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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Steve Taylor. Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the author of several books on psychology and spirituality, including The Calm Center and The Leap. Eckhart Tolle has described his work as an important contribution to the shift in consciousness that’s happening right now on our planet. With Sounds True, Steve Taylor has created a new audio teaching series called Return to Harmony: From Turmoil to Transformation, where he shows how to return to the essential harmony that’s at the core of our being—back to the fundamental state of peace and presence.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Steve and I spoke about three different types of spiritual awakening: natural awakening, the gradual path of spiritual practice, and the sudden awakening that can come from psychological distress and trauma. We also talked about how there are degrees of spiritual awakening and the core characteristics of wakefulness. We talked about what Steve calls the “wakeful self system” and how when the ego dissolves—in his experience—there is a latent higher self that like a bird can emerge fully formed in our experience. Finally, we talked about spiritual awakening as part of an evolutionary process—how we went through “a fall,” as Steve describes it, 6,000 years ago and are now at the edge of what he calls an “evolutionary leap.” Here’s my conversation with Steve Taylor:
Steve, I’m excited to talk to you because one of your areas of writing and research is something that I’m intensely interested in myself, which is the connection between spiritual awakening and difficult passages in our life. And I know you wrote your master’s dissertation on people who had undergone a shift following some type of intense trauma or turmoil. I wonder if we can start there: why you decided to write your master’s dissertation on that topic and how you went about it—how you went writing your paper.
Steve Taylor: Yes. Well, it was something I was always interested in. Partly because around that time—a couple of years before I did my master’s thesis, I had an experience which was along similar lines to that: when I became seriously ill for fortunately, probably the only time in my life so far I was seriously ill. I was in hospital for three or four weeks, and when I started to recover from my illness and I realized that I was going to get better, I felt this incredible sense of appreciation—appreciation of my own body. I was appreciative of the amazing healing powers of my body and the energy that was flowing back into me. And also, I became very appreciative of life itself—you know, the sheer fact of the miracle of being alive and the privilege of being awake to this beautiful world and all of the experiences we can have in it.
So, I expected those feelings to fade away. Most feelings that we have are of a temporary duration, they tend to fade after a while. But this sense of appreciation kind of stayed with me and I realized after a while that it wasn’t going to fade. It was going to be part of my ongoing experience.
So, I began to investigate similar experiences of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and had kind of a spiritual awakening as a result of that. People who’d suffered from bereavement and undergone a personal transformation in the aftermath of that.
I began to realize that it’s not uncommon for people to go through these traumatic episodes and to undergo a spiritual awakening as a result of it. So that became—as you say, that became my master’s thesis and I later wrote about it a lot in my books as well.
TS: Now Steve, how do you define a spiritual awakening? Because a lot of people use that term and mean different things by it. What do you mean by it?
ST: What I mean by it is—you could refer to it simply as an expansion and an intensification of awareness. When we use the term “awakening,” we’re implying that there was a kind of sleep, which is normal to human beings, and I think that’s true. I think to a large extent, the normal human state is to be relatively asleep—to live in this limited sphere of awareness and this limited sense of self-absorption and self-centeredness.
But in spiritual awakening, there’s this sudden—well, I say “sudden,” but it can also be gradual. It can be very gradual over decades of spiritual practice. But whether it’s sudden or whether it’s gradual, there’s an expansion of awareness. We become aware of more reality outside us and also we become aware of more inside us. There’s this kind of opening up to depths of our own being, and there’s an opening up to greater subtle ranges and wider ranges of reality. So, there’s an expansion of awareness in many different areas.
TS: Now, you wrote a book called Waking from Sleep, and the subtitle is Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent. So, let’s start with the second part, How to Make Them Permanent, because I’m imagining many people right now who have said, “You know, I’ve gone through an experience like Steve is describing—of being ill for a period of time, or something like that; being injured or having a loss. Maybe with the loss, my heart really opened. With the illness I had great appreciation for my body when I recovered. Then that lasted for a while and it faded.”
So, you described your own experience—that there was more of a permanent transformation that happened. How do people make their awakening experiences permanent? Or how do they become permanent?
ST: Well, like a lot of experiences, in order to grow from an experience, we first of all have to acknowledge the experience. This is particularly the case with trauma and challenging periods of our lives. With some people, there’s a temptation to push them away, not to acknowledge them as a reality because obviously we want to experience as little pain as possible. We assume that by facing up to the enormity of a situation, that means experiencing more pain. But that’s not actually the case. When we actually face up to situations or predicaments, we find to our surprise that they actually become less painful. Once we face up to them, we have to also accept them.
So, there’s two stages: there’s the stage of acknowledgement and there’s a stage of acceptance. I found in my research that transformation following turmoil almost always occurs when a person goes through a stage of acceptance. Often at the very moment when they accept their situation, they undergo transformation. So, it’s almost as if—it’s a question of surrender almost. You surrender to your predicament and you let go of your resistance in that predicament, and then an almost alchemical process occurs—a process of transformation.
