Recognizing the Signs of Spiritual Awakening

Announcer 0:29

Hello and welcome to speaking spirit where we talk about all things spiritual. Your host, John Moore is a shamanic practitioner and spiritual teacher. And now here's John.

John Moore 0:49

Hello, hello, hello, everybody.

Good morning. Good afternoon, good evening, whatever time of day it is for you. Today we're talking about spiritual awakening, we're going to talk about what it is, how to recognize it, why it causes problems? For some people, what that what does it mean, what is spiritually awakened, even mean? can be a confusing topic for people. And what happens pretty frequently, maybe once a week, about, about ish, somebody contacts me, looking for guidance, looking for help looking for something or just wanting to have a conversation, having gone through what they determined as some kind of spiritual awakening. And it's not necessarily for me to say whether or not a person has been through awakening. Because it's a hard term to define, first of all, and there's this fine line I'm going to talk about, between sort of mental, what we would consider what the Western what Western medicine would consider mental illness, and spiritual awakening. And this is not to be ableist, or anything like that. Because I'm not but there are certain very specific mental illnesses that mimic or go along, go along with or are a part of, or lead into spiritual awakening. They are they're associated, and I'm going to talk about why I believe that is, as well. And a lot of times, people who are going through a spiritual awakening experience have a breakdown of sorts, what we'd call them, you know, a mental breakdown, a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break all of these things. From a, you know, modern Western medical perspective but lead into some sort of spiritual awakening. And I've talked before I've written about the intersection of mental health and spirituality, particularly because I come from a shamanic background. And in shamanism, you know, you're dissociating and hallucinating and you know, all of these things, all of these labels can be placed on what you're doing when you're practicing shamanism. Excuse me, it's early morning here. My clock says 6:34am. But it is really my biologically we just criss crossed daylight savings. And so it's 530 for my body thinks it's 530 for take a little while for it to get used to that. So let's talk about spiritual awakening and and what it is. And it's a little bit hard to define. And there's some issues, there's some, maybe some misconceptions with spiritual awakening. And I'm going to use the word spiritual awakening instead of some of the religious or spiritual terms like enlightenment or Christ consciousness or, you know, any any other thing. I'm just going to use the term spiritual awakening, which is sort of a neutral descriptor. So one of the one of the problems with sort of defining or understanding or coming to to the conclusion that one may have had a spiritual awakening is that it's not one thing. It's a cluster of perceptual shifts, it's a big, when you've gone through an awakening, you've had a giant perceptual shift, your experience of the world changes completely. However, there, the experience is similar, but not always the same for everyone. And there are, I almost hate to use this term, but I don't have another way of describing it, there are levels and layers and nuances. So you could have a spiritual awakening, and then you could have another spiritual awakening, and then you could have another one and another one and another one, and go deeper and deeper and deeper into spirit. You can have a spiritual awakening and not stay in that awakened state, you may be not abiding, you don't instantly have an abiding state of awakeness, your state fluctuates, that shifts can change. Now, some people, some people reach a certain state a certain level of spiritual awakening. And that level becomes sort of a baseline that becomes their normal state. Then they can go deeper from there, or they can come back towards their old state, but seems to normalize, right? Hmm, you might have a normal sort of level, you know, sort of like a level of emotion that you stay at normally, are you a happy person? Are you a sad person are you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, you're not always that one thing. There just happens to be your predominant emotional state. And the same is true for spiritual awakening, you are, have a baseline that you move around in, and that baseline when you go through an awakening can shift. So that's can be why it's challenging to sort of track down and categorize there are, there are researchers who are, you know, there's a guy duck, Dr. Jeffrey Martens, who's written a book, and talks about levels and locations and all of these things, and they've, you know, they've interviewed, I don't know how many people and built this huge matrix to say you're, you know, if you're experiencing this, this and this, you're on location one. And if you're experiencing this, this and this year, and location two, oh, but if you're in location two, you can have all of these different layers to that. And so, you know, that may or may not be useful to an individual, but it's useful from a research perspective, right, you have to be able to, to measure, categorize, you know, that kind of thing.

