Many of us are impatient. We look for quick solutions. Quick results.
In the “spiritual marketplace” there are numerous offers of quick Awakening. Often the promise comes as some new course or seminar; or a revolutionary process or method, that virtually assures you will Awaken.
Don’t believe them. Our conditioning, our underlying drivers, and our closely held beliefs that hold us back from Awakening are very resilient. They don’t give way so quickly and radically. At least not usually.
The process of spiritual unfoldment is not a quick process — certainly not if we’re looking to truly Awaken or to achieve Enlightenment.
Spiritual unfoldment is a process of surrender. Surrender to the Divine Presence that is everywhere, distributed throughout and permeating world appearance. Surrender to what we ultimately find is the Divine itself.
Surrender is not a process of doing. It is not an action. It is a non-action. It is a letting go of acting, of letting the real actor act, and letting our mind and intellect step out of the way. We don’t suppress the mind and intellect, or make ourselves vulnerable to some kind of manipulation. We just let our mind and intellect be as they are, but we relinquish our focus on them, so we may be receptive to Divine Presence, to Being and Consciousness, outside the ordinary scope and range of our mind and intellect.
And in surrender, we prepare for Awakening — that moment of Divine Grace that lifts who we truly are out of the mire of identification with that which obscures the reality of our true Divine nature.
The truth is, that we, these individual persons with a body and a mind that we think we are, do not awaken. We as persons do not become enlightened. And we, as persons, cannot cause our own Awakening.
So when we fall for the promise of quick Awakening, this appeals to us, appeals to our ego, our need for power and control, and our desire to rise out of suffering.
But quick Awakening is a hollow promise. Unless we are already ripe for Divine Grace to greet us, Awakening or Enlightenment will have to wait for another day, when our surrender and preparation has made us ripe.
Oh, there’s a lot we can do in the meantime prior to Awakening to improve our lives, to become less reactive, more mindful, more conscious. In my opinion, foremost is appropriate and effortless spiritual practice. Spiritual practice reinforces our capacity to take steps towards Awakening, by beginning to step out of chronic immersion in our thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and giving us practice in surrender. Then we may begin to glimpse inner spaciousness, peace, love, joy, and light. It is often such moments, once tasted, that make us search for more. To seek the deeper reality of awakening to our true nature.
And while we may find this seeking can be frustrating with ups and downs, and long-lasting plateaus that seem to go on and on, the fact remains, that if we try too much, we’re not surrendering. And surrender is essential. For it is our limited sense of self, our limited identity as just a person with a body-mind, that must be surrendered, because when we do Awaken, we discover who we always were, and it’s not that limited person we thought we were. We are much greater than that.
And we find eventually, that it wasn’t us in the first place who was doing the seeking. It was the Divine itself in the appearance of us.
– Joel
The above is an edited transcript of the video:“The Promise of Quick Awakening”
which you can find HERE.