When I was fifteen and sixteen years old, there was an awakening shift in two phases.
Why did it happen?
And was it as spontaneous as it seemed?
THE INITIAL SHIFT: ABSORBED INTO WITNESSING
As an early teenager, I was an atheist although I had some interest in parapsychology. I was interested in the mysteries of the world in general. I had no interest in spirituality or religion and saw it as a crutch for people who otherwise had trouble dealing with life.
At age fifteen, my sense of self was absorbed into what I now can label witnessing. From taking myself as primarily this human self, my whole sense of self became witnessing – a witnessing of this human self and the wider world and any and all content of experience.
This was obviously unsettling and confusing, and I went to a series of medical specialists for an answer. They found nothing. The idea that this had anything to do with anything that could be called spirituality didn’t even enter my mind.
THE SECOND SHIFT: ONENESS
About a year later, when I was sixteen, there was a shift into recognizing everything – without exception – as God or the divine. This human self, and any sense of fundamentally being a separate self, was all the play of God and the divine. It was all revealed as the divine expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself in all of these ways.
This never went away, and I have explored it since. It was a bit like being picked up and plonked down in a very different land and having to get to know this new and previously unfamiliar place. For many years, this happened on my own without others who seemed familiar with the same terrain.
WHY DID IT HAPPEN?
So why did this happen?
I had done no practices to invite it in. I had no interest in religion or spirituality.
My best guess is that there was a good amount of “psychological pressure” building up at this time for me, from my version of the common teenage angst. Angst made up of a mix of social anxiety, fear of not knowing how to be an adult, insecurities passed on from my family, and so on.
This pressure needed to find an outlet, and the safety valve in my case turned out to be a shift into awakening.
It could have gone any number of other directions. In my case, the most likely would have been a continued freeze. It could have led to some kind of breakdown which would have allowed me to rest and remove myself from the situation. In other cases, or perhaps even in my case, it could have gone in the direction of insanity or substance abuse. And, for whatever reason, in this case, it went in the direction of awakening.
It seemed spontaneous. And, most likely, it wasn’t.
Most likely, the conditions were ripe for just this shift at that time. The psychological pressure was there. Perhaps also genetics, general psychology, and more. And this may include a ripeness that comes from previous lives if there are any.
AWAKENING SHIFTS IN GENERAL
To us, it seems that awakening shifts sometimes happen without much leading up to it. Other times, it happens following a lot of practice and exploration. Sometimes, it’s a sudden shift. Other times, it’s more of a gradual slide. Often, it’s a combination of several of these at different times.
And, in reality, we ultimately don’t know why it or anything else happens. We can have educated guesses. We can have stories that seem to fit the data. And if we are honest, we don’t really know. We cannot know for certain.
What we can say is that everything has innumerable causes. We can always find one more, and one more.
We can also say, in the words of Carl Sagan, that we are the local eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings of the universe.
Our life is the local expression of movements within the whole of existence. We are the whole locally expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself as us and our life.
What’s happening here may appear as the result of our own individual effort, and that’s not entirely wrong. And, more truly, it has innumerable causes stretching far beyond us as individuals. The apparently individual effort, the shift itself, and how we respond to it are all local expressions of what’s happening in the whole, within existence as a whole.
Similarly, it’s not an individual that wakes up. It’s existence that locally wakes up to its more fundamental nature.
Photo: Midsummer at Nesoddtangen.
DRAFT
Why did the spontaneous awakening shift happen when I was fifteen and sixteen years old?
When I was fifteen, my sense of self was absorbed into what I now can label witnessing. From taking myself as primarily this human self, my whole sense of self became witnessing – a witnessing of this human self and the wider world and any and all content of experience. It was unsettling and confusing to me, and I went to a long series of medical specialists to see if they could figure out what was going on.
About a year later, when I was sixteen, there was a shift into recognizing everything – without exception – as God or the divine. This human self, and any sense of fundamentally being a separate self, was all the play of God and the divine. It was all revealed as the divine expressing, exploring, and experiencing itself in all of these ways.
I became an atheist when I was nine or ten years old since the version of Christianity I was exposed to seemed so obviously flawed. Why was I required to believe something I couldn’t check for myself? Why was I supposed to take someone else’s word for it? At the same time, I was deeply fascinated by the mysteries of the world and especially parapsychology.
So why did this happen for me? I had done no practices to invite it in. I had no interest in religion or spirituality.
My best guess is that there was a good amount of “psychological pressure” building up at this time for me, from my version of the common teenage angst. Angst made up of a mix of social anxiety, fear of not knowing how to be an adult, insecurities passed on from my family, and so on.
This pressure needed to find an outlet, and the safety valve in my case turned out to be a shift into awakening.
It could have gone any number of other directions. For instance, continued freeze or something else, but for whatever reason, it went in that particular direction.
Why? I don’t know.
It’s likely because of a predisposition that has many causes from genetics to psychological and more, and possibly even things work on or through in past lives.
…..
Most likely, the ground was prepared for just this shift at that time, including the psychological pressure. It’s just that I consciously wasn’t interested in it and didn’t seek it, and I can’t know what led to the shift.
……
Anything that happens has innumerable causes. We are the local eyes, ears, thoughts, and feelings of the universe. Our life – who and what we are and experience and how we live our life – is the movements within the whole of existence expressed locally through and as us.
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