So, let's talk about how you might know if you've had a spiritual awakening experience. Now, some sometimes spiritual awakening comes with, as I said, a break you know, breakdown, like a nervous breakdown or mental breakdown or psychotic break or whatever. How you would know some of the characteristics of awakening would, how you would know this was a spiritual awakening is that you would exhibit you it afterwards, after you things settled down for you mentally, emotionally, your person perceptually, you would have shifted into a new state, a new baseline state is not even the right word. set of states set of experiences, your consciousness would have been fundamentally changed. Now spiritually awake, spiritual awakening has very little to do with intellectual knowledge. You can read all the books in the world, although there is a type of yoga. That is the yoga of learning the yoga of knowledge, that is, you know, potentially bring someone to enlightenment. I'm not going to argue with that. But that's not what the shift is. It's not like I didn't know things before. Now I know things. It's, you know, literally we, you know, the term is overused, but it's a paradigm shift for one thing, how you experience the world changes significantly. And so I think it'd be helpful if I, you know, if I were to describe some of these shifts, now, again, this is going to be different, a little bit for everyone, but some of these things will be present in any type of awakening, any type of spiritual awakening. The number one sign, I think, for, you know, that someone has been through a spiritual awakening is that there is a fundamental okayness, there's a fundamental sense that everything is okay, no matter what is going on in the world, everything underneath it all is fundamentally okay. This is not to say at all, that if you have gone through a spiritual awakening, if you are in a state where you are living from a place of fundamental well being that you can still get pulled into drama, that you can still have emotional triggers that you can still have this or that. Now, for some people, they have gone so far into spiritual awakening that nothing perturbs them, that's a very deep level of awakening. imperturbability, and you don't interact with these people very much. There are lots of people out there that have this experience, but they're not out, they tend not to be out there. You know, teaching being very public, whatever, because they go beyond the level where, where approval seeking is important for them. Right. So, at certain levels of spiritual awakening, people become less social. This isn't to say that introverts are spiritually awake. It's not introversion, or extroversion, it's something completely different. Introvert introversion and extraversion are really about where you get get your energy, right? Do you get energy from interacting with people? Or do you get energy when you're solo? You know, do you have to recharge your batteries by spending alone time that's introversion and extraversion, right? This is different this level of spiritual awakening is this stuff just isn't important anymore. alone or in groups, it's just not where the energy comes from. So that's, that is a big one, that everything is fundamentally okay. And at, at initial levels of spiritual awakening, there's still a background, whether or not you're getting pulled into daily trauma, there is still a sense of fundamental okayness. Now, there is a there are, you know, there's some other signs I want to talk about as well. One of them is, I will describe as in an increased sense of connection with the universe now this could come in the form of non dual experience or complete unity consciousness now. Personally, I don't like to talk about my experiences too too much, because it just, it comes off as bragging. And that's not that's not a great sign, you know, when people are, if people are bragging about their spiritual awakening, or whatever, that's not usually a good sign. I'll talk about ego in a second. But, um, but I, you know, I just, I want to talk about my personal experience, just because I think it's, it's illustrative and, and I can come from this, you know, this perspective but So, personally, I have had many experiences of non duality of being completely one with everything there is, in fact in shamanism that it gives you a very quick experiential, you know, very rapidly you have this experience. But that, for me is not my baseline. However, I do feel a fundamental interconnectedness with every one Everything with everything there is, it's hard to describe if you've never been there. But you know, beyond that is the sense of non duality in which there's no different, like, if I'm having in a non dual experience, if you're having a conversation with somebody, it feels like that conversation is coming from the same person. It doesn't mean you can't function in the world, in the 3d, physical, everyday world, you absolutely can. And in any level of spiritual awakening, there is some part of you that's still around that can function in 3d reality, although, you know, maybe, maybe there are very high levels, there are stories of Buddhist monks, for example, who, you know, form the rainbow body and essentially, leave the earthly plane in an energy body. So, you know, that that might be different for others. So one of the things is that there seems to be no, you know, nobody knows how deep spiritual awakening can go. There are a lot of systems out there that say, you know, xy, and z is the end state. But when people have researched this, they have found people that have gone beyond the head, it gets rarer and rarer as, as you might imagine, to the deeper one, the deeper one goes like there aren't. There are people who walk around in a complete non dual state every day. Not that many of them. That's their baseline. And then beyond that, is this sense, comes the sense beyond non duality comes a sense that the entire universe, that you are the entire universe, you're just experiencing reality through these, the eyes of this body, that you're currently borrowing or inhabiting, or whatever. There's a very, we'll say, way down the spiritual awakening pathway to having that experience. When people get to that, that level is very, very rare, very rare, like a handful of people in the world at any given time, to my knowledge, that that's their fundamental state. And the other thing is, those people are not going to can't get caught up in our quote unquote, petty dramas, and things like politics. Right? The why would you care if you're the entire universe, if that is your reality, that you are the entire universe, experiencing things through one person's eyes, along with that, along with that particular level, and some of the other levels as well? Are the, you know, come sometimes sort of supernatural abilities. And whether or not you want to believe in things like telekinesis, or by location, or whatever, these things have been recorded, sometimes under very rigorous scientific controls.

