Each sign of awakening describes someone still searching for it
Your search for "signs of spiritual awakening" brought you what it brings everybody: pages with seven signs, twelve signs, twenty-seven signs. You read them asking one question. Is this me? And some of them fitted. Your dreams have grown vivid. Coincidences pile up around you. You want to be alone more than you used to — and some days a grief arrives with no funeral behind it.
So you have half an answer. Here is the other half, which the pages leave out. Every one of these signs describes somebody who is searching. Go back through them with that in mind. The vivid dreams come to someone who is looking for meaning in the night. The pull towards solitude comes from a person who has had enough of noise. And the grief? It belongs to someone whose old life is no longer the right size.
In this post I take one sign to pieces and show you what all of them are made of. The signs are real. (I am not saying you imagined your grief.) The person they describe is real, and that person is you. But what they point at is something else, and it is closer to you than any sign could be.
An experience only becomes a sign once you want one
Take any one of those signs, say waking at three. A million people wake at three tonight. Most of them will blame the wine, the heat or the worry about Monday. For them, that hour is an interruption and nothing more. For you, it has become a sign. (It may well be one, so bear with me.) What changed? Your sleep is the same, and so is the hour. What changed is that you want an awakening, and anyone who wants one reads the night as a message.
Actually, every sign you found comes about in this way. An experience happens to you, as experiences do. Then a wish arrives behind it and gives it a job. The dream becomes a message, the coincidence a hint, the tears — well, the tears become evidence. Without the wish, each of them goes back to being what it was: a dream, a coincidence, a cry.
Your signs come from your wish, not from any awakening. That is why such pages can be so long: once a person is after a sign badly enough, almost anything qualifies. The signs are yours in one sense only. You wanted them, and the one who wanted them is the real subject of every page.
For whoever did everything right, signs become a scoreboard
One reader of these pages I know well, because I was this reader for years. Here is the portrait. You did everything right. You passed every exam life set you (or near enough), and you went on passing exams long after school was over. Your career came, and your house, and the figures on a statement that were supposed to add up to safety. Then, one ordinary evening, the question arrived anyway: is this all there is?
Of course you went searching, and the trail ended at the pages with the signs. And your oldest habit knew exactly what to do with them. It made the signs into one more exam. How many of the twelve do I have? Seven. Is seven good? Should I have more by now? The restlessness that sent you to the search box became item eleven on somebody's page, and you began grading yourself against it.
The examiner in you holds a clipboard and never sleeps. It graded your childhood, your work and the people you love, and now it grades your search for an awakening. A page of signs suits it perfectly, because the pass mark stays unwritten. By the way, that restlessness is no sign of anything: it is the reason you were reading in the first place.
William James described mystical states while shut out of them
More than a century ago, William James, a doctor turned psychologist, went carefully over the same ground as those pages, in two years of lectures on religious experience. He built them on first-hand accounts: conversions, visions, states of sudden certainty. When he reached the mystical states among them, he named four marks. An experience had to show all four before he would call it mystical. It had to be beyond words. It had to bring a sense of knowledge. It passed quickly, and it came over a person rather than being produced by that person.
What I find most honest in the whole book is this. James admitted, in front of his audience, that these states were all but closed to him. "My own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely," he told them, "and I can speak of them only at second hand." The most careful description of such states that I know of is the work of a man who had barely been inside one. Describing a state and being in it are two different jobs — and every sign on those pages is a description.
That admission steadies me, and it can steady you. His twenty lectures run to nearly six hundred pages in paperback, and he never once pretends to have been where his witnesses were.
Your clearest hour fades into the light of common day
James's third mark puts a clock on every sign the pages describe: these states never last long, he found. "Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day." An hour or two: that was the figure a careful man reached after reading all those accounts.
You know this from your own life, and the limit settles the matter for any sign the pages offered you. A state that fades is an experience, and an experience visits you and leaves you. Your clearest hour was true — and brief, James would say. But it was clear about something. It was clear about you: about the one who was there before the clarity came, and who stayed after it went.
There the signs stop, and the one who read them begins. Each sign the pages gave you describes the visitor. What that hour was clear ABOUT is the one who stayed behind when the visitor left.
