What happens when we start to awaken? How do you know it’s happening to you?
Everyone experiences it differently. Like Neo in the Matrix… you feel off… like your whole life, you have been in a waking dream. You search for truth… for reasons to explain the fog of this reality. Most people turn to modern religion for answers… and often they initially see some hope of truth. Some still feel unsatisfied… like it's only a small fraction of what lies underneath… the tip of the iceberg. They see that religion, too, has succumbed to the Waking Sleep… that it’s filtered through our own blindness. So the search continues…
Often, a significant event in a person’s life will hit them like a Universal 2x4 to the face. A profound truth, a clarity like never before is experienced. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her moment at the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love. One night, she bawled on her bathroom floor, begging God to help her out of the void of her existence. Then, a moment of clarity happens… and she embarks on a Journey into the Unknown to find HER truth.
The glimmer of light before the dawn.
I read that book in the summer of 2010 while on my second deployment in the Navy… floating in an endless ocean. I had just told my husband I was leaving him the day I returned home. My life, on the outside, seemed almost perfect. House, dog, husband, established career, youth, beauty, financial security… but inside, I felt alone. I had abandoned the Christian faith of my childhood… pretty much had told God to fuck off the moment I joined the Navy at 19 years old. I knew I didn’t want to go back to that way of life, but I didn’t know where to look for answers to the questions my Soul was asking me.
Then I read Eat, Pray, Love and a glimmer of light shone in my very dark internal world. It occurred to me that there was more than one way to reach God. That it didn’t have to happen in a church or through the Bible. The Universe knew exactly what she was doing, setting the scene… because the next event in my Awakening was an epic 2x4 to the face.
I wish I could explain to you in great detail what happened… but alas, some serious jail time would befall me for sharing such classified information. Let’s just say that the war on terrorism collided headfirst with my junior Sailor self. A kill-or-be-killed moment for me and my shipmates. “Good Guys v. Bad Guys” or so it appeared.
Since I am writing this post, I’m still here… so that means that others are not here anymore.
While everyone in that tiny intelligence center celebrated our victory… I was devastated. Sickened. I pushed my way through the vault door and almost sprinted to the gallery deck, which is the catwalk outside the ship below the flight deck. I burst through the door leading outside and made it to the unusually empty smoke deck. I lit up a smoke, hands trembling and as I took my first puff, I bawled my eyes out. An unspeakable pain shook my body to the core. The Veil of Separation was violently being torn and ripped to shreds right in front of me, lying in a heap at my feet… and through that pain, I had my very first Awakening.
With no warning at all, I was there, and I was not. In an instant and an eternity, I was… what I can only describe as… not in my body anymore. But I was still in my body… at the same time… both simultaneously a part of everything and a part of No-Thing. I was floating in a Sea of All and a Sea of None. I felt a longing and a bliss so pure, so ecstatic… and there it was. The Veil of Separation. I saw its purpose, and its meaning, and I also saw that it was
created, and it wasn’t REAL. And yet, it was very real. It was both, simultaneously. I floated in this awareness for No Time and All-Time...
… and then was snapped back to my body like a rubber band. With a cigarette still in my hand and salt and water streaming down my face, both created from my body and spray from the ocean… I realized that my tears and the ocean were the same. That my soul and the soul of those who just transitioned were also the same… And different, because we cannot see the magnificence of one without the beingness of This and That, and the magnificent In-Between.
It was at that moment that I questioned everything I had been taught. As an American Sailor fighting and defending her country post 9/11, I was taught we were the “Good Guys” and they were the “Bad Guys.” After what I had experienced, how could that be? My 25-year-old self felt the pain of this reality, and I knew that there was more to us than just fighting and greed and power. I didn’t have the fucking slightest clue what I experienced… it wasn’t until many years later that I had learned the term “Awakening.” It wasn’t a learning… it was a remembering of something I already knew in my bones… in the core of Me.
The Core of WE.
It took another 4 years for me to leave the military, but I never went on a mission again. Everyone around me said I was throwing my career away when I decided to step away after being selected for the prestigious rank of Chief Petty Officer after almost 9 years of enlistment… but I was following my Soul. Her Siren Song was gaining clarity and volume and I could not deny Her anymore. And so, my Spiral Inwards began.
And it never stops.
We never stop Awakening.
Much Love,
Kori Rae
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