And, you know, sometimes these people who have these really, really supernatural abilities, if they do, they tend not to show them off. That's, they're not really interested. And also imagine imagine if, you know, I've talked about this, I've talked about this before, and I talk about this with clients who contact me and they're like, Oh, I've got this condition. And you know, what can I expect from having shamanic healing? And I said, you know, if I could guarantee instantaneous, miraculous healing to everyone I ever worked with, imagine how busy I would be imagine, you know, every person on like, if I could lay my hands on somebody and cure cancer, that's probably all I would ever do. However, imagine the line of people in front of my house or wherever I decided to do healings. You know, the world would be a path to your door and people who can sort of quote unquote, perform miracles. That's not really something they desire. So it's sort of it's this weird sort of thing. And I know I have a experienced people performing what would be considered miracles, witnessed firsthand with other people. Some very interesting, miraculous demonstration. And no of no firsthand of like a second hand of other people who could do some miraculous stuff. And sort of gave it up. Sort of like, oh yeah, I can do this, I can move objects with my mind, I can, you know, whatever. Telekinesis has been shown in labs and laboratories. Yes, there have has been some trickery. Sometimes there have been people trained by professional magicians who went in and fooled some researchers, but that doesn't mean all of the research is bogus. You know, there have, you know, there have been people that the government was very, very, very interested in psychic phenomena, such as telekinesis, and has been and has spend millions and millions of dollars, not just the US government, but other governments as well. To use this stuff to their advantage, one of the issues is, if I, you know, if you were really spiritually awakened and had emerged to the point where you could sort of bend reality to your will, you know, doing that on behalf of a government so that they could, you know, gain some political advantage over an adversary or whatever, they would have very little interest for. Right, that's petty politics, in the scope of the entire universe, very petty, and, and you would understand that doing it, you're, you're doing it so that very few very wealthy people could gain more power. I'm not going to get into conspiracy theories about the government. All you have to do is look and see that, you know, we have these Congress, people who, you know, had a career where they were making $40,000 a year go into Congress, and now they're worth $44 million. It's not a conspiracy, that's, you know, there is money to be made. So let's get back to spiritual awakening the signs of spiritual awakening. So the first is this fundamental sense of all being well with the world. Second is interconnection with everything there is with the universe with you know, whatever. This also, you know, from a religious standpoint, this could be like oneness with God or, you know, this or absorption into the Christ Mind. Or, you know, there are lots of sort of religious ways to describe this interconnection as well, spiritually, you know, in enlightenment, becoming one with everything. Reminds me of a really stupid joke. Which is, what did the Dalai Lama say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything. Right? It's dumb joke. I actually saw a video of somebody telling that joke to the Dalai Lama. And the Dalai Lama was like, What are you talking about? He didn't under you know, didn't get it. But it's hard when you're translating a joke from English into some other language to get the new especially when it's a wordplay joke like that. But anyway, so there's there's that there's that there. So let's talk about ego a little bit. So there is a change, there's, with spiritual awakening comes a fundamental change to the ego. The ego is just your, your concepts and stories about who you are. When you say I am, you know, I am my name, I am my job. I am a parent, I'm one of the role that I take on these are you know, parts of your ego. And one of the you know, as not, you know, non awakened people are very, very attached to their ego. Right. So, I remember, and this is not I'm not using non awakened in any sort of pejorative term in any sort of way to put anybody down. We are all where we're at underneath at all, we are all one. So we are all you know, there's a part of all of us that is awakened

