In This Episode…

“When we’re in touch with the higher spiritual potential of our lives, it’s natural that we want to express that potential as fully as we possibly can. We’re no longer worried about what that will demand from us or what others will think about us. Our heart is now yoked to this greater possibility that we’re called to realize. We’re awake to the great mystery of universal consciousness and that is going through a process of higher evolution that we have to participate in to be true to it.”
—Craig Hamilton

Most of us are on the spiritual path not just to feel differently but to show up differently in the world. So, what does spiritual awakening really look like in a human life?

In this episode, Craig explores the concrete ways in which meditation and spiritual awakening can transform our everyday lives beyond the inner experiences of peace, clarity, or love. While those moments are inspiring, the real transformation happens when awakened consciousness influences how we show up in the world.

Craig discusses how meditation can be a powerful tool for unlocking enlightened qualities like strength, wisdom, and courage, shaping the way we handle life’s challenges.
Tune in to “A Transformed Life: Meditation as a Catalyst for Exponential Growth” to learn how spiritual awakening can revolutionize your everyday life.

If you’re interested in exploring more of Craig’s approach to meditation, you’re invited to tune in to a 90-minute online workshop Craig will be hosting called Meditation 2.0 – The Miracle of Direct Awakening. Register for free at: FreeMeditationWorkshop.com

Discover More about Craig’s Awakened Life Membership Program

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

We can have many profound experiences on the spiritual path. In these moments, we come into a state of intimacy with what we experience as a divine presence or ultimate reality, temporarily transporting us into a kind of knowing beyond our conventional mind and separate ego.

These experiences can evoke all kinds of powerful feelings, from experiences of bliss and joy and elation, to experiences of profound love and immense gratitude for this life and for this sacred context we find ourselves in, and many, many other things.

There are countless varieties of religious and spiritual experience that human beings can have. Again, they happen to us either by chance, or because we’ve been doing practices to try to stretch toward that.

The Difference Between Awakening and a Spiritual Experience

But when we speak about spiritual awakening or enlightenment, we’re speaking specifically about the discovery of the source of all of those experiences, the source of all of those insights and epiphanies and illuminations.

Specifically, we’re speaking about the earth-shattering recognition that this source—this profound, sacred essence of everything, the sense of perfection that is at the core of all of reality—is none other than who we are. Our true nature is not separate from that. We are that.

We can make the discovery that we’re not who we thought we were. I’m not this limited, time-bound, skin-encapsulated person with a history of life experiences and certain preferences and personal goals. It’s not that I’m not that at all, but fundamentally I’m something so much greater—something vast, infinite, and sacred beyond comprehension. That’s not just the essence of reality, that’s the essence of what I am.

This realization can also happen unbidden. It can happen accidentally or it can happen through practice. By whatever means it comes to us, it changes everything. It’s the ultimate revolution from within that turns our whole paradigm, our whole way of seeing and being, completely on its head.

It’s the realization that this whole event of human life is something so much greater, and we are here to embody and bring forth something that our little self never could have conceived of. It’s something so glorious, magnificent, purposive, and meaningful that it brings us to our knees in recognition of the significance of what our life can be.

What becomes possible for a human life when we awaken in this way—when we see what it really means to live an awakened life? It’s not just informed by that realization, but it literally is the living expression of that essence, that sacred essence that is our true nature.

Signs of Enlightenment: What Does An Awakened Life Look Like?

I want to talk about what I really mean by an awakened life, and what the signs of spiritual enlightenment look like in practice, in human form. Because, after all, if any of us really look at why we’re doing this or what it’s all about, it’s not about having powerful spiritual experiences, is it?

I mean, we might sometimes imagine that is what it’s about, and we might sometimes want to have this experience of inner peace, inner bliss, or profound illumination. We might imagine that we’re trying to get to some powerful experience sometimes, and have our attention focused there.

But in the end, for all of us, isn’t the whole point of spiritual practice and spiritual awakening to enable this profound consciousness to take root so deeply within us that it revolutionizes our entire life?

