The 7 Stages of Spiritual Awakening (Podcast)

hey Bo here from perfectly at peace calm and in today's episode we're gonna discuss the seven stages of spiritual awakening and transformation and how to know which one you're in and how you can move to the next stage in order to experience more inner peace more joy and more happiness in your life so how we're gonna do this is I'm going to describe each stage and I'm also going to kind of tell you how this stage manifested in my own life and so maybe you'll be able to relate to my story and I think we're all on a spiritual journey in life whether we know it or not but there comes a point in life where we become more aware that we are on a journey of some kind and maybe it's we stumble upon a spiritual teaching of some kind and we hear about this spirituality and the journey of spiritual awakening and we realized that life is not just this random experience it's actually we're here for a reason you might say we're here to learn and evolve and everyone is on a certain point on the along this spiritual pathway and understanding this pathway and understanding the different stages can actually help you you know evolve more rapidly because if you see where you are and you see clearly what the next stage is then you kind of get a better understanding of maybe what you need to do or how you need to change your perspective in order to get to that next level and experience greater peace of mind in your life so let's get into it the first stage is what I call conformity so in the conformity stage this is where most people live you know most people they're just going through the motions in life conforming to the expectations of society and the primary concern at this stage is just fitting in fitting in with society and being accepted by the people around you you don't want to make any noise you don't want to go against the grain you don't want to do anything that might upset people so you just really fit in and you do what everyone else is doing you do what society says you should do and that's the stage most people are in and it's not that this is a bad thing there's nothing wrong with this stage if you're ok with it if you're content with it then it's perfectly fine but in order to evolve we have to sometimes experience some turmoil in our lives and in order to get beyond the stage of conformity for most people it requires some sort of life crisis it requires something happening in their life that Spurs them to think more critically about their lives think more critically about the the meaning or the purpose of life and so that leads us to the second stage the second stage is the crisis stage and at this stage you might feel like your life is falling apart you may say things crumbling around you you might lose a relationship or a loved one dies or something traumatic happens in your life that makes you really do some soul-searching and really look within and examine your life and and see you know you might see at this stage that you're really not doing what you love in life you really don't get joy from what you're doing you really haven't been living for yourself but you've been living for others and you've just been conforming to the expectations of others and you might feel like you've lost a sense of freedom or purpose or meaning in your life and in my life this happened in 2011 during my freshman year of college during the second semester of my freshman year I suffered with very severe social anxiety and it was probably you know brought on by all the alcohol I was drinking and the fast food that I was eating and I was really just making a lot of bad decisions that led me into this downward spiral and it all kind of got capped off by my girlfriend at the time who I had been with with for almost two years she decided to break up with me and it was very painful it was a very painful experience and I contemplated suicide and I was just very very but looking back on that now I see it as an incredible blessing in disguise even though it was very very painful and traumatic and I was in a deep depression that lasted for a couple years after that I look back on it and I'm so thankful because this was necessary for my evolution it was necessary for me to go through this pain in order for me to move on to the next level the next stage of spiritual awakening which is the stage of courage and this is a very critical step that many people unfortunately fail to take many people will go through a crisis in their life and their first the first thing that they do is they want to blame someone they want to blame something or someone else they don't want to take responsibility they don't want to admit that perhaps it's their own decisions that they've been making throughout their life their life that if that has led them to this crisis and that has led to this rock-bottom experience or whatever and so most people will put the blame on someone or something else in order to avoid a feeling of guilt or avoid having to take personal responsibility because if you take personal responsibility that means you're suddenly in a position where you have to do something to change you suddenly have to put in some effort and you can't blame other people anymore and the weight is on your shoulders and it's it's what are you gonna do and that is too uncomfortable for many people so many people choose to blame and it ends up you know usually if you choose that route and you don't choose courage and responsibility you usually sink back into the level of conformity and you just do the same thing over again until another crisis happens and then you do the same thing you don't choose courage and then you slip back into