficulties. I felt truly incapable.
Jeff then gave us a tour of his business, a coffee roasting facility (this is where we met him that evening). He was excited regarding all the events going on and his future opportunities including some very healthy financial projections. To make the situation more unbearable for me, it must be realized that our friend had been released from a nearly three-decade prison sentence only a year or so before. Although happy for his turnaround and success, I also felt even more ashamed that he was becoming a more successful person than I in one year than all of my own previous 30 years combined.
From here, I recall that we stepped outside for some reason and that is when it happened: I had immediate clarity first of all, that I was not my job and that all I thought that represented of me and, second, that I was not my life that I had been living so unfruitfully and without joy. My perception shifted and I experienced a new understanding that I was not all that I always thought I was. At this moment I was exposed to my true identity as a spiritual being.
At the same time, I realized that I was to become a writer and to help humanity by that gift. In other words, I received a calling.
It took me several months of research to begin to understand what had happened and many more after that to get a comprehensive enough picture in order to begin to help people in any meaningful way. Understanding my awakening was so elusive primarily because I was not searching for it; it arrived on its own, spontaneously.
I had been an evangelical Christian since my early teens and as one might guess, people like myself do not go searching for alternative viewpoints inconsistent with the biblical ones for our answers.
I have come to learn that, although freeing, awakenings can initiate their own form of turmoil for many people who experience them. People’s understanding or worldviews become flipped upside down and many can feel as though they are having some kind of psychotic episode, even being prescribed drugs by their doctors or therapists to try to normalize their newly expanded consciousness.
I understand this turbulence firsthand and so it has become the highest priority for me to allow others some measure of direction as they themselves awaken or for those around them to understand how to respond compassionately. This is so very important because I do believe that the occurrences of awakening episodes have become more common and may very likely increase rapidly in the very near future.
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Aaron Force is a blogger from Seattle, Washington. He writes to educate others about the nature of an expanded consciousness to evolve humanity. Aaron unexpectedly experienced his own profound awakening and ego transcendence in 2015 and soon understood that the qualities of his own experience (a greater expansion and evolution in his life) could be applied to mankind collectively.