Something in you is awake enough to look for signs
Leave the signs for a moment and look at the one who is looking. You see, something in you read those pages. Something in you asked "is this me?" and weighed the answer. Something in you is wondering whether it is awake. Well, what is that?
Whatever it is, the pages leave it out. Every item on them is an event that happens to you, and that something is where all of them happen. Your vivid dream needed it, or nobody would have dreamt the dream. Your grief needed it, or nobody would have felt the grief. It is what notices the clock when you wake at three. It was awake before the first sign, and it will be awake after the last one.
In fact, you cannot even look for a sign without it. The wish for an awakening is itself proof that awareness is already there, awake enough to wish. That proof was on every page you read, in the one spot such pages leave blank: the reader. Every sign you ticked was a sign of the one who ticked it.
Whatever the signs of awakening point at is reading them
So, back to the sentence at the top of this page, with the signs taken apart. All signs of spiritual awakening point to the one looking for them. The sentence is true twice over. The obvious sense: the signs are a portrait of somebody who is searching. The stranger sense, the one that matters: whatever these signs point at, the way an arrow points at a town, is the awareness that reads them.
An arrow never points at the one who follows it. Yet these do. You follow the sign, and the sign turns you round to face the way you came. You search for the awakening your vivid dreams and your nights awake at three seem to promise. The road ends at the one who was reading the signs. An awakening is what you are, with nothing added, and that definition stands in the post before this one. What this one adds is the direction: look at whatever is looking.
The pages were right, then, in a way their authors did not intend. (Some may even have known, and buried the fact under item nine.) The signs are signs. They simply face the reader, and you had them turned round all along.
My moment came one Christmas and I keep catching up
Now, where do I stand in all this? Christmas morning 2020, in Athens. That was my moment, and it was a recognition. I have been catching up to it ever since.
A date, yes — exactly what I warned you about in the last post. It belongs to the calendar. What I saw that morning, however, has none, and there lies the difference between an experience and a recognition. I can tell you what it was, because this whole post has been circling it. What I was looking for was what was looking. That is all of it. The afternoon followed, as James's third mark says it must. Yet what I had seen stayed. An experience leaves you. A recognition keeps returning, and you remain a little behind it, always.
A page of twelve signs would have passed over that Christmas entirely, because it came without a vision, without ringing in my ears, without anything to tick. (I was not exactly at rest that year: I had written two books in a few months.) For as long as it lasted, I stopped looking for evidence. When it faded, it left me the rest of my life to grow into.
Nobody can certify your awakening, and I will not try
Nobody stamped that morning for me. I know why a certificate is tempting all the same: a certificate is permission with a stamp on it. The permission was never going to come from outside. I knew this for twenty-five years. I have been waiting anyway. A sign would let you stop wondering, and wondering is exhausting. So when a page offers twelve signs, what the page sells is rest. Tick enough of them and you can rest.
A certificate needs somebody who stands outside and checks, and what you are has no outside, me included. I turned down the guru's mask once already, and the refusal costs me every month, because a teacher who declines to mark your paper leaves you with less to depend on. Your signs get no mark from me either.
What is left for me to give, if I cannot stand outside you and check? Only this. I saw for myself, that Christmas, what every sign points at, and I can therefore keep pointing you back towards it, for as long as you feel you need someone beside you. Pointing asks nothing of your signs, only that you turn and look.
All signs of spiritual awakening point back at you
Now, then, the pages one last time, and the signs you found on them. Keep them, by all means. They are a true record of a person who is searching, and that person deserves one. Just stop taking the signs in the direction their authors meant. They announce no awakening on its way to you. Instead, they describe the one who waits for it, and each one aims at what stays awake in you while you wait.
So when I say the signs point back at you, I mean this. They point at what reads these words right now and needs no certificate. The character with your name, the one with the career and the house, wants one, and the signs were never about the character. Your clear hour, your vivid dreams, your nights awake at three — each of them came and went, and you watched them go. What they were pointing at stayed exactly where it was.
There is nothing more to find on the pages, and there never was. Everything the signs point at is the one who was looking for them. You were reading about it all along. You were reading WITH it.