That’s one thing. But also I found that in some cases, it’s almost as if when people undergo transformation in these circumstances, it’s almost as if there’s a kind of latent higher self, which is waiting to be born in them. This higher self is ready to emerge. It’s like a bird which is ready to hatch from an egg, and sometimes it needs a kind of breakdown of the ordinary self. It needs the old ego to break down and fade away for this new, latent higher self to emerge. So, sometimes it’s just a question of whether somebody’s ready to undergo that transformation.
TS: You write about what you’re calling here in this conversation “a latent higher self.” You write about it in your book The Leap as “the wakeful self system.” I thought this was so interesting, this term: “The wakeful self system that is ready to emerge in certain people.” Tell me more about it. What is a wakeful self system like? And it’s not a self; it’s a self system and it’s wakeful.
ST: Yes. Well, in order to understand that, you really need to think about what I call “the self system of sleep,” which is kind of the ordinary or the present normal human condition. If you think about it, our mind consists of a lot of different functions and processes and we have a sense of identity. We have a sense of boundary between ourselves and the world, or between ourselves and other people. And we have various kind of processes and mechanisms which determine our perception, how we perceive the world, how we relate to the world, and so on.
In the normal human state, all of these processes create a certain vision of the world. In the normal state, they create a kind of limited vision of the world and kind of restricted vision of the world, which I call “sleep.”
When people undergo spiritual transformation, it’s as if a new self system takes over with a whole range of different processes and mechanisms. For example, one difference is in the wakeful self system, I find that people still have a sense of identity. The sense of identity doesn’t completely fade away. Even if it becomes a lot softer and a lot more subtle, it doesn’t usually fade away completely. But, it’s a different sense of identity.
In the normal human state, an identity is very, very egocentric. There’s a very strong sense of boundary. But in the wakeful self system, a person’s identity is much more connected. It’s much more fluid and there’s no sense of separation. It still has an identity, but there’s no sense of separation from the world or from other people. The wakeful self system also has a different way of perceiving the world; it perceives the world in a much more real and vivid way. In some ways, it’s similar to the kind of heightened, intensified perception which young children have. So it’s almost a kind of full circle, which returns in some ways to childhood.
TS: Now, you talked about acknowledgement and surrender when something really difficult like a big grief happens, and that this is what’s needed for there to be some type of awakening and this potential for the wakeful self system to come online. But I’m thinking of lots of people I know who have been through very difficult experiences where I do think they acknowledged what happened and there’s certainly some level of surrender or acceptance. Maybe they’ve been in therapy and they’re like, “Yes, I accept this loss of a child or this trauma that happened in my life.” But I don’t know if I would say their wakeful self system emerged in the process. At least, it doesn’t appear that way to me, knowing the people I thinking of as you’re talking.
ST: Yes. Well, it could be—one thing I found in my research was that although some people undergo transformation very suddenly and dramatically through one particular instant of turmoil or trauma, often it’s very intense trauma over a period of a few months or possibly even a few years that slowly breaks down the ego until there’s a sudden moment of collapse, almost a moment of ego collapse. In other people, it took longer. It took several years of different incidents—not just a single incident of trauma, but several different incidents. You could compare it to an earthquake, and in some ways that’s a good metaphor because we’re talking about the breakdown of the ego, the breakdown of the normal self system.
So, in some people, if the earthquake is very strong, the house collapses straight away. In other people, it may take several different tremors or earthquakes for the house to collapse altogether over a longer period of time.
So, there’s some variation amongst different people. Other people had a period of very gradual spiritual awakening over a long period and then there was a sudden incident of turmoil which broke the ego down. But it may also be the question of—people mature in different ways over different time periods. So, maybe some people that—kind of unconsciously, their latent higher self is still maturing and still preparing to emerge—it’s not quite ready yet.
TS: Now, it’s so interesting to me—I’m going to keep with this wakeful self system for a moment—a lot of times when people talk about experiences where there’s an ego dissolution, they don’t talk about this other sense, as you’re describing it, as a higher self. They talk about “no self,” a sense of selflessness. So, help me understand this higher self, wakeful self, and why you call it a “self system.”
ST: Yes. Well, I don’t refer to “no self.” I prefer to refer to “a new self.” So, spiritual awakening is not a kind of a transition to no self, it’s transition to a new self—I think maybe because I’ve got a background in psychology and I’m very aware of psychosis.
I’ve met a lot of people, investigated a lot of cases of psychosis, and I’m very aware that if psychosis means anything, it means a breakdown of the self. It means a state of no self in which the self system doesn’t function at all. Now, there is really no self system there at all and therefore there’s just a confusion of perceptions and impressions and thoughts and feelings with nothing to integrate them, nothing to tie them together.