conformity again and so most people are sort of in this vicious cycle where they're never admitting personal responsibility they're never realizing that they are the ones who are shaping their experience of life so fortunately I decided that I wasn't going to blame you know it would have been easy for me at that time to blame my girlfriend for all my pain you know she broke up with me it's her fault for why I feel so shitty all the time and depressed and it's it's tempting to go down that path but what I decided to do instead is look within and really ask myself why is it that I'm feeling these these negative emotions why is it that I'm so insecure that I'm depending on this other person for my happiness and you know she left me and now I feel like I'm a worthless human being like I have nothing why is it bothering me so much why am I so weak that I need to depend on others for my happiness and what decisions have I made in my life that have perhaps led me to this point where I'm so fearful and anxious and insecure and so I really went within instead of blaming and when I was honest with myself I realized that the problem was with me and no one else my suffering was not the result of anything or anyone else it was purely of my own making it was my own fears and insecurities that I was holding within myself that led to my suffering and so taking personal responsibility for my life led me to the fourth stage of spiritual awakening which is what I call the curiosity stage so when we realized that we are the creator of our life experience we become more curious about how to maybe change our life experience and how we can create a better life for ourselves so we become more open-minded at this stage we become more willing to learn from others and we let go of pride we let go of our pride and say I don't know you know we don't assume that we know how to live life because if we really knew the right way to live life then we wouldn't be suffering so much right so we let go of pride and we become open to guidance and mentorship from others so for me this manifested as a voracious appetite for knowledge and books and I began reading about 1 to 2 books per week on the topics of self-improvement psychology philosophy spirituality business health anything related to personal growth or improvement I was devouring it and I read several hundred books over the course of a few years on those topics and I began to understand life a lot better I began to understand myself better I understood more about why I was acting the way I was why I was thinking the way I was and I started to to see the flaws and my thinking the flaws and my perspectives and this self understanding really led to letting go of a lot of guilt and shame and negative feelings because I saw clearly that it wasn't that there was anything wrong with me it was just that I had these limiting beliefs and false perspectives that I innocently believed in and no one in my life told me to believe otherwise no one showed me a better way to live and so I naively bought into certain beliefs about myself and about life and it just so happened that these beliefs created a lot of suffering in my life and so when I just saw that clearly I just I began to let go of a lot of shame and guilt and embarrassment and fear and this catapulted me to the next stage of my evolution and so the fifth stage of spiritual awakening is what I call the stage of enthusiasm so when you start to understand yourself and understand life and understand other people and why they do what they do you start to let go of a lot of judgments a lot of fears doubts and insecurities and this leads to more enthusiasm more happiness and more passion for life and at this point I was just in love with knowledge and growth and I just I wanted to share my journey with everyone I wanted to share this knowledge that I was learning with everyone I saw and I overcame so much in my life that I naturally wanted to share it with others and teach others how they could overcome their problems in life and it was great for a while but I eventually realized that most people are not really open to this kind of knowledge most people don't really relate because they may still be stuck down at the level of conformity and maybe they're content with that level and they don't really have the desire for growth and change in evolution I realized that the hard way you know by at first you know I became very enthusiastic about things about growth and personal development and I tried to force it on people a little bit I tried to force it on my friends and my family and I quickly realized that they didn't have the same passion or desire for growth that I did and it was initially disheartening but I eventually became ok with it because I had to realize that no one can be forced to want change in growth some people are just content with life as it is for the moment and that's ok the desire for growth comes when it comes in decay can't be forced in other people and all occurs in its right time and so when I started to realize this I stopped trying to force my judgments on other people I stopped you know I just I I wanted to understand people rather than judge them and I realized that I couldn't change people and that really all I had control over was myself and so this led to the next stage of my evolution which was the level of understanding or the level of wisdom and so after I realized that I couldn't force change on others I became more deeply introspective and focused on my own growth instead and I stopped trying to force my opinions on other people I stopped being so enthusiastic and passionate not that it's bad to be enthusiastic or passionate but I