It was the summer break between my bachelor's and master’s degree programs, and I was relaxing at my mother’s house, enjoying the time off from doing anything. I was watching tv (I’m noticing a pattern emerge), and suddenly the power went out. It was late afternoon/early evening, and I found myself with nothing to do because everything that I could think of for entertainment required electricity.
At this point in my life I had had a few experiences that could be counted as “spiritual” but, again, at the time I had no true understanding of their significance. I had, however, been in the right places at the right times, and had been exposed to the tools that would lead to my deeper understanding. The main such tool, which I learned as part of the Psychology of Stress course I took during my undergrad studies at Cal Poly, was meditation.
So here I was, sitting alone in the house, the light from the sun waning as the day began to welcome the night, when I heard, “meditate,” come from somewhere inside myself. And as if I had just gotten a suggestion from my oldest and dearest friend, I pulled my legs up under me on the couch, and sitting in a cross-legged position, I closed my eyes and had my Conscious Awakening.
The Breakthrough
At this point in your life, you have spent some undefined amount of time in the unknown awakening phase. We are all on a unique path, so this amount of time will be different for everyone, and no amount of time is any better than any other amount of time. It is what it is, and you are the beautifully unique soul that you are. But regardless of the length of time, your higher self has had enough, has put enough pieces in place, and finally shouts loud enough to break through and have your conscious operating mind acknowledge it. All the hints, clues, spiritual discussions, philosophical insights combined with your life experiences finally produce that first conscious spark of enlightenment.
This is where life gets truly beautiful. The true magnificence is the fact that the number of unique experience of first enlightenment is just as great as the number of beings that there are to have them. You will never be able to find anyone that will have a first moment exactly like your first moment, because it will be completely unique to you and your perception of reality at the moment that it occurs. I think that this is a block for many, because we read about the experiences of others, and then wait and expect to have a similar experience. Instead we must realize that what others experienced was their own picture of enlightenment, tailor-fit for them, and yours will look much different. This is why I stopped short of telling you my full first experience, that’s a description for a different book. This manual is about you.
However it happens - whether sitting in silence during a blackout, basking in the sun atop a mountain, in the middle of a long jog embarked upon supposedly merely to unwind and exercise, or simply looking at yourself in the mirror - the first conscious reflection happens, and you are forever changed. Now, from some unknown place inside of you, there is an unanswered question, a twinge that always leaves you feeling-knowing-that there is something more, something deeper that you are not seeing.
Oases of Consciousness
This is where the waters of enlightenment start to get murky. Something happened within you, something changed, but much of the landscape seems the same. That profound meditation I experienced during the summer blackout prompted me to conduct some serious research once the power came back on. I dove into all the information I could find about meditation, psychic experiences, and all things paranormal, and combed through the modern spiritual teachers of the time, including Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, and Deepak Chopra. And while doing that, I also mainly just got back to life and trying to get through it.
The eventual question that arose was, “What exactly is enlightenment?” I feel like I had an enlightening experience, but that moment passed and seemingly normal life returned. In my own personal journey, the decade that followed that was full of highs and lows, moments to be proud of and instances of intense shame.
To help form a better working theory, let's refer to these various moments in life, your memories, as dots. My unknown awakening is one dot, my conscious awakening is another. This isn’t just limited to these moments of spiritual significance though. My birth, graduating high school, joining a fraternity in college as well as a relationship that ended with some emotional scars. All these memories, these moments in time are dots. Now you could quickly say like dots connecting your life line, but we must look much deeper to see the magic of life.
So it happened, I had that breakthrough meditation, and I dove into research. I had experiences, journaled about them, and as time went on, my focus became more spread out as life does what life does. Amidst all that life however, moments of focus did return. Even if it was a brief 10-minute meditation or a particularly reflective Aikido practice that focused on the concept of working with chi, moments of your deeper connection, deeper presences are scattered throughout your lived experiences. These moments are your oases of consciousness.
The Human Mind
Our brains are measurement devices. From the moment we are born, we become this catalog of things, ideas, and definitions. This object is that color, that person is this sex, and Adam named all the creatures of the earth. But how do you define the undefinable? These moments of consciousness and breakthroughs to higher realms of thinking make absolutely no sense to the human mind, so it is quick to try and dismiss and forget them. That is the true struggle of awakening. Realizing that the human body and the human mind are not you, but rather the tool through which your consciousness experiences this reality.
From a young age, when I thought about topics like witches, wizards, wands, and rituals I found myself looking for the similarities. Likewise, if you view religion with the same lens, you have things like prayer, communion, fasting, and all sorts of rituals. In all these things, there was intent and intender. Now apply the same concept to the human body and consciousness.