So, I think of no self—really, truly speaking from a psychological point of view—no self is equivalent to psychosis. So, what I think happens when people go through spiritual awakening is it may appear to some people that they’re transitioning to a state of no self. But really, what’s happening is that the self system has become so subtle, so soft that it’s barely noticeable. In the normal human state, the mental processes and the sense of ego, the sense of identity is so powerful that it’s very obvious that there is a kind of identity or a kind of self system there. But in wakefulness, it becomes so subtle that it’s—unless you’re very aware of your own mental processes, you may not realize that anything is there at all.
I sometimes use a metaphor that in the normal human state, the self system is like a big metropolis—it’s like New York City, which is a powerful metropolis and it’s kind of divorced from the landscape it’s a part of. The city seems so powerful that it almost takes over from the whole of nature. But when somebody undergoes spiritual awakening, the self system becomes more like a very small eco-village, which is totally integrated into the whole landscape and where the boundaries of the village merge into the landscape. To some inhabitants, it may not even be noticeable they’re actually living in a village or a town because it’s so soft and so subtle and so blended into the landscape.
TS: And why do you say that this new wakeful self system is already in us or in certain people? You used the word “latent” and you said [it’s] sort of like a bird that’s ready to bust open and fly open.
ST: Because when people undergo spiritual transformation following intense trauma such as bereavement, or a diagnosis of cancer, or an encounter with death and their normal self system breaks down—their normal ego breaks down—in those moments in a matter of a few seconds, a new identity seems to unfold inside them and to become their normal self. It’s almost like a butterfly forming out of a chrysalis.
It’s in place straight away. This new self, this new self system is there. It’s completely intact. As a structure, it’s completely there with no further development and it is almost as if it was there already. It was already in place, just waiting for this moment to emerge.
To me, that suggests that it is there already. It’s the next stage of human growth, if you like, which is waiting to unfold in us as individuals and it’s waiting to unfold in us collectively as a species.
TS: In your interviews with people, and now because you’ve done so much writing on this topic—I know you’ve had lots of conversations with people—I wonder if you find individuals who feel that they’re straddling two worlds. Part of them is living in the ecosystem, part of them is still living in the metropolis, and they feel kind of bounced back between both, and it’s confusing and maybe even quite difficult.
ST: Definitely, yes. Yes, sometimes I feel a bit like that myself. Yes, particularly the demands of the modern world, the demands that are placed on individuals in modern society, and the kind of stress and responsibilities we have to take on.
Yes, it can be difficult, and there’s often a stage following spiritual awakening which is quite tricky, particularly when spiritual awakening occurs very suddenly and dramatically. It takes a while sometimes for it to settle down. There’s often a period of integration and a period of adjustment. Partly it depends on whether a person whether a person understands and can accept what’s happened to them because a lot of people who undergo sudden spiritual awakening don’t have a background in spiritual practice. They don’t know about spiritual traditions. In many cases, they’re just seemingly so-called ordinary people who live a seemingly ordinary life and they undergo this sudden transformation. Often they don’t really understand what’s happened to them. They may be confused about it and they may try and talk about it to their friends and relatives who think they’ve gone a bit crazy.
So, after a while they may begin to doubt what’s happened to them. On top of that, there may be some psychological disturbances if their transformation is very sudden and very dramatic. There may even be physical problems. Some people may have a kind of Kundalini-like experiences where energy seems to explode through their being and it can give rise to physical issues like unexplained pains or a kind of restlessness in their body.
So, it can take a while for these problems to fade away, but usually—even if it takes a few years—in my experience and in my research, these problems do always fade away. See, again, it’s a bit like if you return to the metaphor of an earthquake. If you imagine an earthquake in incredibly slow motion where the ground erupts and buildings gradually fall down, but slowly the ground settles again and the landscape returns to stability. So, it’s a little bit like that.
TS: Now Steve, I’m going to say something here. It’s a little inside joke at Sounds True, but let’s see what you have to say about it. “Spiritual awakening isn’t always good for business.” Meaning here we are, we’re a spiritual awakening company, but when people go through it, they’re not sometimes at their most productive and effective. What do you think about that?
ST: Yes. That can be true. Yes, particularly—as I was saying in the kind of initial stages, where it can be difficult to live an ordinary life because you do feel like you’re straddling two worlds and you’re having to deal with the responsibilities of everyday life at the same time as undergoing this strange journey, this strange inner transformation, and it can kind of knock you off course for a while, and it can make it difficult for you to concentrate, even difficult for you to be productive and to be active in ordinary life.
But as I say, in my experience—my personal experience and in my research—eventually, once the transition settles, once it becomes integrated, then in some ways people often become more productive. They may be less busy, but in some ways they become more authentically productive and more creative in their lives.
So, I think in the end it works itself out.
