After the Awakening: Higher States and the Art of Living

It was as a teenager that I was first introduced to meditation, along with the promise that through meditation it was possible to attain a higher state of consciousness. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but it sounded like an exploration I wanted to be part of.

At the time, I think I imagined a higher state of consciousness as something extraordinary, a destination, an experience somehow above or beyond ordinary awareness. There was something mysterious and compelling about the idea. If there were other dimensions of human consciousness available to us, I wanted to know what they were.

That curiosity has stayed with me throughout my life. It has led me into meditation, ritual, ancient traditions, expanded states of consciousness, and eventually the work Laura and I now share exploring the relationship between consciousness, the body, and human experience.

We tend to imagine transformation as something dramatic: a revelation, an awakening, a breakthrough. We are conditioned by stories and films to expect the important moments of our lives to be cinematic, a sudden revelation on a mountaintop, a dramatic breakthrough, a sharp before-and-after line drawn in the sand.

And certainly, extraordinary experiences happen. I have had experiences that profoundly changed the way I understand myself and the world around me. Yet I have also come to realize that the intensity of an experience is not necessarily the measure of its importance. The more interesting question may be what happens afterward.

What does an experience actually change?

For me, this has become one of the most meaningful ways of thinking about consciousness. A higher state of consciousness is not simply an elevated experience or an expanded perception of reality. It is an opportunity to become more awake, more aware, and more present to the life we are already living.

And the evidence of that may be surprisingly ordinary. It appears in greater patience. Something that once immediately triggered irritation still happens, but there is now a little more space around the reaction. The irritation may still arise, but it no longer automatically takes the wheel. There is a moment to breathe, to observe what is happening, and a chance to choose a different response.

It appears in our relationships. We become a little more capable of listening without immediately preparing our response. We begin to recognize another person’s experience without needing to correct it or make it agree with our own. It appears in compassion, not only toward others, but toward ourselves.

We notice someone struggling and respond with kindness rather than judgment. We establish a boundary without anger. We apologize without immediately defending ourselves. We catch ourselves repeating an old pattern and, for once, choose something different.

These may not sound like higher states of consciousness. There are no visions, no brilliant lights, no overwhelming revelations. Yet I have begun to believe these quiet changes may tell us more about transformation than the extraordinary experience itself.

There is another part of this that has become increasingly important to me. Becoming more conscious requires becoming more aware, and becoming more aware requires paying attention.

Attention may be one of the simplest spiritual practices we have.

We pay attention to our thoughts without automatically believing every one of them. We pay attention to the reactions of the body. We notice what opens us and what closes us. We begin to recognize our habitual responses, our fears, our defenses, our assumptions, and the stories we have carried about ourselves for years. At the same time, we become more attentive to other people, to nature, to the world around us, and to those moments when the boundaries of our ordinary awareness seem to expand.

In this sense, attaining a higher state of consciousness may be less about climbing upward than becoming more completely present.

I think of it as stepping into presence.

This also changes the way I think about the expanded states we explore through Ritual Postures. The experience itself can be powerful, beautiful, mysterious, and sometimes difficult to put into words. But eventually the rattle stops. We open our eyes. We stand up. We leave the ritual space and return to our ordinary lives.

What happens then?

That question has become increasingly important to me. An extraordinary state of consciousness can show us something, but integration asks us to live something.

The deepest transformations in my own life have rarely announced themselves with a crash of thunder. More often, an experience has worked quietly within me, changing the landscape so gradually that I did not recognize the shift until much later. Something that once mattered enormously no longer carried the same weight. A reaction softened. A relationship changed. An old certainty loosened its grip. Something I thought I needed to control could finally be released.

Maybe this is one reason transformation can be so difficult to recognize while it is happening. We are looking for the revelation when we should also be watching what happens on an ordinary Tuesday morning.

After a lifetime of being interested in higher states of consciousness, I still believe deeply in exploring them. I remain fascinated by what becomes possible when we step beyond our familiar ways of perceiving ourselves and the world.

But I no longer think the goal is simply to have more extraordinary experiences.

The experience opens the door. What matters is what we carry through it.

We don’t need to chase the high of constant revelation to know that something within us is changing. Sometimes the clearest evidence is found in the texture of our everyday lives, in the quiet ways an experience continues to work within us long after the experience itself has ended.