but I remember, you know, when my daughter was very little, and she went, she was in school, maybe four or five, five, probably five or six, right? She was in school. And she came home and she was really upset. And they said, What, you know what made you so upset? And she said, you know, this kid, this little boy in my class called me stupid. Right, he attacked her ego. She was upset. She's very attached to this concept of herself. That says, I am this being that is not stupid. And this violated my, this violated me. Very attached to her ego. Most of us are very attached to our egos. I remember I, a family member who likes to push everybody's buttons. And I thought myself above all of that. And one day I ran into her and she said, You're not a man of your word. And it like, felt like an ice pick to the heart. Because I thought of myself as a truth teller as somebody who is a person of his word. And there was ego and she knew that and she's, you know, she was she reveled in causing drama and causing people pain by attacking their ego now, when my daughter came home and said, So when so called me stupid, I said, Well, are you stupid? And she said, No. And I said, What if I said, You Sophia are a chair. And she giggled. I said, Well, are you a chair? She said, No. I said, so why are you going to get upset? It's me calling you stupid. That's not who you are. It's not what you are. And she kind of got it. Right. She kind of got that she didn't not have to take that to heart that was not a part of you know, even though it was violating her ego that was not you know, shouldn't have to be attached to that. And the lesson I learned from this person striking out at me and saying you're not a person of your word and is not to be so attached to my ego that I can get sucked into that drama. And so, spiritual awakening comes with a loosening have the attachment to ego, your ego will ship me shift fundamentally. And some people will talk about ego death or getting rid of the ego or you know, whatever. Um, I have met very awakened people who still experience ego. Very, very deeply awakened, people who still have a sense of this is who I am. However, what they often have given up is an attachment to that ego. The Buddha teaches that attachment is the source of suffering.

And so, ego isn't necessarily the problem. It's our attachment to now ego is a trickster. Ego exists, it had has a reason for existing. Right? It's not just this evil thing we need to kill and wipe out. Ego is around for the survival of the physical body. If I have an ego and I, you know, my ego identifies with being you know, owning a home and a car and you know, all of those things, things that provide me means for survival. That it's useful, but then it gets ego gets wrapped up in some stupid things sometimes, doesn't it?

You know, I see these people I drive this kind of car So I'm important, I need to feel important. I wear these designer clothes. So I feel important. This is this isn't these are ego traps, right? The need to feel above others is an ego trap. So that attachment. So also there is, you know, the over identification with things that we are not. And that takes us out of any state of spiritual awakening

I saw a recording of Bob Proctor talking, it's funny because I was just talking about this in another forum. And I was like, you know, I have this name, and this name is just a label. And then the very same day, as you know, spirit tends to put things in your path. I saw Bob Proctor who if you don't know, he's a spiritual teacher, I really like him, like his teachings. And what he said was, you know, I've got this name, Bob Proctor, but that's just a label my parents gave me when I was born, that's not who I am. And I have this body. And this body, someday will die and it changes over time. And that's not who I am. So it's this, this over identification, with the body with your name, with your job title with, you know, whatever, with labels with all kinds of stuff, things that you are not, you're not anything that you have. Right, I have a name, I have a body, I have thoughts, I have emotions, none of those things is who I am at my fundamental core. So with awakening comes a an experience. Not just a belief, not just an understanding, there is understanding that comes with it. But an experience of this is not who I am. So there is a loosening of the ties to ego.