TS: Now, let’s speak to that person who perhaps is finding themselves in some kind of transition like this because I think it very well may be some of our listeners right now. You said one of the things that’s helpful is to have a context to understand what’s happening. What else helps when you find yourself in a deeply expansive—you talked about this increased intensity of perception and a sense of openness, [boundlessness], yet you’re in the middle of the demands of your life. Maybe it’s work demands, maybe it’s the demands of parenting. Here’s Steve Taylor saying, “It may take a few years, but it’s going to turn out good.” But you know, a few years? That’s a real thing.
ST: Yes. That’s true. But I’ve found that it partly depends on the environment a person is in. If they’re in a supportive environment where people understand them, where people can support them, then that helps a lot. In a lot of the situations where it’s problematic, it’s partly because of the confusion that surrounds them because other people around them think they’ve gone crazy and they start to think they’ve gone crazy. There’s nobody to offer them any kind of therapeutic support or any support at all. That intensifies any potential problems.
But if a person is in a supportive environment—particularly if they can make contact with other people who are going through the same journey or other people who have actually completed the journey or that stage of the journey—then that helps a lot. So, context is really important—support and having the right context to make sense of your experience.
But there are other more practical steps as well. For example, contact with nature is fantastic for—because of the sense of stillness, which can really settle you down if you’re going through a kind of tricky energetic awakening. Nature can really soothe you and really ground you and really connect you.
And if possible at all, it’s very helpful to withdraw a little bit. Maybe if it’s possible at all, take some time off—take a couple of weeks off work and just try and slow down as much as you can. Just try to gain the understanding and support of other people around you, to make them understand that you need this space, you need this period of reclusiveness and withdrawal in order to allow this transformation to take place.
And also things like diet: you know, there’s some useful guidelines in terms of diet. You need to keep to a very grounded diet—not too much spicy food, avoid alcohol for a while, and just a very sort of simple, basic, grounded diet just because that can help to kind of settle you down and take away the kind of explosive potential of the energy inside you.
Yes, creativity is also very important for periods of being able to express yourself, to allow these emotions to flow out of you.
So yes, in many ways, you need to surround yourself with a therapeutic supportive environment as much as you can.
TS: OK, now I want to circle back around to something that I don’t know if we fully answered. I don’t know if we answered it sufficiently. We were talking about the subtitle of your book, Waking from Sleep: Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent. So, I’m very interested in this “how to make them permanent” part of that—for the person who says, “Look, I’ve had some unbelievable tastes, but I keep returning to my old egoic self again and again. And even in this conversation, God, I wish I was in more of an integration process. Truth be told, I’m longing for the kind of opening Steve’s describing here.”
ST: Well, I think first of all it’s useful to look into—you know, the first part of the question, “why awakening experiences occur.” In that book, I’m really talking about temporary awakening experiences, which often come through contact with nature. They sometimes come from meditation or yoga, or other the forms of spiritual practice. Or sometimes they come from creativity—creative performances like playing music or dancing. Just for a few seconds or a few hours or maybe even a few days, we glimpse this more expansive, more intensified awareness, and we have a sense of meaning. Everything seems to make sense and we feel this sense of harmony and this sense of connection.
But as you say, often these experiences do fade away. We feel as if we’re kind of stuck and we become trapped in our ordinary self again, and there’s a sense of absence or a sense of lack because we’ve tasted this wider vista of reality. From that point of view, it’s a question of what I call building up a state of intensified, instilled life energy because most awakening experiences—some of them come through psychological turmoil, but most awakening experiences come from an inner change inside us where our inner energies become stilled, our minds become quieter, and our whole life energy seems to intensify inside us. That seems to allow these awakening experiences to occur.
So, over a long period of time—over years or maybe longer; decades—we can slowly build up this state of intensified, instilled life energy. I think that’s the main aim of every spiritual tradition—every spiritual practice even—throughout history: to slowly and gradually build up this intensified life energy state.
So, meditation is a fantastic way of doing that because meditation slowly quiets the mind on a permanent basis. It slowly builds up our energies, our internal psychic energy, and it leads to—gradually, over years, it leads to a more vivid perception of the world and it also softens our ego boundaries so that we have a greater sense of connection to the world around us.
Also, like service—you know, living a life of service. I’m sure many people do this already, but it’s very important to include a strongly altruistic element in your life and as many acts of kindness as possible, regular acts of service—partly because, again, that creates a sense of connection between you and other people, between you and the world, and it softens your ego boundaries. It makes you less self-centered.
So, regular meditation, regular service, also regular contact with nature, and a host of other methods, many of which are involved in many of the world’s spiritual traditions. Over time they all lead to this intensified inner state, which is equivalent to a wakeful state—a spiritual awakened state.
TS: Now Steve, you mentioned the time that you spent when you were ill and the transformation that happened through that. Have you also studied with a spiritual teacher or been on a path yourself? And if so, could you describe that for us?
