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Many contemporary spiritual teachers offer methods for awakening that may actually impede rather than encourage the process. Some of these entail dissolving the ego or subduing the emotional/pain body, while others focus on transcending thought, and even form and language. These methods give the erroneous impression that only by overcoming certain exigencies can a person be on a path to awakening.

What does it mean to awaken? Eckhart Tolle, in his book A New Earth, defines awakening as a shift in consciousness during which thinking and awareness separate. This concise definition of awakening implies that thinking limits our awareness. While this may be true, it is unclear why a definition and resulting methodology of awakening would rest on such a separation, just as for others it hinges on dissolving, subduing, doing away with, or moving beyond everyday realities. As spiritual teachers, we should be asking ourselves if our models of awakening originate in separation consciousness, which compels us to “cut out,” “stop,” or “fix” things in order to achieve our desired outcome. Separation consciousness, by definition, limits the scope of awakening by partitioning off great segments of reality.

What does it really mean to awaken? It seems that awakening is an extensively aware state of mind that takes in everything. There is no “path to awakening” nor end to be gained — only awareness without likes or dislikes, which gives way to more awareness. As a thought or feeling unfolds, it reveals hidden layers of reality, causing the unseen to become seen.

Just as awakening does not require us to separate thought from awareness or transcend the ego or emotional/pain body, it also does not ask us to subscribe to the limits of form. From this vantage point, there are no such limits; within every form is the immeasurable, waiting for our awareness to unfold into it. This is why an awakened chef can taste the soil in a piece of chocolate and identify the region of the world where it originated. It is also most likely how transcendent abilities awaken within us—non-local awareness, spontaneous healing, prophecy, and clairvoyance.

As spiritual teachers, our task is to invite seekers into awakening through models that support it, void of any sort of imposition. Surely we can guide the minds of seekers to give full attention to an experience without relying on exclusion or division. Great painters, for instance, can so reduce a reality to its color content that it assumes a new existence beyond color, unassociated with any previous memory of it. We, too, can show the scales of an infinitely expansive reality.

Ultimately spiritual teachers can invite seekers directly into the unfolding of awareness by bringing our own awareness to the task. In doing so, we demonstrate that expanded awareness, the state of mind that takes in everything, is an integral phenomenon, not one that is divided. We also realize that a mind engaged in this process could never look for a method, because it is constantly opening, continually awakening.

More about Christina Donnell…
Christina Donnell, Ph.D., is a spiritual teacher and author of the five time award winning book Transcendent Dreaming: Stepping Into Our Human Potential. She conducts workshop intensives and training in receptive wisdom. For more information, www.wocaassoc.com.

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