Awakening while in College

[Dinkle64]

Hey Everyone,

I couldn't find a better place to put this so I decided to throw this out here.  I just wanted to give my honest thoughts and feelings as to my journey of awakening through college, as well as some struggles in the hope of finding some like minds who could possibly help me out and maybe share their stories too.  I'm in my second year of college now and I'm getting deep into the awakening process, ever since I got the time to do spirituality (because of you know what) I've really pursued it.  The problem is that my transition back into college has been difficult, I'm finding it way harder to make friends and I'm beginning to feel even more isolated than I did when we first went into quarantine.  Nonetheless, I kept pursuing spiritual awakening, and I know that Leo says that this is the path of the awakened minds, it is a lonely one, but I also feel like it's important for me to get some feedback on this.  So what do you guys think, is it possible for me to find like minds in college?  I really do believe that there are other's pursuing a very similar path that I'm on and it would help if I got some guidance from them.  I remember I had a mentor early on but he left, so I've been on my own for a while now.  Has anyone had a similar experience where they've gone deep down the rabbit hole but you feel like you're missing the world outside?  It makes it even more difficult that colleges are purpose built to prepare you for That's just where I'm at, any thoughts would be appreciated!  

[Carl-Richard]

I stopped pursuing awakening after I realized I'm a child. Now I do child stuff. Hoping to grow up soon.

 

1 hour ago, Dinkle64 said:

So what do you guys think, is it possible for me to find like minds in college?

I made friends with a guy last year who had bought Sadhguru's book "Inner Engineering" totally on accident. He was working in a book store and he wanted to be an engineer, so the title looked interesting and he bought the book. He ended up reading half of it and then gave it to me. It seemed like he was open it, but he never took up a spiritual practice, atleast for the year that I went to school with him. He once asked me to explain meditation to him, but you know how it goes.

He was obviously interested in it but his knowledge and experience was close to zero. Personality wise, he seemed like the kind of guy who would pick it up sooner or later (like me, introspective, inquisitive, interested in art and music). He and another dude we hanged out with combined could probably name every single musical artist of the last century. They would probably excel at the bhakti path (if you want to make that distinction) if they got their mind in the right place.

[Guest EmptyVase]

I feel you, I was and still am (to a certain degree) going through that struggle. No compatibility with my surrounding world. When I first stumbled upon the benefits of meditation, I couldn't shut up about it. For months, I blabbered with almost everyone about it. Had to learn the hard way, that they just don't care. That was at the time, where I saw meditation not as something to understand higher truths about reality, but to be more productive, creative and calm. So even that part didn't interest my friends & family, let alone the deeper aspects of it.

Thanks to Spiral Dynamics I gained a deeper understanding, why people are the way they are. So that has already helped me a lot, but I still saw dysfunctionality in social circles, because me and others were not quite on the same page.

I figured a few things:

1) Surround myself with likeminded people (I hadn't had to do that; as I stopped talking about meditation, spirituality, consciousness etc., the people around me kinda naturally gravitated towards these topics, and came to ask me questions about it; I still don't really speak about it with others, unless they are really interested)

2) Become a chameleon (This is where understanding Spiral Dynamics is incredibly useful, because it helps you to adapt, look at the world through very different perspectives, create bridges between your and their perspective, empathize and understand others, thus becoming more compatible; and I think what I listed there are pretty important aspects to master on the spiritual path, as they help immensely in understanding higher teachings)

3) The outer world is a reflection of your inner world (As I became more "spiritually matured", I stopped caring to a certain degree, whether others are on the same page as me. I learned to love "unconscious" people just as much as "more conscious" people. Funny enough, from the people I met this far, I sympathized with "ordinary" people more than those on the spiritual path. Being on a spiritual path doesn't automatically make you a better person. I always assumed that I need spiritual people around me. Of course, when fitting people come around, it's great. But imo it's not a necessity, because you can have a great time and even very deep conversations with people who are not on the path. I realized that you can learn A LOT even by very low conscious persons. And sympathize with them - understanding them and yourself on a deeper level. And thus empathize, making you more loving. The drawback is, when you have deep conversations with unconscious people, they say stuff which is deep and profound - but you are the only one in this conversation, who really can appreciate the depth of the words, which are spoken.
So why is the outer world a reflection of your inner world? As I said, I stopped caring, whether people are spiritual or not. I just focused on becoming more unconditionally loving myself. As a result, my whole environment becomes this really loving place. I love my friends, my family, people I don't know. It's like the world smiles back at you, which is beautiful. I don't know if I could've reached that, if I didn't make great efforts to becoming compatible with the outer world, regardless of their way of being.)

