I’ve written on and off about the feeling of being lost after a spiritual awakening. I started off with a blog called: Post-Awakening Challenges: The Lost Gray World of Apathy. Later on, I blogged about how freedom can feel like being lost in Post-Awakening Concerns: Being Lost in Absolute Freedom. Because people have been so used to living in their cages, suddenly being outside and being exposed to life’s many possibilities can feel overwhelming at first. What direction do you choose when you suddenly can go anywhere?

In this post, I’m going to help you understand that your awakening has now given you re-newed eyes (they’re not new, really. They’re the eyes you’ve had the whole time just without colored glasses skewing what you see). You may now feel lost and disinterested in everything around you, but a lot of that is because you now can see just how much stuff isn’t real. And you realize just how unhealthy and destructive a lot of it is..

Drawing Up Your List of Lies

Here’s my latest spiritual tip: write down a list of everything that is a lie or generally feels untrue. This includes ideas, relationships, activities, and so forth. Here are a few examples:

  • The news: It’s not that the nightly news is telling all lies. It’s the presentation that’s the problem. Notice how much fear-based “news” is offered. With billions of things happening every day, the big lie of news networks is that what they have to show is in anyway indicative of all the stories happening on the planet.
  • Your closet. Your closet is a huge collection of cultural stories. Different shoes go with different outfits so that you can elicit different reactions from others. From business wardrobes to night-out-on-the-town clothing, all of these are lies and deceptions until you wake up and truly understand the game you play with yourself and others.
  • Media and cultural ideas of beauty. Following on with the closet, we can generally look at “beauty” physically, in home decor, gardening, car detailing, and more as more lies of beauty. Inner beauty becomes the only real beauty in the world after awakening.
  • Bars and clubs. Bars are supposed to be fun and apparently where people can have fun, find someone to date, i.e. find love. You already see the absurdity to this, yet people return again and again trying to find that fulfillment even though it often means abusing your liver, getting in fights, or finding people who are very unhappy with themselves.

Okay, so that’s a couple ways to look at lies. Really, most of the lies are telling you to think a certain way and that you’ll be happy if you live a certain way. After awakening, you are very aware that none of this is true, and that’s part of why suddenly you feel so lost in it all. None of it is interesting anymore.

Bringing Truth Into Your Life

Bringing truth into your life will help you to feel less lost, and in many respects, this is why I am always encouraging people to find and develop spiritual community if only with one other person. It helps you to understand what is real. Things that are real are things like love, helping one another, smiles, hugs, laughter, playing, doing the work that you love to do, following your heart, and well, you get the idea. It’s all different manifestations of love. It isn’t about need. It isn’t about making fantasies true. Prince charming is dead. The damsel is no longer locked in the tower guarded by the dragon, and even if she was–dude–it is so not worth the work to try and haul her out of that illusory world.

But initially, the problem is that you still feel committed to this old world. So you go out to the clubs with your old friends. You listen to them gossip and make fun of other people relentlessly. You drink with them. You stay out late and hook up with someone when you’re half drunk. By the time you sober up, you feel more terrible than you’ve ever felt in your whole life. That’s assuming that you made it that far into the night because you can probably feel how awful the environment is in most clubs, and you don’t want to be there. There’s such an amazing amount of old resistance in us that makes us keep doing things that we know aren’t healthy or right for us. But we do it trying to get the fulfillment that we think we need and that we’re told we’ll get from these situations. And the really crazy thing is that after awakening, you truly know that none of this is right for you.

You Can’t Wait for the World to Change

The fact of the matter is that if you are reading this, then you are one of the new change-agents in the world. You are going to have to help us bring more truth and love into the world. It doesn’t matter what change you want to make so long as it’s coming from your heart. This world needs more love and truth in business, date-nights, party games, food and restauranteering, politics, non-profits, and more. There is literally no part of the world that doesn’t need to have truth and love brought to it because so many lies are in it. If you wait, you’re only going to feel more lost because this is not the time for waiting. This is the time for awakening-embodied action. What does that mean? Do what you love. It’s that simple.