ST: Well, in my book The Leap, one of the things I say is that spiritual awakening usually happens in three different ways. The first way is when it’s just natural to somebody, when they don’t have to do anything to be awakened, they don’t need to follow any spiritual practices, they don’t need to undergo a sudden transformation because it’s just there inside them and it’s just a question of allowing this natural awakening to manifest itself. The second way is when spiritual awakening happens gradually through years of following a spiritual practice or a spiritual path. The third way is when it happens very suddenly and very dramatically, which is what we’ve mainly talked about so far tonight—when it happens following intense psychological turmoil.
But if I think back to my own life, I was probably an example of the first case. I was somebody who I think always had a natural awakening inside them—a natural spirituality inside me. It was really just a question of understanding that natural spirituality and accepting it and allowing it to express itself in my life.
But at the same time, I have meditated for a long time, maybe 20 years now. The only teacher I’ve regularly visited is a man called Russel Williams. He was a teacher who was—I say “was” because sadly he died about one month ago at the age of 96. But he was kind of loosely affiliated with Buddhism, although he didn’t call himself a Buddhist. But he was very useful to me in kind of confirming my spiritual insights and giving me guidance and allowing me to understand and accept my spirituality.
Yes, and also just being in his presence—it was such a beautiful experience to spend time in his presence because he had such a powerful radiance around him. It was like sort of bathing in a stream of golden radiance, just being in his presence.
TS: Now, in describing these three different kinds of—you call these people “shifters” (people who have this wakefulness about them)—that there are three different kinds. You said that the naturally awake people are the smallest percentage, but that the largest percentage—the most common people who have made a shift like this—are people who have suffered psychological turmoil or real trauma. Is that what your research has shown?
ST: Yes. I think that’s partly because when people undergo awakening through a sudden transformation following psychological turmoil, they usually shift to a pretty intense level of awakening. I think there were lots of gradations of wakefulness. It’s not a kind of either/or situation. There are lots of different intensities—low intensity awakening to a very high intensity awakening—and people who undergo—the shifters, the people who undergo this sudden transformation, they usually transform into a very intensely awakened state.
Whereas I think there are a lot of people—there obviously many millions of people who are gradually awakening through following spiritual paths and practices, but that tends to be almost unnoticeable sometimes because it’s so gradual and often the awakening isn’t quite as intense as it is through sudden transformation through turmoil.
TS: I think in describing the fact that there can be these different degrees of awakening—in a sense, that’s so intuitively obvious. You think about it, “Yes, that makes sense,” from all the people that I know, from all the people that I’ve interviewed. And yet when people talk about spiritual awakening, it often seems like it’s either you are or you’re not. But when you put it in this context of degrees of awakening, it actually makes a lot more sense. Don’t you think?
ST: I think so. Yes, I think the idea that you are either awakened or you’re not—I think that is quite harsh in a way. It kind of belittles a lot of people who are obviously awakened to a degree, even if they’re not intensely awakened. You can’t write those people off by saying they’re still asleep.
I think there are a lot of myths about spiritual awakening that have grown up and become common views. I think that’s one of them—this idea that you’re either awakened or you’re not.
TS: I also think it helps us in understanding people we’ve met who in some areas of their life seem awakened. They might have that radiant quality that you were talking about in the gentleman that was your teacher in the United Kingdom, but maybe some part of their life doesn’t seem transformed. I think that can often be hard to understand. “I don’t get it. This person seems so intensely alive and boundless in some ways, but then I get to know them well and I can see this part doesn’t seem very transformed.”
ST: Yes, that’s true. I mean, I think that’s another of the myths. You know, one of the myths about spiritual awakening is that awakened people are perfect. They live in a state of bliss and everything they do is naturally perfect. They are incapable of doing anything wrong and they are incapable of feeling any negative emotions or causing any suffering to themselves or other people. But again, that’s an idealization, a kind of romanticization of spiritual awakening.
In reality, because there are so many different gradations of awakening, some people do—they have clearly experienced a degree of awakening, but they’re still dealing with certain aspects of their personality, and it’s a process. Awakening can be a long process of integration.
Even when somebody undergoes sudden awakening, it doesn’t automatically wipe the slate clean, so to speak. It doesn’t automatically mean that they are free from all negative traits—that they’ll never feel anger again or never feel regret or bitterness ever again. Often personality traits are very deeply ingrained and they can linger for a long time following a sudden awakening. And maybe a person never becomes completely free of them, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not awakened. We are still human beings and nobody is ever going to be completely free of any normal human traits.
TS: Now I know, Steve, as part of your work in helping people understand genuine spiritual awakening—as compared to what could be considered imitation in some sense—you’ve created a list of characteristics of wakefulness. What are those characteristics, especially for someone whose listening and they’re trying to understand in their own life? “Huh, I wonder where I am in the process.”
