[W]akefulness as it’s expressed in monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam takes people beyond those religions. When people wake up, they lose the sense of being identified with — and the need to belong to — a particular religious tradition. They begin to feel an all-embracing empathy and compassion that takes them beyond the divisions of religious or ethnic groups. As a result, such awakened individuals, even when they are affiliated with one particular religion, are usually ecumenical and open to other faiths. They see all religious and spiritual traditions simply as different paths to the same destination, or different views of the same landscape. Unlike conventionally religious people, they don’t see their tradition’s beliefs as “the truth” and try to defend them against opposing views.

Partly because of this, awakened individuals throughout history have had an uneasy relationship with the religious traditions they were affiliated with. Conventional religious leaders struggled to make sense of mystics’ awakened interpretations of religious teachings and often viewed them as blasphemous. Whereas conventionally religious people conceive of God as a personal being who oversees the world from another dimension of reality, religious mystics see God as an immensely powerful and radiant energy that pervades the whole world. And most radically, religious mystics don’t see this God as separate from themselves. God is the essence of their own being so that, in a sense, they are also God…

When a person becomes awakened, their experience effects the whole of humanity, in the same way that when a light is turned on it illuminates the space all around it.

Steve Taylor, The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening, pp.42-43, 45

For so much of my life I have struggled to make sense of my own instinct for the contemplative life; to accept that my own cumulative experiences of illumination might in fact amount to a kind of awakening; and crucially, that that wakefulness might have significance beyond my own narrow self and its concerns. Perhaps this, more than anything, has been the reason I expended so much effort trying to find a home for myself within organised religion, and why the attempt always proved fruitless in the end, either through my own self-sabotage or through the misunderstandings of others.

I say this, I think, not so much to justify my own somewhat chequered history as to, hopefully, provide a crumb of reassurance to anyone reading this who might find themselves in similar straits.

A couple of chapters later (ibid., p.74) Steve Taylor writes:

When wakefulness occurs in the context of spiritual or religious traditions, a person has a readily available framework (together with the guidance of others who have experienced wakefulness) to help them understand their state. Without such support, naturally wakeful people may experience some confusion and doubt. They may feel threatened by their spiritual impulses and try to repress them. It may take them several years to understand and accept their innate wakefulness fully.

Naturally awakened people who live in cultures that don’t support a spiritual understanding of the world are in particular danger of this difficulty. The values of their culture may clash with their awakened impulses. We all absorb cultural influences as we grow up, and it may take several years for naturally wakeful people to work off their cultural conditioning so that they can begin to live authentically. They may feel a powerful impulse to live a different kind of life — to turn away from materialism and hedonism, to simplify their lives and spend more time in solitude, for example — but it may be a number of years before they feel confident and autonomous enough to follow the impulse. Until then, they may feel an intense sense of frustration because their innate wakefulness can’t express itself.

For me at least, the process seems to have taken most of a lifetime; and yet, hesitant at it has been, its progress has been curiously inexorable. Awakening does have its own momentum; even my own persistently bombu foolishness has not proved equal to the task of impeding it.

It may be that not only has this impulse towards awakening been present in the lives of individual women and men throughout history, but that there is an evolutionary impulse in humanity itself. In which case, the crazy reverses seen so often in the ongoing processes of civilisation may somehow parallel the ones seen in the lives of so many of us contemplatives. Humanity may yet get there; and yet there is no there to get, is there? There are no objects or objectives, no destination: there are only swirls within the eddies in the stream of coming-to-be. The light glints on the bright water, flickers and is gone; no, there it is again, and gone. The only constant is change; and yet there is no changing from, nor changing to. No thing, only change, becoming; every thing and every self is no more than an appearance, fleeting and lovely, nothing more.