The Choice of Spiritual Awakening

By Evette Gardner
September 2010


Through your life experience you cannot help but to grow more spiritually awakened. Spiritual awakening is a natural consequence of survival. At the same time, however, you are (in every moment) making a choice as to how your spiritual awakening develops. The speed with which you come out of your soul slumber is a matter of choice. But the fact that you will, at some point, emerge from this slumber and become fully awakened to your spiritual identity is certain.

Spiritual awakening is something that simply happens as a consequence of your enduring whatever trials come about in your experience. In merely having the fortitude to see yourself through to the other side of any difficulty, you grow; you become more spiritually awakened (even if it’s only to an infinitesimal degree). However, in deliberately deciding to engage in regular self reflection in order to learn from the adverse experiences you go through, spiritual awakening proceeds at a faster pace. So while on one hand, spiritual awakening is a natural and unstoppable process; on the other hand, spiritual awakening is an actual choice that you make. But “the choice” of spiritual awakening has to do with the pace with which it evolves rather than whether or not it evolves. It is a choice which begins with what you, in any given moment, make your mind up to believe about yourself and the world around you.

The only way to get to spiritual awakening is through the mind. The only way to get in the way of spiritual awakening is also through the mind. Spiritual awakening is facilitated or inhibited by the mental alignment or misalignment of how what you know synchs up with what you believe. When what you believe flies contrary to what you know, it dulls spiritual awareness. As what you believe moves in the direction of lining up with what you know, it gives rise to enlightenment.

It may at first seem like wordplay nonsense, but knowing and believing are actually two very different things. What you know is something which is irrefutable. Knowing is synonymous with the awareness of Truth; its something that comes from the very core of your Being. What you know cannot be denied indefinitely. Flawed reasoning cannot overturn it. Emotion cannot shake or move it. What you know just Is. It never changes. What you believe, by contrast, is constantly changing. Your beliefs are the things that you talk yourself into. They are the ideas that you accept as true, but there is nothing in the rulebook stipulating that what you accept as true actually has to be true.

It is absolutely possible to, for instance, have an erroneous belief about yourself, yet nevertheless (in the deepest part of your Being) still know the Truth about who you are. Of course you cannot help but to know. You cannot help but to be aware, even if it’s just on an intuitional level, everything about your Real nature. Yet despite your knowing, you have the power to accept as true something about yourself which, in Reality, is inconsistent with this Truth. What you choose to accept is a belief. What you inexplicably just “get” is what you know.

The difference between what you know and what you believe is what, to a great degree, constitutes the measure of how spiritually awake you are. While you do indeed, from an intuitional standpoint, absolutely know everything about who you truly are (as Spirit), on a conscious level you are still growing in your understanding about your fundamental nature. You are Spirit, and all that this entails is what is learned in the course of your life’s spiritual journey.

In just the act of living you are refining your understanding of Self. However in choosing to live your life in submission to that still small voice within you, this understanding grows deeper, sooner. In making the choices to live your life in difference to the still small voice within you can effectively slow down the rate of your spiritual awakening to a prolonged, tedious crawl. To a rate so slow that it can seem as if you’re making no headway at all. But this is never the case. While you may (at times) develop slowly, you are always developing. You have the power to slow down progress but not stop it, nor hasten it either for that matter.

There is a natural course to the blossoming of spiritual awakening. This course unfolds at a steady pace. You cannot do anything to quicken this pace to a rate any faster than how it’s given to naturally arise. There are no shortcuts to awakening but there may be bumps in the road which prolong its realization. The only way to “speed up” (so to say) spiritual awakening is to not get in its way. Simply by not getting in the way of this beautiful thing that’s given to come about spontaneously you find yourself emerging out of the dreamy fog that is your soul’s slumber with all preordained swiftness. For spiritual awakening to be deliberate you have to make the choice to not interfere with its progression. How do you do this? By living a life of faith. Not faith in any particular religion necessarily, but faith in the counsel of your Spirit—the source of all knowing.

Get in touch with your intuition. Learn to rely on it and follow its direction. Your intuition is the voice of your knowing; the voice of your Spirit. Unfortunately, however, it’s also a voice people all too frequently tend to dismiss because many times it comes across so softly. But though the voice of Spirit often speaks with a whisper, it always speaks volumes. The way to stay out of your own way, and nurture the development of spiritual awakening, is to actually listen to all that this voice is telling you. Learn how to “hear” (as in recognize) this voice—that’s first. As you gain ground on this front you must then follow up on it by making a commitment to actually take the wisdom it offers you, to heart. In other words, make a commitment to continually work on talking yourself into accepting all that you know so that your beliefs ever more swiftly grow aligned with what you’ve always known (in your Spirit) to be true. When conscious is in complete harmony with Superconsciousness, then you are spiritually awake.

Evette Gardner can be reached at Comments@YourDivineInheritance.com
© 2010 Evette Gardner