Your demand for proof is the right place to start
You want to know whether spiritual awakening is real before you give it one more hour of your life. Good. That is exactly the right question, and I would trust you less if you never asked it. You have probably been promised a great deal already: a final breakthrough, a brand-new self, a peace that never leaves — or so the brochures promise. Some of those promises may have cost you money. Nearly all of them cost you time.
So you ask for proof, the way you would before any serious purchase or any surgery. "Show me." "Who checked it?" "What would count against it?" These are careful questions, and I want you to keep asking them.
This post takes your demand for proof all the way, to see where it leads. It leads somewhere unexpected: to the one fact that every proof depends on, and for that very reason no proof can ever establish it. Is spiritual awakening real? Keep the question close. By the end, you will see why you are the only one who can answer it.
Keep questioning every teacher, including me
Start with the teachers, because they are the easiest to check. Plenty of them will tell you, directly or by implication, that they are awakened. Some describe the day their awakening happened. A few sell you the steps that took them there. Ask each of them the same simple question: how do you know?
Then ask a harder one: what would show you that you were wrong? A teacher who cannot answer that has handed you a belief, not a fact. (And a belief can be beautiful. It is still a belief.)
Ask me too. I say a great many things on this blog, and you owe none of them your trust in advance. In fact, I will save you some trouble: an awakening is not something anyone can own, and that includes me. What I do claim is stranger than that, and you can test it for yourself before this post is over.
Carl Sagan gathered tools for detecting baloney
Tools for asking those questions well already exist, and Carl Sagan put some of the most useful in one place. He was an astronomer, the face of the television series Cosmos, and a sharp critic of pseudoscience. In The Demon-Haunted World, published in the mid-1990s, he collected them under a name of his own: a "baloney detection kit".
The tools themselves are simple. Look for independent confirmation of the facts. Encourage debate among people who know the subject. Think of more than one explanation. Measure whatever can be measured. When two explanations fit equally well, prefer the simpler one. Ask whether the claim could, even in principle, be shown to be false. You can use all of these tools at your kitchen table, as long as you care more about the truth than about being comforted.
A claim that survives all of that deserves your attention. A claim that cannot even be tested deserves your polite silence. Those tools fill a single chapter of The Demon-Haunted World, and I would put that chapter in the hands of anyone who has ever been sold a miracle.
Any promise of awakening makes an extraordinary claim
Now apply those tests to the awakening people have promised you. Long before that chapter, in Broca's Brain (1979), Sagan had already written the line any sceptic knows: "But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
Look at what is usually claimed. A single event changes you for ever. After it, fear, doubt and ego fall away, and they stay away. It follows a fixed number of stages, a particular technique, or one weekend with the right guide. By any standard, the claim is extraordinary. And the evidence offered for it is ordinary: testimonies, a calm face on a stage, a description of symptoms that fits almost anyone.
In other words, the promise does not survive Sagan's tests. I would reject most of those promises myself, because the claim they make cannot bear its own weight.
Research on awakening can only measure what people report
Science, for its part, has looked into the subject. The psychologist Steve Taylor, for one, studied a hundred contemporary cases of people who described a shift into a wider and more intense state of being. His conclusion was that such awakenings are far from rare, and that they happen to ordinary people with conventional jobs.
Is that proof? It proves something — and what it proves matters: people really do report such shifts, and Taylor found a hundred of them.
But consider what the research measures: reports. A report is a person describing an experience. A study can confirm that someone says they woke up. It cannot reach what they say they woke up to, because that is no object you could ever put in front of an instrument. Everything a study gives you is second-hand, however careful it is. What you know first-hand is less than you think, and it is enough.
Sagan sometimes leaned too far into scepticism
To be fair to Sagan, he was no cold man. In The Demon-Haunted World he called science "a profound source of spirituality", and he meant the awe of a mind that understands its place among the galaxies. That awe was real.
Yet at least once his scepticism reached for an explanation that did not hold up. In 1979, in an essay called "The Amniotic Universe", he suggested that the tunnel and the light which people describe near death might be memories of their own birth. That explains where the images might come from. It says nothing about the person seeing them.