So these, I would say, are the three big signs of awakening. There are others, but they're not necessarily as consistent. Not the same for everyone. So some of the things that can come along with spiritual awakening include massive shifts in perception. There are reports of people getting for example, better night vision. After spiritual awakening, or being able to, you know, hear and perceive things, certainly what we would consider what many would consider extrasensory perception comes in an increased intuition because you're plugged you know, you're plugged in more directly to the universe. Now, you're the ultimate state. Here's the thing about spiritual awakening, your beingness the core of who you are, ultimately does not change the field of consciousness that your does not change, you're not suddenly something different. And I like the word awakening because you know, enlightenment is pretty good too. But you you become awake to who and what you really are fundamentally, so the things that you are not lose their importance, you can still use them. I still have this identity, I still have this label. I have this body I can use to record this podcast for you. Underneath it all you and I are one that doesn't change who you are, at your very core never changes. It's timeless anyway. It's outside of time outside of space. Outside it's formless. Awakening doesn't mean you become that you becoming anything when you are spiritually awakened. You're just being what you are. Right So there can be this shift this massive shift in perception. One, that also that can include the perception living from the perception that you're not actually doing anything. Right, you can shift into when witness consciousness where your body mind is carrying out your day to day activities, but you don't necessarily feel like you're really that involved with them. You still get up and brush your teeth, you still, you know, do whatever, turn the lights on, whatever it is you do, when you get up in the morning, you still do all that stuff. But there's a feeling of you're kind of witnessing that. And your body mind is carrying on those activities on its own. That's one thing that can happen. Life becomes more effortless. There is the sense of okayness the sense of fundamental well being, as they call as you know, some researchers call it comes along with a sense of peace, a growing sense of peace in the background. That's not to say that the world that your body mind is inhabiting 3d reality becomes peaceful, all of a sudden that war stops and all of that sort of thing. No. Despite all of those things that are going on, you have a growing feeling of peace as a background. If you don't have that one of two things is going on. One is, or you know, one of several things, but one of the main things could be that you didn't actually you haven't actually gone through spiritual awakening. And that's fine. That's okay. Everybody is where they are. But if you go through an awakening experience, and you it did not bring with it at some point, yes. When you're going through, you know, when the when the initial shift can be very tumultuous, very chaotic, very unpeaceful. But when you come out of that there should be this real sense of peace in the background. If you don't have that, then you've experienced something else. And that's okay. It's not a judgement. It's just what it is. The other thing, the other sort of major thing that can be happening is that you have shifted, like your baseline hasn't shifted to awakening to the awakened state. So sometimes we have these little glimpses, we have these tastes of awakening, before we shift more permanently in our base state, very, very, very common. Almost everybody who does any kind of spiritual work experiences that

and then that's it. Everything is okay. Everything you're experiencing is okay. One of the interesting paradoxes with awakening is, you know, a team attainment feels less important. Gaining things seems less important, even though you may you know, once you've gone through a spiritual awakening, you might try to deepen that you might try to make it more permanent you might try it's not it's not about attainment for the sake of ego. That's not it. Hey, I'm level 32. I'm, you know, got my black belt, in awakening, whatever, you know, it's not none of that. Is that important? But they're, you know, sometimes there is a sense that, oh, there's more to this. And wouldn't it be interesting to see what's there to see what's going on

