Rebirth: The Awakening of the Spirit
The funny thing about birth is, it is an extraordinary and often stressful time for everyone involved. Physical pain aside, the act of giving birth and the experience of being born is singularly primal. Our modern medicine and comforts can make the going easier, but nothing — outside of surgery itself — can take away from the ancient human tradition of bringing new life into the world.
And so, too, with rebirth. In the last few years I have often wondered about the desire to spiritually awaken. A brief internet search or skimming through any book on the topic makes clear that the process of spiritually awaken comes with trial and error, heartbreak, and a baring of one’s soul so gut-wrenching that it would seem better to turn back if not to avoid it at all.
But you can’t turn back once you start. You can’t not be born once the labor pains begin.
How long is nine months to a baby I wonder. It must feel like an eternity at first, the slow rumblings of new life forming cell by cell. I wonder that our first glimpse of everlasting life might begin before we are even fully formed, when our body is the highest consciousness we can produce. Perhaps, before the baby realizes it has become too big for its vessel, it may feel as though one hundred years have passed as it passes between dreams and the red-tinted waking world.
My point is that time can be so much more than the seconds ticking away on a clock. Time can stretch itself and contract itself like a muscle, seemingly dependent upon the experience we are going through as it does. Or perhaps time is more like the tide, like the moon. Perhaps it can be depended upon to disappear and reappear, of its own accord.
I have often wondered how long it may take a spirit to ‘awaken’. How long it takes to learn to breathe through the erupting sorrows, and how long it takes to finally smile again after a dark night of the soul ends.
These last few years have been equal parts boredom and heartache. Staring at myself in the mirror I often wonder that I’m discontent with myself, as though I should wake up and suddenly be someone else.
I think that’s what it feels like will happen when you begin to awaken. At the end of the road you will have earned a similar, fresher face. You will have magically transformed into someone who had not existed prior to your spiritual journey. Like a baby slowly forming from a fertilized egg, you will simply be new.
And of course that could never be.
Rather, spiritually awakening seems to be just like waking up from a long night of sleep, whether the dreams were good or bad is irrelevant. The grogginess, the desire to remain nestled in a warm cocoon of senselessness, the need to wipe sleep from your eye to finally open it.
The awakening takes time. Takes time. It arrives when it pleases and not a moment before, so I have found out. I can drink all the coffee in the world, but my mind finishes awakening when it is most natural too it, caffeine be damned.
So too with the spirit. And if it has taken years for me to finally arrive at a point of peace with myself, then I suppose that was the natural progression I needed.
