Excerpt transcribed from Ryan Kurzak’s YouTube video (2020) entitled: Why is Spiritual Awakening Often Compared to a Crisis?

 

https://youtu.be/WLxYeiZN41c  Follow this hyperlink to view the full video.

 

 

 Why is Spiritual Awakening Often Compared to a Crisis?

 

I received numerous questions lately regarding what it’s like to experience crisis through your spiritual path.  One question dealt with the idea of why is it often considered that spiritual awakening is a crisis of sorts or can bring a sense of crisis. Another individual wrote to me, describing the practices that they were doing related to exploring what is their true nature, what am I.  And as this person dug deeper into the process, not just the philosophy but the actual activity. They found that the deeper they go, the more they start to see that the sense of “I” as a personality with all its likes and dislikes, with its loved ones, with its plans and dreams, with its memories that it wishes it could forget.  That when that starts to be seen as something ephemeral or not ultimately true…this person began to have fear around it.  They didn’t want to proceed.  They didn’t want to continue doing the practice.  There was resistance there to it because it seemed like there was a threat to everything that they held dear.  And all this ties together to the idea of the spiritual crisis.  Because when you start digging into what is the truth of things, you might find some things out that you didn’t quite want to know. 

 

Many people come to the spiritual path thinking that somehow it’s going to result in a superhuman experience where you maintain your personality, you maintain your likes and your dislikes.  But for some reason, all of your likes are amplified and they surround you and all of your dislikes disappear and then you have control over what happens to you, and in all of that, you recognize that you are one with the infinite consciousness and there’s not a thing to worry about. But all that sort of pivots on the idea of, by realizing this notion of god-self is being what you really are, what their really wanting to identify with is this notion of being that big man in the sky who pulls all of the strings.  And so there’s this sense of security in thinking by participating in this, by following this path, I’m going to become one with the big guy in the sky.  And now I will be able to pull all of the strings which means if I see someone in sorrow and sadness, I’ll be able to just manipulate creation-reality so that they feel better or if difficulties come in my life, then by simply changing my thought patterns or emotional nature, all of that will be corrected and well.  And negative experiences or experiences of extreme change won’t trouble me...

 

"Penance is patience or even-mindedness in all conditions.  Equanimity emits the essential dualities of Maya: cold and heat, pain and pleasure, etc.”  So part of the process of awakening/clarifying your consciousness is practicing patience/even-mindedness in all conditions. Which means releasing attachment-identification to defining yourself through fears, through wants, through pleasure, through pain, through the duality of experience and that’s the procedure.  And when you practice this procedure, well then you actually embody even-mindedness.  Meaning that in a sense, you lose a lot of your personal preferences.  And again this is challenging when we are identified with a personality, a mind, and a body.  And this is why there is this sense of crisis around awakening because if you have a very acute experience that kind of shakes you out of the realization that the feeling that you are your body, well that can be very jarring.  Or if you have an acute experience and all of a sudden it points out how silly your personality quirks are compared to the bigger picture or the bigger scheme of things that can be very jarring.  But if through consistent study and practice and contemplation, it unfolds naturally.  You begin to notice, “Well, ya know, this thing that used to bother me really doesn’t bother me anymore and I’m ok”, “This anger or this frustration that I held on to that sort of made me who I am a little bit and I had a little bit of false pride in there about it, I see that it’s fallen away and I don’t really/it doesn’t bother me anymore.  Yet I still exist and I’m still free”.  Or as you grow and as you age and as you mature spiritually speaking, you begin to recognize that the people that are in your life, that they’re expressions of this infinite potential.  But the longer you go through life, you see that people have come in and people have gone out.  Some people have left peacefully and some people have through pain.  But the clearer you become, you recognize, “Oh, but I’m still ok”.  The “I”, the real “I” that is eternal, has witnessed this rise and fall and it’s still ok”.  So when you have that kind of gradual progression of wisdom that comes upon you, what makes it much easier to eventually recognize that even the you that you think that you are as a personality with a name and a family history and legacy to pass on, you’re not really attached to it anymore.  You don’t mind participating in it and you don’t mind enjoying it while it’s there.  But you know that it’s going to fade away too and throughout that entire process, what you’ve been constantly/subtly returning your awareness back to was that…infinite observational awareness in which everything happens.  You start to recognize that that is really what you are and so again, you become less tweaked with the polarities and the dualities. 

 

Does it mean that you develop this wisdom and clarity through age or through practice or through cultivation, that difficult things don’t come your way?  Challenges don’t arise, that would stress out a person who doesn’t have a whole lot of wisdom?  No!  It’s just that you see it in a perspective.  If some develops an illness and whereas when you were in your teens and your 20’s, and they were a loved one, your whole life is crushed.  Well, even if you don’t engage in spiritual practices, as you age and as you get older, you see people passing and you see the reality of illness and that can stress you out more if you keep letting it trigger you.  Or you can see it as a cycle of nature that we’re all going to go through and it loses its sting a bit. 

 

But again, the challenge that many people have is when they read something…and it just points out from the git-go that this world is ephemeral.  That the ideas of time and space and individuality are just simply ideas and that is all.  In the same way that when you are dreaming, you truly feel that what is happening in the dream is really happening.  Your awareness your consciousness, if it doesn’t know that it’s dreaming, the stuff you experience in a dream while you are dreaming is experienced as real as when you are awake.  However, when you wake up, unless it was a very intense dream, you look back upon it and say, “Oh wow. That was a dream! I don’t even know what was going on there but I’m glad I woke up.”  Well, when we have this awakening experience through our spiritual and meditation practices, it usually happens gradually, we begin to see that in this life as well.  That’s why when an awakened one says time, space, sense of individuality is just a play of mere ideas.  Well, that person is saying it from the vantage point of you would say, “Well that dream, that was an interesting dream”. That’s the kind of relationship that’s there in…the analogy.  So, you have to remember that while you still think this is real, of course it’s going to be scary.  And of course it’s going to be difficult at times to have someone say to you that, “This isn’t real at all” when everything you know is This.  This reality.