After Spiritual Awakening Be Ready
to Lose Your Personal Will

Personal growth is a gradual process of letting go of our own narrow concerns and responding to life from a wider, more inclusive perspective. For example, we previously may have taken sides in a family argument and now we learn to stay silent, listen and observe, to determine how best we can intervene in the interests of all concerned.

Before awakening, such behavior was always a choice. However after spiritual awakening the choice to act from our own narrow self interest is taken away. I describe acting from a self centered perspective, as acting through my personal will. Indeed this is where the vast majority of people find their motivation and their drive.

After spiritual awakening all that drive disappears along with our personal will. This is quite confusing at first. We find we don’t have the same energy as before. And certainly not the same drive, because these all came from a self centered motivation. After spiritual awakening that narrow experience of the self has evaporated, initially to be replaced by confusion, and then a settling into a new experience of a hugely expanded no-self - which is in fact union with Higher Self. Our drive does come back gradually, but it has a completely different quality. Now we are motivated solely by impersonal and universal love, that always knows what we must do and how we need to behave in any circumstance.

And we no longer have a choice - our awakening has ensured that we have already surrendered to this universal mysterious source of motivation, that has no name and no goal.

If this sounds confusing it’s because it damn well is, especially for anyone who lives through it. Along with the disappearance of personally motivated actions is a diminution of mental powers, as we come to rely less on our thinking mind and more on our intuitive heart. In short our mind fades away. True we can still call on it for essential tasks if needed, but if that task is out of alignment with who we are and what our action needs to be in this moment, then we meet with huge inner resistance to carrying out that task, even down to an inability to think about it.

In addition we are drawn to spending increasing amounts of our day being - simply sitting, or pottering aimlessly. Of course our society is all for being - right? But the truth is that for people who fall into this still silent personally unmotivated existence, society, including family and friends, can be all too quick to cast judgement. Far from receiving praise for our Presence and our being state, we can very quickly find ourselves the focus of judgments and labeled as lazy, a procrastinator or a layabout! Society simply does not support, or encourage, a state of non-doing, unless you are a baby, very elderly or on your deathbed! That is why enlightenment is described as a birth and/or as a death, because it is akin to both.

So if you are on the spiritual path and you arrive at your own personal nadir, although it is wonderful and liberating, it can be challenging both for you for those around you.

And in many instances, quite impossible to explain.