ST: Well, there’s quite a lot of them. I think we identified about 20 in our research. One useful way of thinking about them is to think of different categories.
So, first of all, we can think of perceptual characteristics. So, in terms of perception, awakened people have a more intense perception of the world around them. They perceive the world as more beautiful, more vivid, and more fascinating than other people. Again, it’s a little bit like the kind of fresh, intense perception of childhood. And also in terms of perception, awakened people are very present-centered; the future and the past are not really important to them. They’re still aware of them and they still make plans for the future; they’re still aware of what happened to them in the past. But those things are not really—their attention is almost always focused on the present.
You can also think in terms of effective characteristics, which really means the kind of interchanges which awakening brings. So, there’s an inner change in terms of the way people relate to their thoughts. Sometimes their minds become very quiet. There’s less random association or chatter in their minds. Maybe it doesn’t disappear completely; I think that’s maybe another myth about awakening—that the mind becomes completely empty and completely quiet. It does sort of become quieter, but I think it’s very rare for it to become completely quiet.
Probably the most important thing is that a person’s relationship to their thoughts changes. They no longer identify with their thoughts. They’re aware that thinking is a kind of process which takes place, which they don’t have to identify it with. They can just allow it to flow by and watch it flow by without being carried away by it. There’s also—in terms of inner changes, there’s a very strong sense of well-being. Even if anxiety and fear—maybe they don’t fade away completely, but they become much less important, much less prevalent.
There’s also a sense of connection. The sense of separation fades away so there’s a connection to other people, to nature, to the whole universe. There’s a sense of no longer being a separate entity trapped inside your own mental space or your own body.
And there’s also some interesting conceptual changes. We normally don’t think of awakening in conceptual terms, but there are some interesting changes in terms of how people conceive of themselves or how they conceive of the world. Generally, people become much more world-centered, you could say—much less egocentric and they have a much wider global perspective on things. So, they’re not really so concerned about their own personal predicament anymore. They’re much more concerned about global issues or the predicament of the whole human race rather than just their individual issues.
Also, group identity fades away. They no longer have a sense of national [or] ethnic identity, or religious identity. If anything, they just have a sense of identity in terms of the whole human race.
Finally, there are also behavioral changes—that people become more altruistic, less materialistic, and they have slightly different relationships too. Relationships become much more intimate, and more authentic, and less superficial. People—they may have fewer friends, but their friendships become deeper and much more intimate and much more fulfilling.
TS: Just to ask you a personal question, Steve: you mentioned that you have this kind of natural wakefulness in you, that you’re one of those kinds of people—and this is what you discovered. It wasn’t so much that you did a lot of spiritual practice or that you had a lot of trauma in your life and that that’s where you spiritual awakening came from. But as you go through and you list all those characteristics and you reflect on yourself, do you think, “Huh, this is the area where there’s still some evolution for me, some growth for me.” And if so, what area would that be?
ST: [Laughs.] Wow. You’re really putting me on the psychiatrist’s couch here. But yes, it’s a great question.
Yes, we’ve talked about how there are different intensities of awakening, different gradations, and you can say there are also different types of awakening too. I mentioned these four categories—the perceptual characteristics, the effective characteristics, conceptual and behavioral characteristics. So, maybe there are certain areas where a person may be more focused or more oriented.
I think for me personally, I would say that maybe in some behavioral characteristics, maybe there are certain behavioral aspects I need to work on. That’s partly because I have a tendency to be busy. I get kind of carried away and I like to be productive, and sometimes I lose the ability to do nothing. And doing nothing is so important. It is such an important part of life. It’s much more important than doing things, doing nothing.
But maybe because my life is always quite busy because I’ve got young children and I have a job, I sometimes get kind of carried away by activity and lose the ability to be. So, that’s something I’m working on. At the moment, actually, I’m trying to train myself to be in a more powerful way.
TS: Can you tell me why you think doing nothing is so important?
ST: Because we are human beings and it’s easy to forget our true—you know, that is our name—that’s our title and our birthright, [being]. Our lives become so caught up in busyness that we forget ourselves.
But in being, we return to our true nature. We return to the depths of our true nature. When we’re busy, our lives become superficial because we become trapped in this level of surface activity. But when we spend time doing nothing, we allow the surface to fade away and we sort of—my personal experience is that being allows me to make contact with deeper levels of myself, to tune into the core of my being. That can also be—contact with nature has the same effect, this sense of tuning into the deepest core of your being.
TS: Now, there’s one more thing I want to talk about. I’ll read a quote from your book, The Leap, and then we can talk about it. Here’s the quote: “I see the wakeful state as an evolutionary progression, the next phase of human development. I believe this state will one day become human beings’ normal one.” When I read that, I thought, “Gosh, I would love to see that. I hope you’re right.” Tell us a little bit about how you’ve come to this viewpoint. “This state will one day become human beings’ normal one.”
ST: It sounds very optimistic.
