Experiencing an Awakening

QUESTION

            “When I was in my first few years studying as an undergraduate, I had recently broken up with my girlfriend and was searching for some answers about life.  I woke up very early one morning, a little before dawn, and decided that perhaps meditation would help me find some answers.  So I sat and tried to clear my mind of all thought.  Once all the thoughts and clutter in my mind had disappeared, I would then ask a question, and imagined that the question was like a seed that would grow into an answer.  I didn’t receive a ‘response’ in the traditional sense, but simply got up and felt compelled to page through one of the Bibles I had on my bookshelf.

            “I opened the Bible to a random page, and there I found the Parable of the Mustard Seed.  I read through it, not really knowing what it might mean.  I closed the Bible and tried again.  This time the passage was the Parable of the Wicked Vinedressers.  Once more, I opened the Bible and rested my eyes on a passage that discussed how ‘the stone the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.’  I wasn’t a Christian at the time, nor a particularly religious person, so I didn’t think much of it at the time.

            “Again, I felt compelled to go out for a drive to think about things.  The passages kept replaying in my head, somewhat like a catchy pop song that you can’t help but listen to over and over again in your mind.  I wasn’t interpreting them, so much as memorizing them, over and over again.  After about an hour or so of driving, I found myself in a small town I hadn’t been in before and I saw the white cross of a little church and decided to stop by, more because I was sick of driving than anything else.  I’ve never felt particularly comfortable in a church, so it was a somewhat unusual thing for me to attend a service out of the blue.

            “Once I got there, I kept thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’  I didn’t know anyone, and it didn’t seem like the kind of congregation I would be comfortable in, but I sat and waited for something to happen.  After some singing and general announcements, the pastor turned on his projector to display some visual aids for his sermon.  Of course, the three passages he had picked out to assist his sermon were the three I had randomly turned to before I left.  I sat in the pew and tried to compute the odds of ending up at a random church that just happened to be using those passages for a sermon, and I determined that it was nearly impossible for this to be happening.

            “I leaned back in the pew and was overwhelmed by a sense of complete bliss.  I got the impression that what I was experiencing was something like God letting me know He/She/It existed.  I started to cry, and I remember the tears felt icy cold as they came over my cheeks.  What happened next is somewhat difficult to describe, and it is one of those things I wish I had not told anyone about because I know I cannot adequately describe it; however, since I’ve already told a number of people about it, I suppose I can tell it one more time.

            “As I sat back in the pew, and after I had started to cry, I became momentarily blind.  Everything turned into a kind of overexposure, a pure kind of whiteness.  I could still hear everything that was being said, but I was truly blind for a moment.  Then I lost what I would call my ‘normal’ consciousness.  The only way I can describe it is being everything in the entire universe all at once, but being nothing at all at the same time.  All the paradoxes about life, things like life/death, or good/bad, and everything that I doubted or did not understand about the world became perfectly clear, but I also knew that the wisdom I had would only last as long as I was in that state.  Once I went back to my normal self, I knew that I would be unable to describe it in a way that anyone would really understand.  I’m not sure how long I was in this state, but when I finally came back into myself, something wasn’t quite the same.

            “I was still a little dazed at that point, but one thing I noticed was that I could feel everything and everyone in the room.  It should have been overwhelming, but in a strange way, it felt normal to me, like I was just seeing things in a different way or from a greater perspective.  I had similar experiences the entire day.  When I returned to campus, I could hear conversations that should have been impossible for me to hear.  I felt the emotions of other people, of the animals in my environment, even the pilot flying a fighter jet overhead.  As the day ran its course, I eventually felt myself retreating farther and farther into myself until I returned to my everyday, normal self by the end of the day.

            “That is the basic gist of my experience.  I’m not sure this would count as a ‘near-death’ experience, but I suppose I would label it more of a spiritual experience, and I’m still working through what it means to me.”…..Matthew

ANSWER

            What you went through, Matthew, is commonly referred to as “an awakening.”  Awakenings are where all senses heighten and expand, your state of consciousness accelerates to a higher degree, and you suddenly know things, feel things, see things, hear things – beyond the normal range.  I would not call it a near-death experience, but, rather, the beginnings of a threshold experience.  Again, the idea of an awakening:  suddenly accessing more of the electromagnetic spectrum, suddenly expanding into realities you did not think existed, suddenly “not self” but more than self.

            The spiritual/religious worlds of thought and sense are quite real.  Once accessed, they change us – on all levels, even physically.  It might behoove you to follow this new path and see where it leads you.  Seldom does an adherent realize or recognize the onset of spiritual energies and spiritual shift.  Yet these happen “on time” – when you’re ready, you shift.  You did.  And the opportunity to shift again will occur.  Count on it.  By the way, synchronicity is one of the signs of making such a shift in consciousness.

            Awakenings are just that, an opportunity to think and to exist on another wavelength.  Take advantage of the door that has opened for you.  Awakenings strengthen us and give us courage – the courage to grow.

            Many thanks, PMH