Because the world is still run by momentum and inertia. And I don’t like where we’re going. I think the 20th century’s atrocities were a warning, not the culmination of the level of pain and suffering that we can inflict on ourselves. With hundreds of millions slaughtered in that century, you may feel horrified to think that it can get worse, but it certainly can. It may also seem silly that creating a fun way for couples to meet each other in a genuine space would be making a major dent in any of this, but just remember that all changes start small. Just as all atrocities started small. It took millenia to build up the technological know-how to really eradicate lives efficiency. Could you imagine if we’d spent that time focusing on how to help people love and be more kind to each other? I wish we’d had. It’d make life here a lot more fun.

Why Choosing the Spiritual Path Is Urgent

After You Write Your List

After you write up a list of the lies that are in your life (be sure to include your lies about how and what you should be), just keep a check list of how many times you see one of these lies or how you act from that space. If you want to see them up close, do something with an old family member. You’ll often see all kinds of ways that you think you should behave to make that relationship work because you think that that’s simply how family is. And of course, every relationship is ultimately alive and free-flowing, and when they get stuck or we hold onto them, things get unhealthy for both parties. So much needs to be let go of, and the check list will help you to bring awareness to what exactly needs to go in your life. And sometimes, that will mean letting of old, unhealthy relationships to make new ones, sometimes with the same person because relationships are supposed to evolve.

Coming Out of the Woods and Into Your New Life

The great thing about waking up is that you start to see more clearly. In essence, you are not lost after that. 

What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

You still have a lot of things to clean up in your life, but the light is on. 

I like to describe awakening as flipping the switch on in your house for the first time. Just turning on the lights doesn’t clean up all the crap in your life. It simply helps you to see where it is. That’s when the work and self-care comes in. You have to start cleaning up all of it. You can’t even really turn the switch off, although some people squeeze their eyes shut and hide under the covers. But you know the truth, and there’s no going back from that truth. And honestly, life gets so much more easy when you clean up your internal space. Everything becomes clearer and easier.

So in essence, awakening shows how lost you were. Now you are found, and now you can realize how lost everyone else is. This doesn’t come from an ego-space of judgment. The ego would say:

“Oh these unenlightened people are soooo dense. They just don’t get it.”

Your true self simply says:

“They are lost.”

It’s just how it is. And if you don’t believe me, just look at your history books. Do you really think a world society this isn’t lost would have butchered so many of its own kind?

Let Yourself Accept What You Are

Above all else, you have to accept what you are. Let go of these old habits and ways of being. Clean out the closet. You don’t have to throw away everything, but you’ll know what is no longer appropriate. Now when you put on clothes, you may understand what you are presenting to the world, and you will be able to come at it from a sense of a play. It’s just a game. You don’t have to take it seriously. You will understand that other people will still take it seriously, and that’s there prerogative to do so. You’ll also understand that they can make some dangerously bad decisions from that space, so it’s not like you’re going around making fun of others or in anyway trying to change them. But you see what’s going on. In seeing what’s going on and trusting yourself, you’ll feel a lot less lost. From there, you can make the changes that feel authentic and live in truth to help show the way because if you don’t, the others will never learn.

Embrace who you are, so others may one day do the same.

Author

I'm a spiritual teacher who helps people find freedom from suffering.

11 Comments

  1. Jim, I genuinely enjoyed this post, and wanted to share a slightly different flavour of experience of mine relating to your list of lies, specifically about the idea that, "Inner beauty becomes the only real beauty in the world after awakening."

    I understand that you are addressing cultural and media portrayals of a perceived shallow view of beauty, and that you were not being comprehensive here, but I have had such a profound and abiding experience with this, that I wanted to share it.

    For me, it wasn't that inner beauty became the only beauty; it was that the concept of inner and outer, deep and shallow, in relation to beauty, simply ceased to have any meaning. So, all beauty that I previously viewed as inner, became apparent to me on the outer, and all beauty that I previously perceived as being simply external, became perceptively deeply innate to its origin, to the object or person.

    I don't even have this distinction anymore; I cannot see anything but beauty at all- anywhere. Even in horrific situations, there is still beauty. I have not become complacent or unconcerned with well-being, of course; it's just that where there is tragedy, that's me, and where there is joy, that's me, too, and no matter what it is- pain, elation and everything in between- it is beautiful, somehow.

