Oakville Zen Meditation
Spiritual Awakening: Toward a new identity Part 2
Last week we talk about 1) New identity Part 1 : Less self-centered, 2) Inner quietness and
3) Enhanced interconnection with others. Here are other traits of the new awakened self.
Empathy and Compassion:
The sense of connection described last week is closely linked to the high levels of empathy and compassion associated with spiritual awakening. When we’re connected to other living beings — animals and the natural world, we’re able to sense what they’re feeling and experiencing,
If they’re suffering, we sense it and feel the impulse to comfort them or try to alleviate their pain because the interconnection exists.
Empathy in its deepest sense, is the ability to “feel with” other people by experiencing a shared sense of being with them. This ability to “feel with” other living beings gives rise to compassion and love.
Love stems from a sense of connection and oneness, a sense that you are the other one and so you belong to them and share their experience whatever joyful or sad.
Well-Being / contentment:
Well-being is perhaps the most obvious symptom of spiritual awakening generated by wakefulness. Awakened individuals are not living in a state of complete uninterrupted bliss, but they are generally much more content than other people. One major source of this well being is freedom from the psychological discord that plagues human beings in our day-sleep state — habitual worry about the future, feelings of nostalgia & regret about the past, and a general sense of unease.
Also, Spiritually awakened people are much less prone to negative states such as boredom, loneliness, and dissatisfaction. The atmosphere of their inner world is less charged with negativity and much more harmonious.
Sense of gratitude, appreciation and tolerance:
The feeling of well being in spiritual awakening is related to a sense of appreciation. People are more likely to feel a sense of gratitude for their health, freedom, loved ones, and other good things in their lives. In our “sleep state” during the day, we likely take these things for granted and fail to appreciate their true value. Appreciation is an important sign and symptom of spiritual awakening, especially in terms of well-being because it helps free us from wanting, hatred and illusion .In Zen Buddhism terms we become free of craving and hatred and so free of the psychological suffering they create.
Absence of (or Decreased) Fear of Death
Death is probably our most fundamental fear consciously and subconsciously. The ego feels especially fragile in the face of death. The fact that death could strike us down at any moment — and will reduce everything we have achieved and accumulated to nothing — creates a profound sense of meaningless, and anxiety especially as long as we don’t believe in the possibility of life after death.
This decreased fear of death is related to the transcendence of the separate ego — another sign and symptom of spiritual awakening. Because our own ego isn’t the epicenter of our universe anymore, its demise no longer seems such a tragic prospect. We know that our own biologic/ material death isn’t the end of all things; the immaterial world that is part of our identity will continue if one believes in it.
However, perhaps the main reason why the awakened person loses fear of death is because of a different attitude toward — and understanding of — death. Spiritual awakening brings an understanding that birth is not a beginning but an arrival and death not an end but a departure.
The essence of our being will continue to exist after the dissolution of our material bodies.
From a pure materialistic point of view 1) it seems logical that there’s no life after death and
For the materialistic people our consciousness is just the product of brain activity, when our brain stops our consciousness ceases, too. People who wake-up after long phase of flat EEG may prove otherwise.
But from the spiritual and awakened perspective, genuine reality is probably far more complex than this “materialistic and reductionist view”. The essence of our being must transcend our material entity.
Maybe and just maybe, our physical body is a temporary incarnation of some sort of a universal consciousness as A. Einstein said, which appears at birth and depart at death towards a new material living entity and so on indefinitely..........
It will never be proven in one way or the other since, by definition, immaterial entities cannot be observed, analyzed and confirmed by science