That, through our practice, we become a liberated, awakened, or enlightened human being who is now able to express something of that essence, that sacred perfection, in how we live our life?

I know that was what it was always about for me on the path, even though at certain times I sought after spiritual experiences and had many spiritual experiences. In the end, if I really got down to it, it was, “Well, I don’t want to just have a great experience. I want to be an awakened being, someone who is changing the world into an expression of this essence by how I show up in my life.

Identifying the Key Signs of Enlightenment

Our behavior is manifesting the qualities, the gifts, or what some of the traditions call the “ornaments” of being awakened: the enlightened behaviors, the enlightened ways of living that are, in a sense, how we bring this extraordinary grace into the world.

I’m going to range over a few aspects of these signs of spiritual enlightenment. I realized as I thought about wanting to share this with you that I could probably go on for hours and days and months about just this topic, and I think I probably have done that over my years of teaching, in different ways.

But I want to highlight a few of the aspects of the human face of enlightenment just to try to bring this down to earth a little.

1. Ease and Flow in Life

When we awaken to this essential nature, one of the striking things we discover, which becomes our natural way of being, is how we find ourselves in a remarkable sense of ease and flow in life. We’re no longer struggling against life.

People sometimes get confused and think, “Oh, it means you become passive and you’re just surrendered to whatever life throws at you, and you’re no longer trying to make anything happen.”

It’s not that.

One of the most dramatic signs of enlightenment is that we have wisdom and insight and powerful care – and we want to have an impact on the world. We want the world to work in a more conscious and enlightened way.

It’s not that we become passive and let life carry us. It’s that even in our desire to change the world and to express this higher nature, we find there is a gracefulness and ease and flow in how we move in life and how we interact with the world.

Often that means everything’s going in a direction we sense that it could and should and want it to, and other times when it’s not, we’re still able to move and flex and flow and adapt very dynamically to what’s happening. So this is one of the striking characteristics of awakening, of how awakening looks in human form.

2. Flexibility and Inner Freedom

Flexibility and inner freedom are also signs of enlightenment. In other words, we’re not getting stuck on fixed ideas about how things should be, or emotional reactions to things that are happening.

We still have emotional reactions. We still have ideas, and maybe even strongly held beliefs come forth at times, but all of it is flowing. It’s moving through us. They are not becoming rigid structures that start to turn into obstacles to our natural and spontaneous response to life.

3. Effortless Spontaneity

I just brought up something else. A natural spontaneous response to life is another sign of enlightenment. What does that look like? You’ve experienced it. We’ve all experienced times where we’re in a kind of flow, responding very spontaneously and naturally and un-self consciously, without premeditation, not worrying about what everyone else is going to think.

We’re not worrying about what’s going to happen and thinking “I have to control it,” but we’ve abandoned and let go of control, and we’re moving with that flow. Our responses are happening faster than the speed of thought. They’re happening spontaneously.

All of us can have the experience at some point of some version of what I just described. Hopefully it’s your experience often, but regardless, the point is that when we’re awake to our true nature, when we’re awake to who we are beyond the mind, this becomes a natural way of being.

4. Buoyant Energy

One of the most catalytic signs of spiritual enlightenment is the discovery that we are a wellspring of energy. It’s a different energy than our personal energy source.

Often if we look at our lives, we find times when we have more energy or less energy. It seems tied to our sleep and also our stress load and our workload. Each of us has this little store of energy. We’re like a battery. We get charged up through restorative activities, and then our battery gets drained.

I’m not saying that aspect of life goes away entirely. There’s still something called your physical energy and your emotional energy, and there are limits on our energy that do need to be restored in various ways.

But when we’re awake to our true nature, we find there is a much higher order of energy moving through our system that is not coming from that battery cell. It’s not our personal energy source. It’s not limited to that and doesn’t need to be recharged in the same way.

It’s actually the case that the more we let it flow through us and the more we make ourselves available to it, the more we find that it seems to have no limit. It seems to be an unlimited power that will flow through us to the degree that we make room for it.