God I hate to classify people into conscious or unconscious categories. I can't even tell, whether I am friggin conscious. But for the sake of this discussion I had to do it lol.

One final note though, as I became more of a chameleon, adjusting myself towards my environment, I became a people pleaser and "lost" my authenticity. But that was more of a personal issue, than the spiritual one you are talking about. Just wanted to put it out there, as this crippled my self-expression in sad ways.

Good luck on your journey!

[Dinkle64]

Yeah that's a really great point actually.  I think it helps when you look at it from the wholistic perspective and just appreciate how beautiful it all is, it's like a never ending pattern where you've got multiple elements that are coming together to form the whole.  In some sense I have been a little obsessive with this but I think it's more excitement than obsession and at the end of the day most people are just not ready for awakening anyway, which is totally fine.  In some ways I kinda miss having someone around to have those conversations with but in other ways I totally agree it can become too much and sometimes you just got to have patience with it and appreciate everyone as they are like you said. 

[Guest EmptyVase]

5 minutes ago, Dinkle64 said:

In some ways I kinda miss having someone around to have those conversations with

Totally feel you on that. ??

[soos_mite_ah]

1 hour ago, EmptyVase said:

3) The outer world is a reflection of your inner world (As I became more "spiritually matured", I stopped caring to a certain degree, whether others are on the same page as me. I learned to love "unconscious" people just as much as "more conscious" people. Funny enough, from the people I met this far, I sympathized with "ordinary" people more than those on the spiritual path. Being on a spiritual path doesn't automatically make you a better person. I always assumed that I need spiritual people around me. Of course, when fitting people come around, it's great. But imo it's not a necessity, because you can have a great time and even very deep conversations with people who are not on the path. I realized that you can learn A LOT even by very low conscious persons. And sympathize with them - understanding them and yourself on a deeper level. And thus empathize, making you more loving. The drawback is, when you have deep conversations with unconscious people, they say stuff which is deep and profound - but you are the only one in this conversation, who really can appreciate the depth of the words, which are spoken.
So why is the outer world a reflection of your inner world? As I said, I stopped caring, whether people are spiritual or not. I just focused on becoming more unconditionally loving myself. As a result, my whole environment becomes this really loving place. I love my friends, my family, people I don't know. It's like the world smiles back at you, which is beautiful. I don't know if I could've reached that, if I didn't make great efforts to becoming compatible with the outer world, regardless of their way of being.)

God I hate to classify people into conscious or unconscious categories. I can't even tell, whether I am friggin conscious. But for the sake of this discussion I had to do it lol.

I think that this is the best piece of advice here when it comes to what to do when you don't resonate with your surroundings. 

Even though it is good to grow and track where you are on your journey using a model like spiral dynamics, I feel that it's easy to make something like spiral dynamics just another man made hierarchy. This happens when we put value judgements on stages and label them as conscious and unconscious and decide who is worthy of connection from there. Don't get me wrong, there are levels of development that are higher quality and resonate better with some individuals, but what i mean by value judgement is along the lines of "I can't connect with anyone because they are too unconscious" or "these people aren't worth talking to because of their level of consciousness." That can get toxic and turn into a competition and not in a good way.  Regardless where other people are in their journey, you can still empathize and connect to other people even if you are further along. 

I believe that hierarchies based on value judgements are what separate stage orange (man made hierarchies) from the natural hierarchies in stage yellow (while stage green is just flattening hierarchies and getting rid of value judgements so you can move to yellow). For instance, lets say you have a test that measures out how smart you are. An orange person will look at it and say that "hey person x is better than person y because of their IQ and therefore person x should be treated better and is more worthy of connection." Stage green will say "person x and person y have the same value because scores don't matter since they are human beings and you shouldn't base a person's value on their IQ." Both of these have a partial truth. Stage yellow and above sees this and says "person x is smarter than person y which can be valuable in certain contexts (like prediction of academic performance) but as far as being human goes, both deserve dignity and respect because they have the same value." These statements for each of the stages may not be conscious but it can be reflected based on how they treat people and what triggers them. 

I hope that analogy/ example makes sense in how you can apply that to a person's development. Just replace smarts with consciousness and IQ with spiral stages.