The call to adventure represents a break from everyday life, a signal that bubbles up from the subconscious, catches your attention, and leads you in a new direction. The celebrated mythologist Joseph Campbell defined what is known as the hero’s journey, an evolutionary path of growth and transformation woven into all great myths and stories: “When we quit thinking about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”Īt the start of any hero’s journey is the primary pushing off point known as the call to adventure. Let’s explore each of these stages in greater detail. In this model, five different qualities of sight represent unique steps on the spiritual journey: One of the most useful metaphors for describing the stages of spiritual awakening is that of vision. And if this process is mapped into your consciousness and your body, then there must be clues or steps to indicate you are on the path to awakening. Like a spaceship achieving escape velocity, spiritual awakening punches you out of the limiting gravity well of ignorance and on toward the ultimate destination of cosmic self-realization.īut how does this happen? Well, if you accept that all human beings, and perhaps even all sentient beings, are hardwired for evolution, then it stands to reason that spiritual awakening is your birthright-something you are destined to achieve. The evolution of consciousness generates a forward pull, a momentum toward growth, transformation, and change that is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Fortunately, though, the process of spiritual awakening runs directly counter to the currents of avidya in your life. Tamas embodies darkness, dullness, inactivity, and entropy and binds you in the physical, mental, and emotional quicksand of inertia. At the heart of this ignorance is tamas, one of the three gunas, or primary qualities of the universe. This is a state of not knowing what you don’t know. Escaping IgnoranceĪ spiritual awakening represents the lifting of the veil of ignorance or avidya, which in Sanskrit means “incorrect understanding.” This ignorance shrouds your true nature and keeps you operating in the dark of lower levels of consciousness.
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And as if emerging from a deep sleep, you can see the dream for what it is-an illusion to which there can be no going back. As the term implies, you “wake up” from the dream of everyday, mundane material-level, ego-based awareness to a higher reality of spirit. A spiritual awakening has the potential to rip apart the fabric of reality as you’ve known it and pull you forward into a new life of conscious growth and evolution. Identifying with and directly experiencing your divinity represents a paradigm shift of the highest order. In the course of a human life, few experiences can be as profound and transformative as those of a spiritual awakening. By Adam Brady: While a spiritual awakening is often considered a journey, it’s not necessarily a journey of physical travel or pilgrimage it’s a process of going beyond your boundaries and taking the next evolutionary step…