I can already hear some of you going, “Wow, that sounds a little dangerous. Can that lead to burnout? Can we give ourselves to that energy too much and then end up wiping ourselves out?” I won’t say the answer is no.

I will say having access to this energy and being tapped into it does completely change what seem like the normal limits of the human being. I’ll also acknowledge that we all have to be mindful in paying attention on the path to which energy source we’re using, and whether our personal batteries need recharging in different ways.

But regardless of that, this energy source starts to really change our experience of being alive and our experience of our own energetic limits, and where we look for our power and force.

5. Arising Wisdom

One of the most important signs of enlightenment is the emergence of profound wisdom. Wisdom is something that has different dimensions to it. There’s wisdom that comes from lived, learned experience in life. That’s why we should listen to our elders about certain things. They’ve accumulated a lot of life wisdom from having so much life experience.

We see ourselves, as we mature, increasingly having certain kinds of wisdom. So there’s a dimension to it that we can accumulate in that sense.

There’s also a dimension to it that’s cosmic, meaning there’s a kind of super wisdom that starts to flow, as a kind of spontaneous knowing. I don’t mean necessarily things like psychic powers or telepathy or clairvoyance, or things like that, which also may or may not occur… because they are not inherent to enlightenment. They can be triggered by that, but I’m not talking about that. I’m saying our whole system can have that ease, inner freedom, fluidity, flexibility, and energy flow.

As these signs of spiritual enlightenment are coming online, essentially we find that we start to operate as an organism in a super-holistic way, meaning there’s an integrative or integral force going on inside us that is enabling us to have this spontaneous wisdom.

This includes penetrating insight into people, circumstances, situations, problems, and challenges. It’s not that it’s not partly using your mind and your accumulated knowledge—it most certainly is. But it’s also informed by your sensitivity to the collective field, by other people and their needs and what they’re bringing to the moment.

This insight is informed by an attunement to the future and to where things are going, or trying to go, in each moment. All of that is funneling into this moment of spontaneous wisdom that seems to hit the mark in a seemingly supernatural way. It seems like a superpower. It is a kind of superpower or supercapacity that defies the conventional ways that our minds operate.

Some people would refer to that as intuition. I’m not against calling it intuition. It’s just that these days intuition is very often confused with feelings. In other words, very often when people say “Oh, I’m following my intuition,” it means “I’m doing what I feel like doing.”

Sorry to those of you who don’t see it that way, but I find there is a lot of confusion around what genuine intuition actually is, and that it tends to be feeling-based in most cases. This is different – it’s a super intuition, you could say.

Also on that front, this wisdom I’m referring to means having really good judgment. If you think about what gets in the way of us having good judgment as people, it’s that we’re invested in believing things are a certain way, or wanting them to be a certain way, or having a specific outcome, due to our personal investment.

We need things to be this way, both for our sense of self or our sense of security, whichever it is, and that perceived need creates biases and distortion. I’m really simplifying a very complex set of psychological mechanisms here. They’re called cognitive biases and they go hand in hand with all of our ego defense mechanisms.

But all of these are ways that we distort reality and don’t see clearly. One of the miracles of your true nature—of what happens when you step into your own enlightened nature and enlightened consciousness—is that it exists, in a sense, outside of all of those biases.

6. Seeing Clearly

When it comes to signs of spiritual enlightenment, inner clarity is another. When you’re awake, you’re no longer invested in seeing things other than the way they are. You no longer need to have things go the way that you want them to go. You no longer need to see yourself as a certain kind of good person, with certain qualities, and therefore you’re going to avoid facing the qualities you possess that aren’t that.

There’s a way in which, holistically, we’re now willing to be in reality, because there’s a sense that being in reality is always going to lead to the best result. I don’t want to avoid things, I don’t want to deny things, I want to face things. I want to be in alignment with truth.

Because that is now your motivational center, where you’re coming from and where you’re living from, it enables you to really live in truth, which is another way of describing wisdom. I mean clear seeing of what’s in front of you.