TS: It does indeed.
ST: Particularly when you look at certain developments in recent times in politics and in global events.
But yes, I am optimistic because you have to look in a wide timeframe, and even you need to look in terms of the whole history of life on Earth going back hundreds of thousands of years—millions of years. Because on one level, evolution has always been about life forms becoming increasingly complex—more and more cells joining together to create more complex, more organized life forms, and life forms begin to split off into different varieties. But there’s this trend towards increasing complexity in evolution from the first simple-cell creatures to very complex creatures like human beings and other animals.
But if you look at evolution on an inner level—at the inner dimension of evolution—there’s also at the same time as this complexity, there’s an increasing consciousness. There’s an increasing expansion and intensification of consciousness.
So, that’s been happening for millions of years. Life forms have been gradually—have being becoming more conscious, more aware of reality, more aware of the depths of their own beings. They become increasingly interconnected, increasingly aware of other beings—other members of their own species and other living beings in general.
So, in all of these different ways, there’s been an increasing intensity of consciousness. And if you think about it, when somebody undergoes a spiritual awakening or even when somebody just has a temporary awakening experience that lasts for a few seconds or a few minutes, it’s the same process which is continued. It’s also an intensification and an expansion of consciousness. So, it’s a continuation of the evolutionary process.
So, I see spiritual experiences and spiritual awakenings as part of this evolution process. It’s a continuation of this process which has been continuing—which has happened for millions of years.
If you think about it in those terms, then it’s inevitable that evolution is moving in the direction of increasing awareness, increasing consciousness. in my book, The Leap, I try to analyze the different aspects of spiritual awakening and I compare them to the different aspects of evolution, the inner evolution over millions of years, and it’s the same aspects which are appearing in both cases.
So, despite all of the problems which the human race seems to be going through at the moment and despite all the potential difficulties that line our future, the rest is kind of this counter-process of increasing awareness, increasing spiritual awakening—which is happening at the same time. So, in those terms, I think there are good grounds to be optimistic.
TS: I think one of the questions people are asking is, “What will happen first?” Will we blow ourselves up, destroy the climate, or will there be enough spiritual awakening that it will tip the balance and this next phase of human evolution will have the chance to emerge? What do you say to that?
ST: Yes. Well, that is the big question. But in some ways—we spoke earlier about how crises and psychological turmoil can awaken people as individuals. So, I think even the crises which we’re going through now as a species and even the potential catastrophe which may be awaiting us in the near future—I think even that is bringing about awakening as well.
So, I think collective awakening is probably intensifying at the moment. If you look into surveys of spiritual experiences, they all show that over the past few decades spiritual experiences have become more common. People report having them more frequently. And in my research I’m always astounded at the number of cases of sudden spiritual awakening I come across. Sometimes it seems as though the more I look, they seem to increase exponentially. It seems to be becoming more common.
So again, you could say I’m a naïve optimist, but my feeling is that as the crises intensify, that will also spur us through greater awakening.
TS: How do you see that? How do you see the connection? Especially when you talked about how people go through turmoil. You said “acknowledgement and surrender.” And it seems like if we just acknowledge and surrender our collective crises, that might not be enough. More might be required.
ST: Yes, that’s true. I mean, I’m in favor of direct action, you know. I’ve got a great interest in environmental issues. I’ve been a member of the Green Party and other environmental movements.
But I think that acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean passivity. Acceptance sometimes means action. You have to accept a problem before you respond to it fully. So, I think if we accept—if we acknowledge the reality—one of the biggest problems is that we don’t acknowledge the situation we’re in. So many people are seemingly blind to environmental issues. There’s still a lot of denial about global warming. So, acknowledgement is possibly the main problem.
But I think there is also growing acceptance as well of our predicament. I think even as the predicament worsens, there will be growing concern about it, growing acceptance, which leads to action.
Now, I mean, that’s another thing I’ve found—another myth about spiritual awakening is that it makes people passive and inactive and indifferent. But I don’t think that’s true either. A lot of spiritually awakened people become very idealistic, very active, and very conscious of global issues, and very motivated to solve global problems.
TS: Now, we’re talking, Steve, about this evolutionary possibility—potential that we have as a human race to awaken more and more—for this state to become human beings’ normal state. Well, wouldn’t that be a thing? And you wrote a book called The Fall, in which you described that in human history—this is your view, as I understand it in The Fall. If we go back more than 6,000 years ago, you believe that we actually were more wakeful as groups of people, as human beings living on the Earth. I’d be curious to know what your evidence is for this and then also what happened 6,000 years ago to create this shift.
ST: Wow. These are big questions. I may not have enough time to answer them fully.
