Awakening

“ The awakening of the soul is its entrance upon an appreciation of its powers, relations, possibilities, and responsibilities.
What awakens the soul? The answer to that question is hidden. The wind bloweth where it listeth. Elemental processes and forces are all silent and viewless. The stillness of the sunrise is like that of the deeps of the sea. No eye ever traced the birth of life, and no sound ever attended the awakening of the soul ”

“ To arouse suddenly from a sound sleep in the woods at dawn while this chant is in progress, is like awakening in another sphere, where sings the choir celestial. We slip from sleep into the heaven of song, and it requires another awakening to bring us to consciousness of this actual world about us. ”

“ We awake to find done what our sleepy brains missed in the doing, and after months or years perceive ourselves in a second older by all that period. We are jogged by the elbow, roused ruthlessly and curtly bidden to look and see how we are changed, and wonder, weep, or smile as may seem best to us in face of the metamorphosis. A moment of such awakening came to me now; I seemed a man different from him who had, no great number of minutes before, hastened to the house, inspired by an insane hope, and aflame with a passion that defied reason and summed up life in longing. ”

“ We understand this sometimes, as I say, and stand amazed at the whirl and the rush and the anxiety and all the dream that we call our life; we seem to fear the awakening, and our dreams too become vivid and restless, as the awakening draws near. ”

“ And not till that great awakening lord brings back the heart, will the body become quickened, the thoughts reach their mark, the eyes and the ears revive, the limbs stir and raise themselves once more. ”

“ To every human being this awakening comes sooner or later. To some, gradually and naturally as the dawning of morning, and the bright effulgence of its rays is not recognised until the darkness and clouds have already rolled away, and, lo, it is day. Upon others it bursts with the suddenness of a thunderstorm, and the soul cowers under the threatening peals, and is riven by the lightning flashes of conscience before it reaches the haven of calm and peace. ”

“ For how many times in sleep has not the same dream come to me as a whispered message from another world, from her grave even—and on awakening I always seemed to know that her journey through life was at an end. ”

“ For my outward behaviour, I usually rise at five (that is, after part of the night spent in prayer.) At my awakening, I consider myself as nothing, before the majesty of God. I unite me to his Son and Spirit. Being risen, I cast myself down, and adore the blessing of the incarnation, which gives us access to God; and deliver up myself to the Holy Jesus, to be entered into his Spirit. ”

“ Conceive what this awakening must be to an earth-bound spirit—to one altogether unprepared for its new home—carrying no light within it—floating in the dim obscure—clinging to the earth, where all its affections were garnered up: for where its treasure is, there shall it be also. It will find its condition evil, more or less, according to the degree of its moral light or darkness, and in proportion to the amount of the darkness will be its incapacity to seek for light. ”

“ So in the night he tried to send his thought over the hills, flash his spirit into hers, in the great hope that she would thrill with a new comprehension, a new awakening.... In a world so mysterious, in an existence so strange, so impossible, so unbelievable, might such a miracle be stranger than the breath he breathed and the passions he felt? ”

“ She recalled faintly an ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life to which she had given being, added to the great unnumbered multitude of souls that come and go. ”

“ Is it to overcome death to flit about like shadows without understanding?
And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? ”

“ We are ministering angels to one another, in our process of awakening. If we have not enough realization of truth to keep ourselves awake, some one comes along and wakes us up, by telling us more and we, in turn, wake some slumbering neighbor. ”

“ The first awakening is to the consciousness of a moral order and of freedom; the second awakening is to the consciousness of God and of a near and vital relation with Him. The path of progress is still full of obstacles; there are still attractions for the senses in animalism and solicitations from something malign outside; but never again will the soul be without the realization that it is in the hands of a compassionate, as well as a just, God. ”

“ The great modification which the act of awakening effects in us is not so much that of introducing us to the clear life of consciousness, as that of making us lose all memory of that other, rather more diffused light in which our mind has been resting, as in the opaline depths of the sea. ”

“ If he heard the call before awakening, then consciousness was awake to hear it while the body slumbered. If he awoke before he heard the call, then the call did not awaken him. No matter how deep the slumber of the body, something remains awake to catch the signals from without. ”

“ Oth 2 All of this is the aspect of awakening from sleep, which is the aspect of the revival of the dead, the aspect of the renewal of the world. As we say every day upon awakening from sleep 'Who restores souls to the dead bodies'. For the essence of the aspect of awakening from sleep is evoked in the roots of all the aspects of rectifications, as seen above. For sleep comes about through the contraction of the intellect and the confusions which are evoked from the aspect of 'the Serpent was clever', which attaches itself to the kind through the sin of the first man, etc. ”

“ That awakens the divine spark, and the vision of such an awakening is beautiful. I serve my cause with all my strength, and the improvement and transformation of some of my flock has been so complete, that they have returned into society as new men, and bravely resisted all temptations. I admit that success often depends on my ability to save them from immediate need. ”

“ The sudden awakening to the realities, not only of life but of her own nature, caused by his reckless avowal of love, had passed, as all awakenings must, into calm acquiescence in the commonplace facts of consciousness. ”

