From my perspective, spiritual awakening begins with one of the deepest wounds of the human condition: the experience of separation from our true nature as souls.
We are born into this world with little conscious memory of who we are or where we came from, compressed into the limitations of a physical body and its five senses, far removed from the vastness of what we are as souls. We are dependent on those around us for survival. We instinctively learn to adapt ourselves to secure safety, love, belonging and connection. What begins as a biological imperative often becomes a way of being. We suppress aspects of our authentic self that feel unwelcome or unsafe to express, relegating them to the shadows of the subconscious. Traumatic experiences can fragment our consciousness still further.
Before we are old enough to question or discern anything, we inherit beliefs, identities and narratives that are not our own. We become confined within thought prisons that tell us who we are, what this reality is and how it works. We are programmed and conditioned to believe that love, truth, power, permission , knowledge and authority exist outside of us.
We learn to identify and define ourselves through the conceptual mind—personality, history, roles and relationships—Our attention and sense of self become so consumed by the external and the demands of being human that we lose sight of something extraordinary:
Who we really are.
You don’t have a soul, you are a soul
You are not a human being trying to find your soul.
You are a soul remembering itself through a human experience.
You may have always lived with the feeling that something was missing—A longing you could never fully articulate or satisfy.
For a while, that longing can be suppressed. The further we become separated from the truth of who we are as souls, the more we search outside ourselves for what can only be found by remembering who we have always been. We can distract or numb ourselves. We can be on autopilot to adapt, achieve, consume, conform and construct lives around the identity we have assumed.
Until, for some of us, we can’t anymore.
Spiritual awakening begins when the soul’s longing to remember itself can no longer be suppressed.
Sometimes it is catalysed by a before-and-after event: bereavement, trauma, heartbreak, illness, upheaval or another experience that fractures our existing understanding of ourselves and reality. Sometimes the catalyst is less dramatic—a growing dissatisfaction with a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside, an inexplicable sense of disconnection, or the creeping realisation that the reality we have been sold no longer makes sense.
The existential questions we once managed to avoid become impossible to ignore:
This is the white rabbit.
The question that leads to another question drawing us deeper down the rabbit hole.
And so begins the labyrinthine journey of remembrance
Spiritual awakening is what happens when the longing to remember becomes stronger than the system that taught us to forget. It is the process of remembering ourselves as souls by progressively seeing through everything that taught us to believe we were only human.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for the stages of spiritual awakening. It is often non-linear and it’s a deeply personal odyssey, informed by the uniqueness of who we are as a human and as a soul.
Yet certain patterns do recur. The archetypal Hero’s and Heroine’s Journeys can offer useful maps—not as prescriptive phases, but as landmarks that help us find our bearings. They cannot tell us which path we will take, in what order, or how often we may circle back through familiar ground. The map can orient us, but the terrain is ours to traverse.
One of the most compelling depictions of contemporary spiritual awakening in popular culture appeared in the iconic science-fiction film, The Matrix. Long before Neo was told to follow the white rabbit, mythologist Joseph Campbell identified a recurring pattern running through myths and stories from cultures around the world. He called it the monomyth, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey:
The hero begins in the ordinary world, until something disrupts the familiar and calls them beyond it. They may resist at first, but eventually cross a threshold into an unfamiliar reality where they encounter allies, adversaries and tests. An ordeal follows—often a symbolic death of the person they believed themselves to be—before something previously hidden is revealed. They can never return to the ordinary world in the same way because they have been changed by what they now know.
The Matrix follows this arc.
Neo begins as Thomas Anderson, living what appears to be an average human life. He has a job, an apartment and an accepted place within society. Yet something bothers him. Beneath the apparent normality is a nagging intuition that something about reality is wrong.
So he searches. He follows clues. He encounters Trinity and eventually Morpheus, who offers him the Alice in Wonderland choice that has become one of the defining metaphors of spiritual awakening:
Take the blue pill and return to the reality you have always known.
Take the red pill and discover what is actually there.
Neo chooses truth. And the world he thought he knew collapses.
He discovers that the reality he had accepted as real—the reality reinforced by family, education, science, religion and society—is not reality at all, but a simulation. The world he thought he inhabited, the history he had been taught and even his understanding of what he was had all been constructed within it.
The revelation does more than give Neo new information. It destroys the framework through which he had previously understood everything. There is no returning to Thomas Anderson’s old life because there is no returning to believing the Matrix is real once he has seen what lies behind it.
That is the red-pill moment: the glimpse behind the curtain that cannot be unseen.
Neo does not merely understand the Matrix intellectually. He awakens from it through direct experience. He knows. That is gnosis.
The revelations about the nature of reality that we experience as we awaken can be exhilarating and inspiring, opening your mind to possibilities you may never have imagined. But spiritual awakening can also be disorienting, distressing and isolating. Not everything you encounter is comfortable or reassuring, And once you begin questioning consensus reality, you can find yourself feeling like an outsider—not only to the mainstream, but sometimes even to family and friends you have known forever.