Three years later, the researcher Carl B. Becker published a reply in a journal devoted to near-death studies. The theory fails, he argued, for three main reasons (newborn babies, for one, cannot perceive what it needs them to remember). You see, an explanation like that looks only at the experience, and forgets the one having it.
Every piece of evidence has to appear to someone
Here is the question Sagan's tests never ask: who sees the evidence? However solid a finding is, it stays a mark on paper until someone sees it. A reading on a dial means something only when somebody reads it. A brain scan proves something only when a pair of eyes — and a mind behind them — takes it in.
Follow any proof back to where it begins, and you end up in the same place each time: someone aware, looking at it. The telescope needs an astronomer. The study needs a reader. Even Sagan's tools need hands, and behind the hands, someone conscious of using them.
Evidence, then, depends on awareness, never the other way round. You can gather proof about almost anything in the world. What you cannot do is gather proof for the one who gathers it, because that one is already there when the first piece arrives.
Being aware is the most ordinary fact about you
And what is left after all this checking? Nothing extraordinary. It is so ordinary that you step over it every day: you are aware. You are aware right now, of this sentence, of the light around you, of a thought about whether to keep reading.
Ordinary claims need only ordinary evidence, and this one needs even less. Your awareness is already present before you even think of looking for it. Any confirmation you could ask for would have to turn up in it first. And this is one claim you can test first-hand, right now. I once went through every doubt I had and found that this was the one fact still standing.
Is that really all? Yes. It sounds too small to be the answer to anything (and that is why the marketplace prefers to sell something bigger). Your own awareness cannot be packaged, and it has no need to be.
Spiritual awakening names what you assume whenever you check anything
What, then, do the words "spiritual awakening" actually name? Set aside the sudden event, the stages and the teachers' claims, and one fact is still here: the awareness that was present before you asked anything and will still be present when you stop asking. In the first post of this series, I called an awakening simply what you are, and nothing more.
Each time you check anything, you assume that one fact without noticing it. You assume someone is there to check. You assume someone will see the result. Your demand for proof, which this post began with, assumes that fact too.
So is spiritual awakening real? If you mean a sudden event that changes somebody for ever, it does not pass Sagan's tests, and you are right to doubt it. If you mean what the words actually name, the awareness you are, then it is the most real fact you have, because every test you run already relies on it. That answer needs no evidence. It needs only that you look again at who is asking the question.
I stopped negotiating with what I already knew
Now, what about me? Here is a line of mine from earlier this year: "The insight is not new. I have known this for twenty-five years. The new thing is that I have stopped negotiating with the knowing."
A second line goes with it: "I have been avoiding the simple act of saying: 'this is what I do, this is who I am, here is the door.' Everything else has been elaboration designed to delay the simple act."
Your demand for proof may be doing the job my negotiating did for me. That demand can keep the question open, so that you never have to live the answer, and each new piece of evidence becomes one more reason to wait for the next.
Judge me by contact, a test nobody fakes for long
Of course, I do not expect you to take any of this on trust. Claims about my inner state are exactly as doubtful as anyone else's, and you do well to treat them with caution. There is one test, though, that no performance survives for long, and it is contact.
Whether something reaches you when I speak with you is a result only you can report. Testimonies, titles and reviews cannot decide it on your behalf, and that kind of result shows up in your body long before it gets anywhere near an argument. I stay close enough for you to feel me, and from there I can help you actually touch what you came looking for.
Contact will never count as proof for anyone else. You run that test yourself, with the only instrument that was ever going to decide: you. (For a sceptic, that is the best kind there is.)
Whatever weighs the evidence is never weighed itself
So keep Sagan's tools. Apply them to every promise, every teacher and every glowing story about the day someone woke up, and to this blog, too. They are good tools, and the world could use more people who take them up.
But look at who is using them. All your testing, doubting and checking takes place in the same steady awareness, and that awareness never goes on the scales. It weighs everything. Nothing weighs it. Sagan made his tools for everything else, and they do that job well.
You cannot prove spiritual awakening is real…
… and you never need to. You have been using that very awareness to check everything else, all your life. You are using it NOW.