had just moved to a new stage and those that emotional sort of overly emotional way of being was not really serving me anymore and so I became a little more serious and introspective and I started to go more within and I realized that life is really a purely subjective experience there's no way in life where you can escape your own subjectivity and so I realized that my judgments of others and what I believed about others or what I believed others should or should not do or should understand or should do with their life whatever I realized that my judgments about others was really not saying anything about other people and it was actually saying everything about myself so my judgments of the world and other people were really judgments about myself it was coming from me it was my subjective interpretation of life and so when you realize that life is purely subjective and you can never take that away you can never escape your own subjectivity you suddenly realize that everything in life is that it's happening to you is for your own growth even the negative things your negative reactions it's showing you what you are believing what perspective you're coming from it's showing you the negative emotions that you're holding within yourself and so it's never about the world it's never about other people our problems are never really about what's outside of us what's in the external world or what other people are doing or what they're saying or what they're thinking about us or any of that it's never really about that everything in your life is pointing you back within yourself to understand yourself understand where are these emotions coming from what am i believing about this that is creating this emotional reaction I'm having and so when I began to focus more on the subjective realm of my life I began to really just go within and I began to see life as just this never-ending learning opportunity and so when something outside of me triggered a negative emotion within myself instead of blaming the external thing I began to just examine the emotion or the biases that I was having or the judgments that I was having that were creating that emotion and I began to see the true cause of my suffering in life as purely within myself and I began to focus on letting go of all that and as I did that more and more it led me to experiencing much more inner peace and emotional stability in my life and it also led to some pretty profound spiritual experiences that I don't have time to go to in this episode but I will talk about that in a future episode but overall it just led me to being much more peaceful more level-headed in my life and a lot less emotional I wasn't making decisions based on emotion anymore I was making it based on rationality you might say I was coming more from you know knowledge and wisdom rather than you know trusting my emotions so much and in basing my decision-making on emotions I realized that that's not always a reliable way to make decisions or to and your emotions really just cloud your perception of life and so I began to seek for a higher understanding I began to seek for wisdom and understanding of the true nature of life and how this whole thing really works you know so a part of me is really still in this stage of understanding and wisdom but I do feel that I'm transitioning to the seventh stage of spiritual awakening which is the level of surrender the stage of surrender or you could also call it the level of love so when you start to see the limitations of your own mind when you see that your mind can never really grasp all of reality and it can never really explain things in a you know I can't really explain the nature of reality because reality is subjective so you start to get curious about what is beyond the mind is there another layer of existence another realm that is beyond the mind that that can't be explained by the mind but can be experienced subjectively so you start to ask yourself deeper questions like Who am I Who am I really am I just this mind and body or is there something more to Who I am and you kind of get an intuitive sense that you are not your mind and you are much more than that you're not your emotions you're not your thoughts you're not your body and you start to search for that core of who you are you might say and you start to ask yourself how do I even know that I know anything at all these opinions and perspectives that the mind comes up with they're just very limited they're limited perspectives because you're just a single human being experiencing your life but everyone else has all these different experiences and you start to wonder like how do I even know that my perspective of life is true like how how could I even be so prideful to say that I know the truth about life and you start to realize that your mind your mind that doesn't really know anything at all and you can only know something by experiencing it so at this stage you start to become a lot more humble you start to realize that the mind doesn't really know what truth is and that your ego is very limited in its understanding and your ego is rooted in pride and it thinks it's opinions and perspectives are right and true but you begin to let go of that and as you evolve you see more clearly the limitations of your own understanding and this brings about a focus on what is more meaningful yeah it brings about a switch from the mind to the heart you might say you stop focusing so much on your opinions and interpretations of life and you focus more on what is meaningful like love connection joy and inner peace so you switch from opinions and perspectives to the subjective realm of experience so most people are always