7. Enlightened Action

What that also immediately gives rise to is the potential for what we could call enlightened action, which is yet another sign of enlightenment. Enlightened action means you’ve got the good judgment to see things as they are, and to discern what’s needed in a given situation or moment.

This is because you don’t have any other agenda. So what prevents enlightened action, or even positive action, or even just doing the right thing? Why do people not do the right thing? Because they want something else, because they have another agenda.

So we won’t see clearly and won’t do what’s needed. We’ll do something less than that, something that is maybe more self-serving, or at least self-protecting, out of fear or desire to make things go a certain way that serves us more than someone else, and so on.

So positive, enlightened action becomes natural when you don’t want anything else, when essentially your whole being has become holistically aligned with what we could call the greater good.

8. Innocence

You are holistically aligned with wanting the greater good. You’re not insisting that you know what’s for the greater good, because there’s this humility. There’s this innocence that I have spoken of elsewhere where we hold the position of, “I don’t know, but I want to know, I want to see.”

So that innocence, which is another sign of enlightenment, gives rise to the ability to see without an agenda. And therefore I can respond with simplicity and do what’s needed here for everyone’s benefit, for the greatest benefit that I can discern, or that we can discern together. That enables action that is informed by wisdom and care.

9. Universal Care

This brings up another one of the signs of spiritual enlightenment and awakened consciousness—universal care. We all know what it’s like to experience care. You care for people that you love the most. Hopefully all of us also care for people we don’t even know.

We find in situations where someone’s in need that human beings show up with a care for people they don’t know or for strangers and animals. We have the ability to care.

So, what happens to a human being in whom that ability is unleashed? Meaning, the heart is broken wide open and we care so much about the upliftment and health and positive evolution of everyone and everything, because we realize . . . it’s me. I’m not separate from any of it. It’s all part of me. It’s all one event, and I care equally about all of it.

That universal care starts to manifest without constraint. This quality also then informs that enlightened action I was speaking about.

10. Courage and Strength

It also gives rise to another of the signs of enlightenment, which is courage and strength. Again, when we find we’ve awoken beyond our personal agendas—our limiting beliefs and our personal fears—and we’re starting to live this bigger life for this greater purpose, informed by universal wisdom, we find we have boundless courage and strength to do what needs to be done. We take the risks that need to be taken and say the uncomfortable things that need to be said in order to bring things into alignment with their potential.

You can hear that I keep swinging to a little bit more cosmic, religious, or spiritual language. To try and make it a little more practical, you can boil it down to simply say, we can be in touch with the potential of things, with what another person or a group could become, with what we could contribute to together or what I could bring forth . . . and being in touch with this potential is a big part of what it is to be awake.

When we awaken to the potential of each moment and each circumstance, we want to bring that potential forth. We’ll do whatever it takes. We’re not thinking, “Oh, what’s going to happen to me? Am I going to be okay? Are people going to like me? What am I risking?”

Taking Care of the Cosmos Includes Taking Care of Ourselves

It’s not that we ignore ourselves in a pathological way, but our self is no longer primary. What’s primary is the greater life that I’m now serving. Not because I’ve got an identity that I’m here to serve a greater life, but because I’ve awoken to the great mystery of universal consciousness that I am, and that we all are. And I recognize that it’s going through a process of higher evolution that I have to participate in to be true to it.

So, you hear me talking about universal care, living this bigger life, being called to serve at a higher level, the nourishing of higher evolution between us and bringing forth the potentials of each situation—some of us hear that and think, “Oh, no. I already over-give. I already don’t take care of myself. I give to other people at the expense of my own needs, and now, Craig, you’re telling me that I’m going to awaken in this way and I’ll become the world’s greatest self-abandoning, over-giving person.”

I just want to say to that: the interesting thing in this is because your personal self, your own body and mind, and your life is the aspect of the whole that you have the greatest power over and most influence over, you naturally will take care of yourself, too. So self-care does not sit on the other end of the scale in opposition to this universal care. It’s holistically and naturally included in it.

We become someone who takes really good care of our self, not because we see ourselves as this separate little being that needs us to take care of it, but because it’s part of this whole that we’re now naturally and organically and joyfully and freely serving. It is who we are.