    This experience grew out of my initial bliss phase, and has simply become my very stable world-lens. I wouldn't even know how to begin to figure out if it is deficient somehow, either. It seems to work universally, both as a lens and automatic navigation tool. I also don't know how to go back to the way I used to see, so it's not really a live option to try that either. Besides it being odd to pick out a part of my self in this way, it's pretty neat to take a look at how I function, and see the contrast with how I did before.

    Thank you for the self-reflection prompting. 🙂

    And this: I like to describe awakening as flipping the switch on in your house for the first time. Just turning on the lights doesn't clean up all the crap in your life. It simply helps you to see where it is, and that's when the work and self-care comes in. You have to start cleaning up all of it.

    … is a fabulous analogy. It's so close that it's only just barely a metaphor- perfect! Thank you for this; you just pushed my dimmer switch up a touch. 🙂

  2. That is all so beautiful. Thank you for sharing. You've realized your awakening energy very deeply, and that's totally awesome.

  3. Thank you for your kind words, Jim.

    I read much more often than I comment, and genuinely appreciate what you are doing and sharing.

    🙂

  4. Before I realized I was awakening I had been finding myself getting spunky unique clothing choices that most women would feel too 'weird' in. I looked at myself and thought, this isn't typical but it really fits my personality and I like it. Just one of the many things I'm relating to in the blogs. I want my outsides to match my insides and don't really care what anyone thinks. I'm not smiling and agreeing with all of the gossip I hear either. I try to give fair input. Just in general being true to myself feels cleaner.

    Thanks for your blogs. Loving them!

  5. Hi Jim
    I am definitely feeling lost – There is something i feel like doing BUT i am not sure if its egoic or its spirit – Is there a way to decipher ?
    Thanks

  6. Yes. First, you surrender, and you learn to be awareness and observe your thoughts. In observing, you begin to understand the difference between spirit and ego programming. The ego has agendas. Spirit does not. But it all starts with going within and understanding your ego.

  7. I went through a rough couple years waking up and cleaning out my closet. As I began to realize I was waking up… I started seeing the world very differently and like you said, you can't go back. You can't un-know what you have seen. Now that I see the way I do, I am feeling lost because I am so disappointed with the lies and often have the 'why bother' attitude when it comes to anything. I have lost motivation to do the things I love. Thank you for this post. I know I am a few years late to finding it but I love it.

  8. I'm glad this post can help. Feeling lost in this way is a kind of in-between state. It is in-between being attached to old things and being so surrendered of desire that you are peace. Keep surrendering. Don't go looking for new things just to fill the space; that's a common trap that keeps people stuck for years and ends up being part of creating a spiritual ego.

    Thanks for your comment!

  9. Hi Jim,

    Thanks for these great way marker articles. How do I deal with relationships with people that I am no longer compatible with but I can't extricate myself from for various reasons?

    I think it's embarassingly telling that I have so many people in my life who are highly unconscious and suffering a great deal as a result. It shows just how unconscious I myself was! I don't claim any greatness but I have had an opening in my consciousness to a small degree. Before awakening, I thought I was a great mediator and peace keeper etc and many family members looked to me to intervene in (frankly) all their crap. Many would have described me in 'glowing' terms!… I was very empathic, compassionate, always helpful, giving, caring and self sacrificial. It was of course my Ego, and how I thrived on being the 'good' one. NOW, I can't even bear to Listen to their dramas and gossip. I've become horribly impatient and I just can't take their problems seriously. When they seek my help, I no longer sympathize/empathize, instead I feel like they're all in a crazy television soapie.

    I've changed completely! I see clearly now how I was just ACTING before according to each person's demand. Hence I was everyone's go to. But now I don't entertain gossip, I no longer give up my bed or my last pennies but my (old) role is so well established in these relationships that they persist. I can see them thinking it's just a phase and soon I'll snap out of it and get back to all their drama. What can I do?

    Sorry for the long, unawakened sounding tirade. I value your input.

    Thank you.

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