I’ve been a teaching this path since 2010, and I’ve seen most awakenings fail.
Why?
In no particular order, here are 10 reasons for spiritual awakening failures.
You can get in touch with me via my free newsletter.
1. No Understanding of Awakening
A spiritual awakening is discovering reality and coming out of the projected illusions of the mind, body, and heart that filter a person’s every experience. It is a doorway to realizing freedom (aka enlightenment) from these experiential illusions and attachments.
However, most people don’t know what’s happened to them when they wake up. It makes positive action to embrace the dissolution of ego impossible. They also don’t know what ego is, what attachments are, what spiritual freedom/enlightenment is, or much of anything.
After an initial burst, the sense of opening/breaking down/oneness stops. The person reverts to who they were even if they thought they could never go back.
What Is a Spiritual Awakening?
2. Deception and Misdirection
Learning to let go of ego means accepting the reality a person is in. However, many people don’t want to be where they are, and they are in deep resistance to whatever realities they must face (trauma, bad relationships, poor health, etc.).
They use spirituality to pretend they are somewhere else. That misdirection and deception stunts any help they might receive.
3. Unresolved Trauma
Waking up to the reality that you’re a deeply traumatized people is a nightmare. Actually, it’s coming out of the nightmare into a kind of purgatory. You can’t fix your trauma in a dream-state. You can walk out of purgatory.
But it takes a lot of walking.
Most people don’t have the will and support network to do that much less realize that continuing to feel trauma in their system is a choice.
Yes.
It’s a choice. That’s the power of this path.
The path to spiritual freedom shows people that they have choices even when their bodies don’t feel like they have any.
However, being free of a traumatized ego is a choice that has to be made a lot and be made with a great deal of work, support, and care.
4. Fighting Help
Some people ask for help only to fight it. They come with a subconscious understanding of relationships as being inherently antagonistic.
This dysfunctional form of socialization has to be seen and accepted for the massive problem that it is. The war with others must end for help to be accepted and acted upon.
5. Aggrandizement and Big Experience-seeking
The people looking for the biggest and best spiritual master and/or spiritual tool in far off places are looking for the biggest bypass they can find. This avoidance game can lead people to even greater suffering. They are also highly manipulatable–prey for the false teachers out there.
6. Not Enough Direct Help
Indirect help/self-help/DIY advice is great, but it has limitations. The ego self picks familiar tools and ideas and avoids new things and the necessary challenges that they must face to resolve attachments.
Direct help confronts a person with who they actually are.
Direction interaction brings in new ideas and tools to break someone out of their familiar ego patterns. Most egos can’t handle looking in the mirror.
7. Poor Advice and Bad Teachers
There’s a lot of bad advice out there. What makes it bad?
It doesn’t help a person to understand themselves.
Bad advice comes with generalizations, enabling, fantasizing, and ignorance. A guide may say they’re on the spiritual path, but it doesn’t mean they’ve done the work to teach anyone else if they even managed to realize their own enlightenment. Often they haven’t. These are the ones who are always saying that, “Enlightenment is a journey.”
Or they’ll say, “Enlightenment is already here now,” but they don’t even know what they said.
Credentials and lineages are also irrelevant. How a teacher IS says so much more than their social associations and framed diplomas.
The Problem of Incomplete Spiritual Teachers
8. Lack of Dedication
Some initial awakenings are amazing blissful. The grind of unlearning small ego issues, large ego issues, and extra-extra large ego issues is NOT blissful. It requires work, resilience, and dedication.
Few people develop it in the right way. Some half-ass their work. Others totally avoid it.
A few spiritual over-workers turn inner work into a strange form of punishment. That’s not dedication. That’s masochism.
9. Magical Thinking
Magical thinking is infused in some of the earlier spiritual awakening failures, but it bears its own space in this blog post. It is so common. A lot of people hope that a spiritual awakening will fix trauma, bad relationships, messed up careers, health problems, and more while they essentially do nothing to change.
Awakening doesn’t. It only helps you to open to reality.
You take it from there.
10. No Interest in Reality
Ultimately, a root failure in all of this is that people aren’t interested in reality. Most humans are interested in how to control their perceived experiences. Generally speaking, that means to keep feeling good, but if misery is comfortably familiar, people choose that familiar suffering.
That’s madness.
All the while, reality keeps doing what it does. When it seems to play by our rules, we’re happy. When it doesn’t, we’re upset.
That’s how suffering works. If suffering never included moments of comfort, we’d all be more sincere about getting out of our illusions and ego attachments.
Instead, people actively reinforce their reality and only use spiritual tools as a means of coping, medicating, or even numbing. As such, most of the spiritual and religious systems are intent on giving beliefs and tools to help people stay in some fantasy-state.
The Underlying Failure
In almost all of these situations, the underlying failure is about not doing what is needed now. This post can explain more about how people corrupt their inner work and ultimate fail in the journey to enlightenment.
Take heart!
The way out of suffering is real!
It is attainable to those who truly want want to realize it.
If you want help, sign up to my free newsletter to get connected.
