If you had told me in April of 2014 that in ten years time I would be hosting a podcast complied from interviews of people who have had real spiritual awakening experiences, I would have not believed you. Before everything happened the word “spiritual” felt cheesy to me, all religions looked no different from cults, and if someone had an awakening it meant they’d been taken. The very idea of cultism and brainwashing has been deeply disturbing to me for as long as I can remember and I was very happy to subscribe to the Newtonian, mechanistic, material, model world-view as a means of dodging the brainwashing. Plus who doesn’t like to believe their outlook makes them smarter than everyone else?
Oh how life loves to humble me.
Of course there are still plenty of people out there who treat religion no differently than a cult member would. I’ve also witnessed for myself the transformation of the word “spiritual” from something deep, profound, and mysterious, to something silly, cheesy, and ridiculous by tribes of seemingly well-intentioned, oblivious people who only proceed to ruin the movement known as New Age.
But what I didn’t know at 27 was that there was a third group of people, who don’t always belong to religious or spiritual circles and who don’t call themselves atheist or agnostic either. I also didn’t know that with this third group comes another dimension of reality altogether, and that I would suddenly find myself as part of it at 28.
Our modern, mainstream society with all its fancy gadgets and technological advances is shockingly ignorant to a part of the human condition that is arguably the most important part. It is a piece that was celebrated, understood, and woven into the fabric of societies around the world for millennia. In fact it still is in many parts of the world today. Modern, Western, non-indigenous, culture and the societies of relatively recent past that helped to shape it, are possibly the first and only societies to banish firsthand spiritual awakening experiences to the forbidden lands of the taboo. In most other cultures if a person found themselves able to communicate with the dead, the unborn, and the spirits of nature, or if they were suddenly consumed with a love so intense and overwhelming that they could feel the essence of a higher power, these people were encouraged to become shamans, priestesses and priests, medicine men, sages, mystics, and druids. In many indigenous cultures there are also much needed support systems in place for people who suddenly wake up to the nature of reality and their experiences and abilities are celebrated as important contributions to the community which gives them an outlet and a role in the world.
In modern America there are no support systems. Instead the person’s innocent, direct experience seems to threaten everyone else’s belief system and sense of safety by defualt. In not all but many cases, people are deemed insane by the secular, heretical by the religious, and are usually gaslit by the New Agers, while we all continue to search for answers about the mystery of life in places we will never find it. Meanwhile, the mental health crisis rages on, the Earth continues to be treated as a dead, lifeless, thing to be exploited, and the experiencers themselves can suffer greatly from isolation, confusion, lack of support, and depression all for having the most beautiful and the most human experience they can possibly have.
Yet there are people who have gotten through it, hiding in the margins, living real-world examples of what is possible and where the answers lie. They are sitting on the sidelines, usually trying to contribute their magic to the world in the most “acceptable” way. So they commodify and commercialize their offerings so as to remain digestible to the highly spook-able public. Meanwhile there are plenty of imposters and fake gurus out there, further clouding our ability to see any of them clearly. Or perhaps they just live quietly, as role models of grace and maturity, living a seemingly normal life while silently wondering if anyone else has felt what they’ve felt or seen what they’ve seen.
Not being given a role from the community when having a spiritual experience does contain a silver lining though. Because when you are able to step out of your comfortable belief systems and open your heart and mind to listen to people’s stories, you’ll come to find out how universal and how simply human these experiences really are. You don’t need to have been meditating in the desert for years or make life-altering sacrifices to something you believe in. These are misconceptions that can come with labels and titles. You’ll find instead that these people are actually just financial analysts, corporate company members, university students, lost 20-somethings, hospital patients, mothers, fathers, authors, and teachers, neighbors, “atheists,” Christians, and Hindus. People of any culture, and religion, any age, and any belief system. One day it hits them, their consciousness expands, their spirit soars, and they become a living example of what we all are hoping to find but continue to be too scared to see in plain sight.
Now let’s be clear. No one can “get out” of the human experience. We are here to feel all of the emotions and to be the protagonist in our one, unique, hero’s journey of ups and downs and of deaths and rebirths. No one has all the of the answers either. This is an ironic realization of the most enlightened among us, the people who seem to know it all. A huge part of awakening is realizing that divinity and the great mystery are linked, that it is all around us, and to become re-enchanted by how much we do not know and yet thoroughly enjoy pondering all of it anyway. Spiritual awakening stories are also sometimes highly personal and tender. It is vulnerable to publicly share them and can feel strange to take your experience of unity and spread it out into the world of separateness, up for anyone to judge or naysay. But our world today is in desperate need of the truth from trust-worthy, primary sources, people who are not pushing opinions or beliefs, who are not selling you anything, promising anything, or expecting anything from you. Just stories. Stories that serve as a healing elixir to both listener and experiencer alike. Stories that turn you back around and send you home to yourself. Stories that are here to bring truth, love, peace, and magic to an increasingly cult-like, fearful, and cynical world.
So I humbly invite you to join us this winter, and welcome to Tales from the Truth Seekers.
HUGE shout out and thank you to Rachel White of Totem Readings and host of The Skeptical Shaman Podcast and to Roger Oney aka Roger Goes Rogue, for helping me move my dreams into a reality. If you are interested in this subject matter while simultaneously staying grounded and laughing along the way, I highly recommend subscribing to Rachel’s and Roger’s Substacks and Podcasts linked above!!
