False awakening is false peace is false service || Acharya Prashant (2019)
Questioner (Q): After an initial period of spiritual awakening and consequent exploration, I radically transformed many areas of my life, including leaving a secure European life to live and work in rural communities in India. The sense of calling, satisfaction and peace were very strong. But for the first time in my life, I felt my urgency of searching aborted. For around one year, due to both materialistic and spiritual reasons, I am questioning this calling, which was once so strong. I suffer from, firstly, the loss of sense of calling and secondly, confusion about what to do next, although a sense of service is still very strong. Can you please help me understand and manage this?
Acharya Prashant (AP): First of all, there is nothing called an episodic spiritual awakening. There is nothing called a ‘period of spiritual awakening’. All periods are associated only with the body, the soul does not have periods. People often come and start off this way, “There was a time when I was bathing in bliss. And now, it's all gone.” If it's gone, it's gone for good. If it's gone, be grateful, because it was never real at all. There is no need to cherish its memory as something authentic.
The real cannot go away. The ‘seen' cannot be unseen. The ‘understood' cannot be un-understood. Or, can it be? Yes, clouds float and dissolve into various forms; one separate from the other, one different from the other, and sometimes they all just fade away. The sky never undergoes a transformation. Day and night are episodes; skyness is not. Or is it? You may have a dust storm, you may have dense clouds, you may have the twilight sun, you may have the pitch-dark night—does any of this have any relation with skyness?
If something has come and gone, it only means that it is related to something ephemeral, something corporal, something worldly. It anyway did not deserve to be eternal, it did not deserve to live, so it went away. Why do we all die? Because we don't deserve to live. Only the Truth deserves to live; only the Truth is immortal. We are mortal, so we go away.