Initially, there can be an almost irresistible urge to tell everyone what you are realising because it feels so mind-blowing: How can they not see this? How can they not want to know? But you soon learn that not everyone is ready—or willing—to question the reality that makes them feel safe.
There is a reason Cypher, the traitorous character in The Matrix, eventually asks, “Why, oh, why didn’t I take the blue pill?” Awakening is often romanticised, but there are moments when ignorance can look like bliss. You may have followed the white rabbit, but the people you love may have no desire to tumble down the rabbit hole with you. And once you have taken the red pill, there is no going back—you can only do as Morpheus promised and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
The Matrix is a powerful and effective metaphor for waking up to our external reality not being what it seems. But this is where I think our pop-cultural understanding of spiritual awakening becomes incomplete. Spiritual awakening is not only about Campbell’s Hero’s Journey of seeing through the illusions around us; eventually, we have to confront the illusions within us.
Psychotherapist Maureen Murdock developed the Heroine’s Journey partly in response to the limitations she perceived in Campbell’s model.
The distinction goes deeper than the protagonist’s gender; the two journeys reflect fundamentally different energetic movements—the Hero’s Journey through masculine energy and the Heroine’s Journey through feminine energy.
Where the Hero’s Journey propels us outward, into the unknown, the Heroine’s Journey draws us inward, into the unknown within ourselves.
Murdock’s heroine initially seeks fulfilment in the external world. She strives, achieves, proves herself and may even attain precisely what she thought she wanted. Then she encounters what Murdock calls the illusory boon of success.
She has reached the destination. So why does something still feel missing?
The strategies that brought her here can take her no further. What once provided identity, purpose and validation begins to feel hollow. The outward journey has reached its limits, and the direction of travel changes.
The ascent becomes a descent. We stop looking for answers outside of ourselves and go within. As we begin to recognise that we are not our thoughts but the consciousness observing them, our identification with the self constructed around those thoughts starts to loosen. We begin deconstructing the egoic identity—through which we had defined ourselves.
In spiritual circles, this is often described as “ego death.” I see it differently. As long as we are human, the ego has a function. It gives us a sense of self, helps us distinguish self from others, establish boundaries, make decisions and navigate the physical world. Nor is ego inherently the enemy of creativity or achievement; many beautiful human expressions have arisen through the desire to create, accomplish, distinguish ourselves and leave a legacy.
The work, then, is not to annihilate or demonise the ego, but to change our relationship with it.
The ego remains part of the human experience, but it no longer runs the show. The soul becomes the compass; the ego learns to follow.
This can be one of the rawest, messiest and most uncomfortable stages of awakening, The long dark nights of the soul as the life built by versions of ourselves we created to survive begins to crumble around us. The descent takes us into the Void: the liminal space where the old self is dissolving, but what comes next has yet to take form. You know you cannot go back. But you cannot yet see what lies ahead.
It can be lonely as we begin to realise that there are more friendships and relationships that may not continue with us into this next chapter.
In my own journey, there were periods when I felt like a Hermit—withdrawing while I tried to understand who I was becoming. It can also be very challenging for the mind, which craves certainty and must learn instead to tolerate uncertainty.
We are triggered. We meet our shadow and all those parts of ourselves that we rejected, suppressed or abandoned in order to survive and belong in the Matrix. This is the deeper work of coming into wholeness, coherence and authentic expression as a soul.
The temptation is to escape the discomfort of this inner work, reaching for what feels good in spiritual bypassing which is promoted by practices within the New Age movement. But the descent asks us to do the opposite: to remain with ourselves in the Void.
The Matrix anticipated our seeking beyond its limitations and illusions and through the False Ascension Matrix, it attempts to intercept and co-opt our spiritual awakening itself.
Instead of continuing inward towards the heart of the labyrinth, we can be tricked into exchanging one external authority for another and diverted into endless loops of seeking, waiting and looking outside ourselves for someone or something to reveal what has always been within.
What you are as a soul is vast and powerful beyond comprehension
That is why the Matrices are so invested in making us forget: to keep us in spiritual enslavement. It is only when we begin to awaken beyond them that we can recognise the even deeper layers of energetic and etheric interference that have suppressed and distorted the authentic expression of what we are as souls.
For me, the greatest gift of spiritual awakening is what it reveals within us: the deeper we go, the vaster we become. Psychic abilities awaken, dormant talents come online and soul memories emerge, giving us access to knowledge and capacities we may never have imagined possible. There is a profound sense of wonder in realising that what once seemed magical was latent within us all along—and that we are only beginning to discover what we are capable of.
Let the greatest mystery you explore be what you are as a soul.
Within the labyrinth, there are wrong turns, dead ends and paths that promise to lead us home but take us further from ourselves. Discernment is what keeps us from being lulled back to sleep and enables us to move beyond manipulation and control to reclaim our sovereignty as souls.
I offer this in humility from my current level of consciousness. I remain curious. Assume nothing. Question everything. Clear all distortions and energetic interference. And as a soul, ask yourself: what is your truth?