Due to their more recent popularity from the Harry Potter series, let’s borrow the terms ‘wands’ and ‘wizards’. Think of the human body and the human mind as the wand, and your higher self or consciousness as the wizard. The reason different schools of thought use things like rituals, magical objects and focused intent toward a specific deity or higher being is because the mind needs a work around so it doesn’t get involved. The ritual gives the mind something to do, a task to focus on, which is what the mind does. This allows its focus to be taken up, which allows a higher part of you to ‘step forward’ and assume more control.
Do it Consciously-Until You Do it Unconsciously
The title of this section is something I tell my students when teaching them how to learn a new behavior. As it came to me as the title of this section, the depth of the statement struck a new chord deep within me. Every act of consciousness-from five seconds of meditation; to one good, long, focused “om” chant; or the contemplation of forgiveness-is an action you take to consciously move your mind aside and allow your higher self to move forward. And just like a snowball rolling down a hillside, before long what might have started as a five-second pebble can become a life-sized boulder.
Each time you venture into non-thought, the unknown, the place where the human mind does not go, it strengthens your connection to that place. (There’s that sneaky, lazy enlightenment again!) Throughout history teachers have implored their students to sit and meditate-just sit and meditate. Look at your breath, look at water, look at nothing. Just sit still and keep looking. The brain, the human mind, will find all sorts of things. Sounds, smells, sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, worries, fears, until you find yourself exasperated: “Wait! I'm supposed to be watching my breath!”
Eventually it gets better. Either that, or your mind just runs out of things to define and look at, so it gives up. It ‘taps out’ if you will. It’s not that there is nothing there to see, it’s just that the brain doesn’t know where to look. It only knows to see what is defined and tagged in it’s database, and if enough information does not exist, it deletes it from the recognition registry. But that part of you that was finally able to breakthrough and make itself known sees and records everything as well, the only difference is that it can also understand and interpret. You just have to learn that that is the real you.
Progress Not Perfection
Duality is just that: dual. Positive and negative; up and down; in and out; male and female; good and bad. And, to some extent, so, too, is life and spiritual development. At the time of your conscious awakening you may ride a spiritual high that lasts anywhere from a few hours, to a few days, to even years. But we do live in a duality; you will also fall back into your old patterns and be challenged to integrate these new thoughts into your being. How else would you really come to understand these truths? “It’s easy to be enlightened in a cave,” is the quote that comes to mind.
I remember reading books like The Way of the Peaceful Warrior and The Celestine Prophecy, longing for my own fantastical spiritual tale of awakening. Be careful what you wish for, right? And while it may not be the movie-like story of some ‘out there’, as I sit here writing this book trying to explain some of what I have learned, I can say that it has indeed been an interesting journey, one full of adventures in duality. And that really is the point to all of this: life and experiences. To have them, be aware of that experience, and to some extent, grow from that experience. Progress, not perfection. A big pitfall to spiritual growth is harsh self judgement for what one has done or where one thinks that they should be. The fact of the matter is that it is always right now, will always be right now, and you will always be where you are in that now moment that it happens to be. Acceptance of that truth is part of the enlightenment process.
One way to relate it to a simple spiritual teaching is this: even if you were to only spend one second more today in a conscious, aware state than you did at any previous point in your life, it would be progress-and actually a monumental step. That extra second would build into two seconds, then four seconds, and so forth, until one day you spend a whole minute in non-thought, completely forgetting about the now moment when even ten seconds seemed like an insurmountable task. The Enlightenment of Duality is being fully aware of your past and future, while fully living your present, now moment.
Exercises for Chapter 2
Going back to the timeline you began in chapter 1, add in the moment in your life when you feel you had your first conscious awakening. The first time that you feel you truly connected with a deeper part of yourself, consciously, and from that moment on you knew you were on a quest for enlightenment, so to speak. Again, even if that moment is this moment, or occurred the split second after your unconscious awakening that you decided upon in Chapter 1, bring it into physical form so that you can see it, as well as your consciousness progression, all while also being able to see such life landmarks such as birth and various ages. Again, I stress the importance of doing this in some physical form, as to bring it out of your non-physical mind and give you a chance to see it from a different perspective.
See if you can recall the things that you ‘wished’ for around this time, or the things that you wanted to do or be in life. What were your passions? What was life all about? What do you think brought you to the specific place in life in which you were able to receive that message from your highest self, announcing the beginning to your consciousness journey?