“ The awakening, then, of the human soul, to an effectual apprehension of eternal realities, must take its first issue from some other Being than the drowzy and slumbering creature himself. We are not speaking of a few serious thoughts that now and then fleet across the human mind, like meteors at midnight, and are seen no more. We are speaking of that permanent, that everlasting dawning of eternity, with its terrors and its splendors, upon the human soul, which allows it no more repose, until it is prepared for eternity upon good grounds and foundations ”

“ Awakening and vitality are in the very atmosphere which brings a new hope, a new day, a new world of possibility and life. New heavens and a new earth thus present themselves to mortal cognisance, for the most part quite unconscious of them, every day. ”

“ The awakening of the earth from the long cold sleep of winter is typical of the awakening of the mind from its hypnotisms of external consciousness.
Instinctively, there arises a realization of the divinity of creative activity, and the mind soars up to the higher vibrations and awakes to the real purpose of life, more or less fully, according to individual development. ”

“ Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much—everything—in a flash—before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. ”

“ It is a law in the universe that a wave of spiritual awakening is always followed by a period of doubting materialism, each phase is necessary in order that the spirit may receive equal development of heart and intellect without being carried too far in either direction. ”

“ The resurrection at our awakening—after that healing attack of mental alienation which is sleep—must after all be similar to what occurs when we recapture a name, a line, a refrain that we had forgotten. And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory. ”

“ The home lacked a living, happy soul to give meaning to the humblest cares; to the most trifling needs, diffusing that spirit of harmony, relaxation, peace, which allows the man of mental activity to follow the course of his thoughts, to gather them and afterwards give expression to them—not in muddled sentences, but with quiet authority, capable of soothing and comforting other people, and awakening them to a realization of the flight of time. So, by an exalted intuition, vague and pathetic—she began to understand the rôle that fate had assigned to her in which she had failed. ”

“ This first glance of a soul which does not yet know itself is like dawn in the heavens; it is the awakening of something radiant and unknown. ”

“ They become illumined by the divine fire permeating its words, and as they turn from the study of its verses enriched for another of life's experiences, the glow of the gleaned awakenings will become a haunting memory leading them back to its precepts for another sunrise and sunset of the spirit. ”

“ There comes a time, however, when by its peregrinations in the sphere of the lower world, the soul gains knowledge of real values, and the awakening spirit, shaking free from the bonds of the flesh, answers to the gravitational pull of a higher or more interior Spiritual Sun which occupies the kenofocus of the great ellipse. ”

“ In the case of such a person as we have been describing, an awakening may be caused by the passionate sorrow and desires of friends left on earth, and these violently vibrating kâmic elements in the embodied persons may set up vibrations in the desire body of the disembodied, and so reach and rouse the lower Manas, not yet withdrawn to and reunited with its parent, the Spiritual Intelligence. ”

“ And the result is the same,—a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. ”

“ Our friend says, too: "Your people must be awakened to a practical realization of the outside world." Many things that are dear to us will then be driven into the background, but should we for that reason, delay the awakening? ”

“ In such a case as that spiritual awakening will be followed by a long period of spiritual struggle against habits of thought and action which we have already formed, a period in which unused and immature spiritual powers must be roused to action and disciplined to use. ”

“ Or a dreaming mind—and its centaurs and canary birds that turn into giraffes—there could be no real biology upon such subjects, but attempt, in a dreaming mind, to systematize such appearances would be movement toward awakening—if better mental co-ordination is all that we mean by the state of being awake—relatively awake. ”

“ I tried to break the spell—the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness—that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions. ”

“ The victim on awakening feels no inconvenience, but sooner or later, sometimes months afterwards, while he is hunting or exerting himself violently in some other way, he will feel the string snap in his inside. ”

“ His thoughts, too, underwent a change: rose and fell with the larger rhythm of new life as the sound played upon them, somewhat as wind may rouse the leaves of a tree, or call upon the surface of a deep sea to follow it in waves. Terror was nowhere in his sensations; but wonder, beauty and delight ran calling to one another from one wave to the next, as this tide of sound moved potently in the depths of his awakening higher consciousness. ”

“ Where are your delights?
Oh, where are you,
The joys of night?
The joyous dream
Is vanished,
And in a deep darkness
I woke up
Alone.
The deathly-still night
Surrounds my bed.
The dreams of love
Grew cold in a moment,
And flew away
As a flock of birds.
But my soul
Is still full of desires,
And catches
The memories of a dream.
O love, O love,
Listen to my prayers,
Send me again
Yours sweet visions,
And in the morning
Let me die
In ecstasy
With no awakening.
1816/1825
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content. ”

“ The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life. ”

“ Yet they are a way of looking at the world, and changing it to suit the ego better. They provide striking examples, both of the ego's inability to tolerate reality, and of your willingness to change reality on its behalf.
You do not find the differences between what you see in sleep and on awaking disturbing. You recognize that what you see on waking is blotted out in dreams. Yet on awakening, you do not expect it to be gone. In dreams you arrange everything. People become what you would have them be, and what they do you order. No limits on substitution are laid upon you. ”