Q: In pursuing a spiritual path, what do I need to do to have an awakening experience? I tried going to church but didn’t have the experience I was hoping for.
The way many people go about “pursuing” an awakening experience can actually backfire because they set up the experience as a goal. “My goal is to have an awakening experience.” It becomes the craving for the sensation, rather than understanding what an awakening experience is.
That’s the difference between setting a condition and setting a catalyst.
So when you went to church and you wanted to have a spiritual moment, the church is an environment that sets the condition. But it doesn’t automatically activate the catalyst.
When you’re talking about having an awakening experience, it is possible to accelerate the process. You start by learning how to rework each one of your senses so that they’re clear and sensitized and responsive. Learn how to understand signs and symbols and synchronicity, and know that’s how the universe communicates with us. I’ve talked about it before as energetic pathways that we travel along that carry knowledge. But they’re regulated. It’s not like you can just zip along any one at any speed at any time. There are gates and the gates set up the conditions, and where the gates are unlocked and open is the catalyst.
The catalyst is the thing that moves you forward. The condition is the starting line.
You can’t really activate the catalyst without being at the starting line, at least in the beginning. Eventually, you can just want that experience and that intention is enough of a catalyst that you can generate that experience.
For example, anytime I want to go into deep meditation, I just sit and close my eyes, and it’s instant because I have set the intention so many times that it’s a groove.
You’re trying to use that church as a groove because you like that church and you’ve set that condition several times before. But the missing part is the centering part. Otherwise, it’s just you sitting in a church thinking, “I’m in a church.” You’re not experiencing the vibrational, energetic exchange of all the thousands of masses that have been said in that church that set the conditions for spirituality and connection to something greater. It’s just the external visual cue, which is a condition. Which is not the catalyst.
So the catalyst in that environment would be meditation on awakening and being in that environment setting the condition.
For example, when you learn to meditate, you will be told to sit up straight with your back straight. Keep your head up straight, keep your spine straight. They’ll set all these conditions. There are reasons for that. They’re not necessary eventually, but in the beginning, they teach the body how to flow the energy to clear passageways to open up greater consciousness.
Sitting up straight isn’t a catalyst. In the beginning, it’s a condition. It’s setting the intent that I want to be more spiritually awake. The condition will eventually create the catalyst.
Q: Yeah, well, I wasn’t frustrated when I went to church and didn’t have a moment. My intention was, “Oh, I’m going to go have a moment.” And then that gate just wasn’t open. And I was like, “Oh okay, not today.”
What do you think was happening for you when you were in the church? Do you think it was more about comfort or something deeper?
Q: Probably a little of both.
From my experience, touchstones like that can often serve as a way to ground us, but they don’t always create the spark of awakening. It sounds like you might have been using the church as a touchstone.
And touchstones can actually block us from creating a catalyst. Because the touchstone is a self-soothing act rather than a generating act. “I want to feel calm.” “I want to feel part of a long tradition.” I want to experience whatever. It’s like scrolling on your phone for self-soothing. It generates a dopamine response that helps the body feel good.
So, the church can be that for a lot of people. It’s a habit that we’ve learned through time to use in a certain way to generate a certain feeling.
If the intention is for self-soothing, that’s fine. If the intention is for awakening, self-soothing will never bring awakening. Self-soothing is the opposite of awakening. Self-soothing is “Let me go to sleep.” Awakening is “Let me wake up.” I think people get confused by that.
The reason why religion often doesn’t wake people up is that religion most often generates followers. It doesn’t generate seekers. When you follow something, that’s a self-soothing behavior. When you’re seeking, there’s no security net. For most people, religion is the endpoint. It’s not the starting point.
And seekers can’t be at the endpoint because they’re not awake yet, so that’s why religion often isn’t enough for a seeker. But truthfully, anything, including religion, can take a seeker to awakening, but it can’t take a follower to awakening because their intentions are not to be awake. Their intentions are to follow, to be part of, to be self-soothing.
Obviously, that’s a gross generalization, but they’re two very different motivations.
Q: If anything, I had the opposite experience. Church is not self-soothing. It’s not a habit or a pattern for me.
Because it wasn’t part of your upbringing, you’re saying it doesn’t have that same soothing effect that it does for others.
Q: Right. But I’m saying, in that moment when I went, I did feel the weight of the thousands of masses that had been held there. And that was overwhelming and that was partially the blocking factor.
Okay, then that’s actually an awakening moment that you were able to feel that.
Q: That church has always felt incredibly intense, though.
There are many levels of awakening. Awakening means realization.
You had that realization, and you’re saying maybe you’ve always had that realization in that church. But you had that realization in that moment, feeling the weight. And then it sounds like whatever emotions got triggered by that feeling of the weight stopped you from going further.
Q: Yeah, so then it becomes less personal and it’s more about the energy of this space, as opposed to the experience internally. So I was trying to have a private moment with God, but instead, I felt everybody else’s private moments.
That’s a kind of awakening. When you feel everything. And the intensity of that feeling can be completely overwhelming. But that’s where we’re still enough of us that we’re placing a value on that: “I don’t like this. I don’t want to feel everybody else.” And we’re feeling the feelings of those thousands of people. Rather than feeling the spiritual energy of those thousands of masses.
Here’s the thing. Awakening isn’t necessarily comfortable. It’s not soothing or validating. It’s raw, intense, and often overwhelming. If you’re feeling discomfort, good—that means you’re on the right track.