What is Spiritual Awakening?
The word spiritual comes from the Latin, “spiritus.” It refers to the essence (spirit) eternally present at the core of all manifestation—including every human being—past, present and future. Throughout human history many people have spoken of this essence as God. Spiritual awakening is the transformative process of coordinating the limited and often faulty perspectives of the Ego, Senses and Unconscious mind with the unerring Super Conscious Wisdom, always available to us through the vehicle of Conscience. Ultimately, this process leads to the experience of a higher state of knowing, an awareness that our essential nature is Consciousness, the same Divine Consciousness that manifests every form, animate and inanimate—now and always—here, there and everywhere.
The founders of The American Meditation Institute (AMI), Leonard and Jenness Perlmutter, are living links in the world’s oldest health and wisdom spiritual tradition, known as the Bharati lineage—meaning “lovers of knowledge and wisdom.” The Bharati tradition has been kept alive for more than 6,000 years by countless women and men devoted to their spiritual awakening and experience of enlightenment. The teachings at AMI today are the same that have inspired the founding of every religion, and which developed into the world’s oldest Holistic Mind/Body/Spirit Medicine.
With your purified Conscience as your guide, you too can act, not as a limited and habituated individual, but as a joyful, vital instrument of the Supreme Intelligence at the core of your being. With dedication and a deep, driving spiritual desire, you can come to understand your own unique purpose in life, and begin living each day with greater clarity and confidence to fulfill that purpose. This transformational process is not fiction. It is a practical, scientific, reproducible methodology for attaining the summum bonum—the highest and ultimate good of life.
But do not accept on blind faith any advice you read or hear. Instead, learn to become a Yoga Scientist, and be motivated enough to turn your own mind-body-sense complex into your personal scientific laboratory. Then, as you experiment and scientifically test the knowledge you receive, you will come to know—and know that you know—that you are a citizen of two worlds: essentially spirit, having a human experience.
30 Benefits of Spiritual Awakening
The Purpose of Life: Enlightenment
Human birth is not an accidental phenomenon. Each of us has been born to accomplish a purpose. That goal is to expand our spiritual awareness sufficiently to recognize and become one with the Supreme Reality, and to serve Its eternal wisdom as a loving instrument in every relationship. In the process of such a spiritual awakening, the earnest seeker is asked to become a selfless servant of Truth—compassionately witnessing the world, while remaining unaffected by the highs and lows of the personality’s old attachments to likes and dislikes, victories and defeats, praise and blame.
Of course, not everything in life happens exactly the way we wanted or planned, but the very thoughts of disappointment and frustration that arise can bring us two invaluable virtues: patience and determination. If these two powers are faithfully nurtured and cultivated, they can expand one’s spiritual awareness, and eventually lead to the fulfillment of your life’s true purpose.
In fact, every human being is born with all the means and resources necessary to attain the goal. And each spiritual aspirant can learn how to use their resources skillfully and efficiently. On everyone’s journey to Self-realization, the power of thought is the practical tool by which one can distinguish what ought to be done from what ought not to be done. Through the moment-by-moment power of thought, one increasingly comes to know the nature of the Supreme, the purpose of life, and the ever-present means to achieve it. As seekers of Truth earnestly contemplate who they are, from where they have come, what selfless service is being asked of them, and ultimately, where they will go when the body is no more, it is this reliable power of thought that can expand their spiritual awareness—until they awaken to the resolution of all the mysteries of life.
The stream of all life may change its course, it may be manifest or unmanifest, but it never stops. It keeps flowing until it merges and becomes one with the ocean of pure, Supreme Consciousness. Traveling in the eternal stream of life, each of us has already known innumerable life states. The stream of life is filled with lessons to be learned through one’s countless births and deaths.
The only way to become free of that cycle is to begin examining life from a higher perspective; a higher consciousness. For that spiritual work, the individual seeker must humbly employ the gifts of discrimination, willpower, and Divine inspiration—gifts that expand the currently limited perspectives of the Ego, Senses and Unconscious functions of the mind.
To go beyond the rounds of birth and death, one must acknowledge the transitory nature of the sense objects of the world, and contemplate the limited nature of the satisfactions derived from them. No doubt, sense objects can be a source of joy for human beings, but much of that joy exists in the seeking, and not the attainment of them. Once the desire for them is fulfilled, the Ego, Senses and Unconscious portions of the mind soon become bored and dissatisfied again, and begin a new search for other objects.
Understanding the ever-changing nature of worldly objects and the tendencies of the senses and mind can help spiritual seekers refine and deepen their perceptions, and hasten their awakening. Then equanimity and freedom arise in the heart. The wisdom born of such experiences inspires spiritual aspirants to change the course of their lives, and they begin exploring the real possibility of a full awakening to lasting peace and happiness—in this lifetime.
Throughout this ongoing process, priorities and lifestyle choices undergo many changes. In response to the growing power of the seeker’s enhanced discriminative decision-making, spiritual desires begin to consume all lesser desires and loosen the mind’s attachments to old, painful thoughts, speech, and actions. And it is through this expanding inner purification and heightened spiritual awareness that the earnest aspirant awakens to an enlightened state of being—all by Divine Grace.
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