one of the things I want to talk about a little bit is what happens physiologically to people what happens to your physical body. Because your consciousness, when it shifts, can rewrite a bunch of stuff in your brain can rewrite stuff in your nervous system? No, I do not equate the brain and consciousness as being the same thing. And I heard an interesting metaphor for, you know, saying that the brain is is consciousness, or that consciousness is generated in the brain. So if you were to go out to somewhere where there was a primitive, and they just mean that from a technological standpoint, tribe, this is again, not, when I use the word primitive, sometimes that's taken to mean less than or whatever. But if I were wanting to survive in a jungle, or without technology, you know, I would want to have the skills, the extreme level of skills and knowledge that these people have. So if I were to go out to some tribal region somewhere, you know, South America, you know, the some places in Africa, some places where there are still tribes living without technology, right? It's getting rare to find these places in the world, but tribes that have not experienced technology before, and I were to bring a radio out there and turn it on. And all sudden, these tribes would hear, you know, these people who had never seen a radio or heard, you know, or were aware of how technology worked, the baseline, would suddenly hear voices coming out of the radio. And they might, you know, for example, come to the conclusion that there were tiny people living inside the radio, speaking through it. Very logical conclusion, if you don't know how radio works. And then let's say they took, you know, they would take apart the radio looking for those people, and when they would never find them, right, because they weren't aware that there were people in a studio miles and miles and maybe hundreds of miles away, broadcasting. Well, the same is true for consciousness and the brain. Right. And also, if they took the radio apart, the voices would stop. Right? The voices that were coming out of the radio would stop if they took it apart, looking for the source of these voices. Oh, we killed you know, we killed the people that live inside the radio or whatever. The same is true of the brain and people who research that looking for consciousness. Right, you can take the brain apart and it stops receiving, I think the brain is a receiver of consciousness and a processor and that does a lot of stuff for us. But it is not consciousness and we have not been able to locate consciousness in the brain. Yeah, you can damage the brain and it stops receiving the same way you can damage a radio, but it doesn't stop the broadcasts. So it's a good way of looking at consciousness. So with major shifts in consciousness that as happens with spiritual awakening, there can be fundamental changes to the physiology of the brain. For the for the person who is experiencing that shift. Why because we have to rewire the radio to receive this new profound consciousness. Sometimes this is dangerous only in very extreme levels. But There are stories that researchers have found not just the stories, but they have studied the individuals, their stories coming out of research of finding people who went through profound experiences of spiritual awakening that wound up with life threatening stuff, because the low level functions in their nervous system stopped working correctly. Sounds dangerous, and it is. It is dangerous to the physical body can be very, very high levels of spiritual awakening deep levels, whatever, however, you want to look at it. Very profound levels of spiritual awakening can come you'll have you know, people who go catatonic for a while unable to speak you know, and it sort of be like, oh, did this person have a stroke? Or did he have you know, something along those lines? And no, they did not. Now, after the brain rewrites itself and shifts, these people are once again, physiologically fine, unable to speak and come out of their catatonic state, unless they die, which also happens sometimes people stay that way, until their body passes away, there are stories of monks who meditate in such a deep state that they go into this quasi death state for years. And, you know, frequently they don't people don't know if they're, if they are dead or alive. And in fact, their you know, their body doesn't really decompose even though they haven't eaten or and you can't really detect their breathing. And, you know, there are these states that we don't really understand yet. These aren't just stories, these are, you know, things people to this day are going through and witness and these aren't just mythologies. And there are, you know, there are researchers that are just beginning to look into these things into these experiences.

So, these are some of the signs of spiritual awakening, fundamental Well being a sense of interconnectedness, a lessening of the ego, big perceptual shifts. Right. There also seems to be a quieting have the net, you know, the narrative background noise of your mind.

