To print this page, select "Print"
from the File menu of your browser.
The Mystic's Life Lesson #1
Mystical Awakening
Mystical awakening is individual. Your particular sequence will be the very best one for you. It is arranged through the instrumentality of higher consciousness itself. You must give yourself a chance and not interfere with your awakening. Using guidelines from this website and Mysteries.Net may be helpful, but to use these principles in order to set your will on how your awakening is supposed to occur will greatly inhibit you.
However, while awakening comes to each person differently, some stages of realization are nearly universal. These stages and signs recur again and again in the lives of awakening aspirants. When you experience any of these stages you are greatly fortunate. Your understanding of these signs will prove extremely beneficial, providing you encouragement and validation of your personal awakening.
Many seekers have experiences they don’t understand and they live far away from qualified teachers. Often, these sincere seekers are having genuine enlightening experiences but since they cannot comprehend or evaluate what is happening to them, they do not recognize or build upon their tremendous blessings. To uninformed seekers, one experience may seemsas important or unimportant as another.
Many times, spiritual awakening is confused with psychic states or a flood of vivid impressions projected from the subconscious mind. It’s a "precious and rare thing," unless you have an enlightened teacher, to know where you are coming from and where you are going as awakening begins. Awakening events can occur to you for years but you probably will not give them the attention they deserve unless you have a basic familiarity with the road ahead.
You may lament you are not becoming enlightened while indications of your awakening are all around you. It’s essential, if you wish to make gratifying, lasting progress, that you understand the dawnings of higher consciousness and what they signify to your life-enrichment.
As you proceed, be alert.
Reverence for Life
The first sign of awakening is usually a growing reverence for life. You find you are immensely appreciative of being alive. Life itself is revealed as a wonder or a miracle. In your reverence for life you delightedly value the lives of others and of yourself. You perceive life as extremely precious, such an extraordinary phenomenon. You find it easy to conceive in your musings that incredibly great consciousness and energy is at work wherever there is life. With awe and enthusiasm you often turn your mind to consider how great must be that higher consciousness which gives life and sustains it! In life itself there is enough to wonder at forever. In your unique heart you see enough to explore and develop for much more than a lifetime. What is life? Who can say? But you, the awakening aspirant, wholeheartedly treasure being alive and love to watch that life force animating each person; indeed, you admire all living creatures.
You become aware that you may have many negative qualities but, nevertheless, you have an extremely positive and undeniable plus — you have life. You are an expression of that higher consciousness which maintains and sustains life. Life is a marvel. You see it. You know it. You abide in wonder.
You find, with these realizations, that you begin to value other people a great deal. Whether they value themselves and have noticed the miracle of life or not, you perceive uniqueness and significance in each one. You have become enabled, as your eyes of higher consciousness open, to see life well. You can easily understand why Albert Schweitzer said that it’s fine to cut the grass in order to grow a garden, but on the way home from the garden do not drag your scythe and needlessly kill one blade of grass. This now makes great sense to you.
You also clearly understand "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." You know all people are, in reality, sharing life together. You deeply yearn that everyone will see the preciousness of life and not hurt, deny, or strive to destroy the life in another.
Your awakening to life’s richness also prompts a profound consideration of your own conduct. Your interactions with others more deeply reflect your respect for their concerns and feelings. You actively strive not to harm people or cause them any suffering. You practice, "Do unto others ...." You seek to be constructive and helpful to your fellow human beings.
Cause and Effect Insight
Being appreciative of life you understand it more clearly. Your reverence for life gives you deeper levels of wisdom and more opportunities for fulfillment.
Another excellent sign of your awakening is your heightened awareness of cause and effect. You see that the events of your life are the results of causes. You recognize that what happens to you each day is not based on random, irrational fates. Rather, your thoughts, attitudes, words, and actions most significantly cause and influence your personal experiences of life. While some events in your life remain perplexing and inexplicable, more often than not you can understand why other people and life in general treat you the way they do. You gain the insight which enables you to examine your good experiences and create (cause) more of them.
Further, you stop ignoring your bad experiences if you are truly awakening. Whenever something painful or otherwise negative happens to you, you seek an insight about what caused such an unpleasant effect. Then, in your thoughts, feelings, words, and actions, you strive to cause a preferred effect, a more satisfying and ideal result.
You notice the good you do for people, or for the world in general, comes back to you in kind — not necessarily directly from the people you helped but by some perceptible means your "good returns good" to you.
You see harm, or evil — either in thought, feeling, word, or action — often comes back to its originator.
Each day you appreciatively watch cause and effect relationships going back and forth, on and on, in simple or complex combinations. No longer does life seem to have no rhyme and reason, or seem absurd as many existentialists regularly exclaim.
More Meaning In Life
In your reverence for life you find that life itself is like a two-edged sword. If you use your life in a negative way you can hurt someone; but, inevitably you too will find yourself cut — perhaps not by the person you hurt but by some other precise means. The cuts come back, each and every one, in detail. Evil returns suffering; good returns good.
You also discover that your increased awareness and reverence for life make profound changes in the way causes and effects act in your life. You become progressively free from negative experiences and revel in new causes.
Often formalized thought makes cause and effect a bizarre philosophy of punishment for being alive and a rationalization for every unfavorable occurrence. However, you will see cause and effect, in your awakening, as a creative process — beautiful, exciting, just, and very helpful. Becoming more responsible for the condition of your life and attitudes, you take part in a regenerative process. You realize that a new life, one ever more to your liking, awaits you.
In essence, as your awakening begins you will very likely perceive more meaning and purpose in your life. You will become more fulfilled and able to accomplish your goals as you see a relationship between cause and effect, between your ideas (and feelings) and events in the outer world. You now know that your good returns good, that being evil is cosmically stupid.
But you have even more to experience. The days and years of awakening and enlightenment rush toward you. The five stages of mental/emotional quickening in higher consciousness beckon you to new discoveries. Dawn has come! Let’s begin!
REFLECTION