Yes, in a sense that’s true. I think there is a lot of evidence that early human beings lived in a state of connection to nature and also that early human beings were largely free of social pathologies like warfare, male domination, and hierarchical consensus societies. These views are not really unconventional anymore; a lot of anthropologists agree that the earliest human beings were very egalitarian, very bonded with nature, and there was a lack of male domination—very egalitarian in many ways. Also, that warfare was a late development in human history. Warfare becomes endemic in human history only from about six thousand years ago.
I think some of the world’s indigenous peoples—you can trace some of these qualities even in some present-day indigenous people, although many of them suffer from various problems nowadays. But certainly when the first peoples of Europe went to the New World and encountered indigenous peoples, they were also struck by their sense of bondedness to nature and their relative peacefulness and equality. Karl Marx took a lot of his ideas for communism from reports of early anthropologists of various peoples in the New World—the so-called New World.
There was also a spiritual quality to a lot of indigenous peoples and a lot of prehistoric peoples, which is evident in their artwork—also in many of the conversations and the reports of anthropologists.
But something did seem to happen about 6,000 years ago, which I call “before.” I also call it “the ego explosion” because it was a time when the individuated ego developed. It was the first time that human beings have had a sense of separation from the world around them and a sense that they were individuals living in their bodies in separation from nature, even separation from other human beings.
So, that was the fall, and that led to a lot of social pathologies like warfare, male domination, hierarchical societies, and so on. In some ways it even led to the advent of farming. Some people say that farming started earlier but kind of intensive farming was a later development. In some ways that seems to have been associated with the intensified ego.
So, this was the fall into suffering. It was a suffering which the Buddha talked about—you know, that human life is full of suffering. And it was a suffering which led to century after century of warfare and oppression and exploitation and so on.
I suggest that in some ways we are returning to the pre-fall era, but we’re also—probably the most important thing is that in some ways we’re also going beyond it because there are some—you know, the ego—there were some positive developments as well of the ego explosion. It led to a kind of new intellectual ability, a new technology, a new sense of autonomy, and so on.
So, there were some positive aspects. I think what’s happening now is that we are recapturing the earlier wakefulness of human beings, but in a more integrated way—in a way which is integrated with a more powerful intellect and a more powerful sense of autonomy. So, it’s a full circle, but it’s also adding on something new. It’s kind of a higher level of wakefulness.
TS: Now, you mentioned farming, and some people say that we started farming 10,000 years ago. But you say it intensified 6,000 years ago. Was there something else that happened 6,000 years ago to have created this “fall”?
ST: Well, I mean, originally what happened 10,000 years ago was that people started to garden, you could say. They sort of transitioned to horticulture, and full-scale farming happened later. Some archeologists suggest it was due to population increases and food shortages, but I suggest that the primary change was a psychological one. It was this new sense of individuality, this new sense of ego. That in itself was possibly related to environmental changes because this change—this new sense of ego—it developed in many groups of people around central Asia and the Middle East, not all over the whole world. It was concentrated in one particular area.
In The Fall, I suggest that it was possibly related to environmental changes because a lot of the area became very arid over a few centuries. So, life suddenly became a lot more difficult and there was a lot more competition for food and resources. Maybe those changes led to this new intensified sense of ego.
TS: Now, as you mentioned, I brought up a really big topic for us. But I think the point that I wanted to talk with you about is this vision you have of us evolving as a human species into a new type of person and a new type of collective. One of the things you write about is how our impulse to spiritually awaken is actually an evolutionary impulse. I wanted to end on this note because in my own life I’ve devoted so much of my energy—really, my whole life—to helping people spiritually awaken. I do feel it’s something that doesn’t—it feels like it comes from some other place. When I hear that phrase, “An evolutionary impulse,” I think, “Yes, that’s right.”
So, I wonder if you could just talk about how you understand that, that this call to awaken is not in some sense an individual matter, but the force of evolution moving through us.
ST: It’s really the same impulse which has taken life from the simplest forms many millions of years ago through increasing levels of complexity and organization to animals and human beings. It’s that same kind of dynamic impulse. It’s the impulse of life itself to move towards greater order and greater organization and greater consciousness—greater awareness.
In some ways that’s how it feels. The impulse to awaken is so deep-rooted. It’s nothing to do with the ego; it’s much, much deeper than the conscious self. It’s really the most sort of fundamental impulse of all life forms. All life forms have a fundamental impulse to grow towards greater complexity and greater consciousness.
And that’s how it feels. It’s the most fundamental, most powerful impulse in living beings. So, when we follow spiritual practices or follow spiritual paths, it feels so right. It feels like we’re aligning ourselves with this ancient, most fundamental impulse.
That’s why it feels so organic and it feels so right to follow the path of awakening.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Steve Taylor. He is the author of the book The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening and also a book called The Fall, [as well as] a beautiful book of poetry, The Calm Center. With Sounds True he’s created a new audio series, Return to Harmony: From Turmoil to Transformation.
Steve, it was great talking with you, I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
ST: Yes, likewise. Thanks a lot, Tami.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