The mind loves to chatter. It has this thing called the default mode network that when you aren't focused on something, when you aren't meditating are really, really focused on what you're doing. There's chatter, there's rumination. There's all of these processes. Well, and this is going on with different parts of the brain are just sort of communicating with each other. Hey, what's going on? Oh, yeah, remember this? Oh, yeah. Remember that? Different parts of brain this is called the default mode network. One of the functions of the default mode network is it is self referential, meaning those thoughts those ruminations feel like it feels like who we are. Those thoughts feel like who we are. And so with experiences of spiritual awakening, that default mode network quiets down, first of all. And second of all those narrative thoughts become less attached to self reference. thought arises still, but you don't go oh, that too I am you know, I am that I am that which has the, you know that song going through my head that I can't get out of my head, I am that who has those depressive thoughts that I'm ruminating over those thoughts of worthlessness or being unloved or whatever, there's less identification with that.

To the point where it is more, more profound levels of awakening, it feels like the normal state is no, no inner dialogue. And some people, you know, some people don't really aren't really aware of an inner dialogue or you know, whatever.

But the default mode network becomes less self self referential. It's not about who we are anymore.

So, if you feel like you've gone through a spiritual awakening, what do you do about that? This is a question I've gone through spiritual, what should I do? I don't know. Now, I'm being a little facetious there. You do with it, you do with it what you will, right, you don't have to do anything with it. Or you can work with it to see, to experiment to see how for further along that path you can go. Or you can work to understand it more if an intellectual understanding of awakening is important to you. I have a lot of people, a lot of people contact me interested in understanding their spiritual awakening. Why? Well, because it's a completely novel, new way of being for them

it's a new way of going through the world. And, you know, in the beginning in the, in the, sort of the, the initial levels of awakening, that can be very confusing, you can feel very alone. Although there were plenty of people who have had awakening experiences, and many who have stabilized that to some extent. But we don't always know who those people are.

There aren't necessarily, you know, unless you join a cult or an ashram or something,

aren't necessarily large groups of people having that experience, to kind of hang out with and discuss and it can feel very abnormal, it can feel like you've gone crazy can feel all of these things. You know, particularly when it comes to the mental health breakdown. You know, I went through a psychotic, you know, somebody contacted me very similar through spiritual awakening and resulted in a psychotic break. Well, psychotic break was part of the awakening. The Awakening didn't, you know,

You know, there are lots of people out there who think that everyone should be doing things the way they're doing it. And I don't take that perspective.

As a spiritual teacher, I know that fit the right fit, finding the right teacher, it's incredibly important. You know, you can go attached to any guru out there, just about if you've got enough money, if you've got enough time, if you can, you know, give up everything and go live in a commune or ashram or whatever. They're mu, there are lots of places out there that you can just sort of like sign up. But is that going to be the right path for you? Just because it's the one you found when you signed up for? Maybe maybe not. I like to be very efficient, very efficient with students and say, Look, you know, tell me what you're looking for. Let's talk about it. Let's find out if my teaching style is right for you. And if not, I will reach out to other teachers or find a referral or, you know, tell you what you might be better suited for.

You know, I do I give public classes that anybody can come sign up for I'm giving a free talk at the end of this month as a matter of fact, on spiritual awakening, and anybody can sign up for that. But to study with me directly. You know, there is, you know, when I first started out in shamanism, for example, my teacher had to interview me, like I sat in her office for, I think, three hours. And there was an application before she decided to take me on as a student

s of: 1000

You know, is that going to work out for you? I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. Which you know which one.

Sometimes you have to hunt around and find the type, you know, the style of meditation that works for you. I'll do another, I'll do a podcast at some time in the future on meditation.

And talk about the ins and outs of it and that sort of thing. But it does seem to be the you know, as a practice, the one the one thing that leads leads most people into awakening, there are other things and there are people who come to awakening without meditation whatsoever. So, you know, again, there are many, many paths, many paths to the top of the mountain. We're all going to the same mountaintop, but there are many different ways of getting there many different experiences along the way. So with that I will leave you for today. I love you all. I hope you're all doing well and that you're happy and healthy and we will talk soon

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