continuously caught up in their judgments about the world their interpretations their mental interpretations their mental perspectives their thoughts about the world that's what most people are stuck in they're stuck in their beliefs you might say they're stuck in defending their beliefs all the time but when you realize the true limits of understanding the limits of your mind you realize that beliefs are not really important in life and you realize that what's truly important in all of our lives and what we all really want more than anything is to subjectively experience love happiness inner peace and those higher emotional states that's what we all want so instead of focusing on beliefs in this stage you start to focus more on how you're feeling about things how you are perceiving things so you go really deeper within and opinions lose their value you don't value opinions so much anymore and love becomes the guide for decision-making at this stage because you're not really concerned anymore with being right or having the truth or knowing knowing something being superior to others all these egotistical ways of being you're not concerned with that anymore and you're more concerned with how can I feel good how can I make others feel good how can I bring love and joy and peace into the world and into my experience of life so it's a switch from the mind to the heart and instead of trying so hard there is a surrendering a letting go letting go of your perspectives beliefs opinions emotions and that leads to the love joy and peace that we all desire deep down so when you take this to the extreme you reach the final stage of what you might call spiritual enlightenment spiritual enlightenment is the goal of many spiritual traditions spiritual teachings talk about spiritual enlightenment and it's it's a very rare thing and I'm not I'm definitely not enlightened to myself so I don't feel qualified to really teach about this in any depth but from what I've learned the seventh stage of surrender eventually leads to what you can call enlightenment when it is taken to its extreme so with continual surrender of mental positions judgements emotions assumptions interpretations etc when you let go of all pride and vanity and egotism and you do that continuously around the clock non-stop the mind eventually becomes silent because you have removed all of the things that feed the mind the mind becomes silent and then you reside in eternal peace and the stage is very rarely really reached because it requires intense devotion and unwavering commitment to the goal but it is a possibility for any serious spiritual student but it's important to know that we can't force this upon ourselves we can't force our evolution it comes in its in its right time when the desire comes it comes you can't force yourself to want something that you don't want right so you have to go through the stages as they are and just understanding the stages can help you move through them a little more smoothly because you see where you are on this on the scale of evolution and you see where you're going and you kind of get a better understanding of maybe maybe what the next steps are to take and then your desire grows with time and you're sort of pulled towards your ultimate destiny which may be enlightenment whatever it is it's not the destination that really matters it's the journey it's the process of growth the process is fulfilling so you don't need to necessarily get anywhere you don't need to reach enlightenment the journey is what it's about it's about the here and now are you being the best you can be here and now are you growing are you being loving kind generous it's peaceful as you can be here and now and that's what really counts because we all live in the present moment and the future is an illusion and we can't escape the present moment so we might as well learn how to make the most of each moment of our lives and so that's what I hope to help you achieve in these trainings with these episodes I hope to help you experience a more peaceful present moment and I hope this episode has been helpful if you want to learn more about the spiritual journey I do highly recommend you look into the work of dr. David R Hawkins he's been my spiritual mentor and teacher for several years now and I've learned so much and I'm so grateful for his teachings he passed away in 2012 but his teachings definitely live on and will live on for a long time so his book letting go is a great one to start with I would recommend that if you've if you're not really that familiar with a lot of spiritual teachings I would recommend you start with letting go and then you can move on to his other books power versus force is another one that's very good I would recommend you read them in that order letting go first and then power versus force and then continue on with the rest of us books and I think they will be very enlightening for you so that's all for today's episode I want to thank you for staying to the end and listening if you'd like to learn more from me get more free resources and training and tools you can head over to perfectly at peace calm that's perfectly at peace calm and I have some more free training for you there you can sign up to my newsletter so you can get updates when new episodes are available so that's all for now and I'll talk to you in the next one peace

Channel: Beau Norton

Views: 45,466

Keywords: stages of spiritual awakening, spiritual awakening, spiritual transformation, signs of awakening, spiritual awakening signs, spiritual awakening symptoms, spiritual growth

Id: v1lSnbDskSc

Length: 24min 58sec (1498 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019