I think I’ll stop naming signs of enlightenment and talking about them, and maybe say a few words about what that looks like practically.

Practical Awakening

Where the rubber meets the road on the spiritual path is in our relationships with other people. It’s in how we show up at our work. It’s how we show up in our lives.

So let’s talk about relationships for a second. Can you sense how easy it would be to come together harmoniously with others when there weren’t personal agendas and investments getting in the way?

What gets in the way in a relationship? Well, you want one thing and I want another. You think one thing is important, I think something else is important. When we are both really aligned with this higher consciousness, wanting whatever the greatest good is that we can discern together, then our personal agendas are subordinated to our own desire for the greatest good to be met, to become manifest.

It doesn’t mean that we know what’s for the greatest good, or we see it clearly. There’s so much humility that, in a sense, we can’t go there. But I don’t want to do what only I want to do. I don’t just want to do what I think is the right thing. I want to know what you think. I want to know what you need. I want to know what the whole situation needs. I’m here for that.

Awakened Consciousness Transforms Relationships

Hopefully you’ve had that experience in relationships. Hopefully you’ve had it regularly. But imagine that experience supercharged by this radical consciousness that’s now coming online. My simple point is that awakened consciousness is a transformer of relationships.

The freedom from agenda, the ability to see clearly, to see deeply into people and situations, to see what’s needed . . . all of this is a transformer of relationships. It’s also a transformer of our work life, and you sense how your work and all your contributions in the world are enhanced by the ease, flow, good judgment, wisdom, and flexibility I was speaking about.

One thing I’ll share on the work front is I’ve had many students who have awakened, or begun to awaken in the ways I’m speaking about, who had people at their work say, “What happened to you? You’re performing in this organization at a level so far beyond what we hired you to do.”

They suddenly get noticed and embraced, and asked to perform all kinds of higher functions because people around them—even if they don’t understand what it is—recognize something. They say, “There’s something about you.”

I had one student who was a pretty high level of organizational change. Her area was organizational change at an executive level in this large healthcare organization. This thing happened where everybody would say, “We need you to be in this meeting even though it’s not in your department because of that wisdom thing you have.” They were saying things like that: “That wisdom thing.”

She knew that she had some extraordinary capacity to see into situations with penetrating insight and clarity that superseded any particular stakeholders’ needs, but she could see all the stakeholders and coordinate among them very naturally and intuitively. But this all happened through her spiritual practice, through her own beginning to awaken to this.

Since I was speaking about relationships, a few years ago where I was leading a lot of live retreats, people would sometimes bring their significant other on the retreat with me.

A number of times I’ve had spouses and adult children of practitioners come to me on the retreat, or after, and say, “Whatever you did to my mom, whatever has happened to her, thank you.” meaning thank you for how she’s changed through the awakening, or “Thank you for what you did to my spouse, I really want some of that because they’ve changed so much.”

So this kind of transformation is something that other people very much notice and are impacted by.

Taking Responsibility

I guess maybe the last piece I want to share about this is that in all of life we become somebody who takes responsibility and owns every situation we’re in. We see we’re the whole, so we take care of the whole. That’s who we are. And that’s one of the most powerful signs of enlightenment.

By the way, this is why I feel the world so desperately needs more enlightened people. Don’t we need more enlightened people on this planet? We need more people who carry all the qualities and capacities I was just speaking about.

As you begin to experience these signs of spiritual enlightenment in yourself and see them in others, you realize how utterly different human life could be if more and more of us were attuned at this level and starting to live in this way. That’s one of the things that’s always driving me, is that sense of possibility for not just you individually, not just one of us, but for the whole human race.

In conclusion, I just want to say that I hope you agree with me that the world needs awakened people. It needs people who have stepped out of the dream of the separate self-sense and into the larger unity that envelops us all, that we’re all representatives of, in some sense. I want to encourage you to go for it and hold nothing back. Put your spiritual practice first, and see where it leads you. I wish you godspeed on your journey.