Awakening and Enlightenment: What Is the Difference?
In the lessons of spiritual teachers, we can hear terms such as spiritual “enlightenment” and “awakening” alternating within a single sentence. These concepts keep replacing one another, and to the follower, and sometimes even to the author, it seems that they are one and the same.
Within Lilith’s teaching, these are, if not opposite, then very distant concepts. And this is far from being about how often you meditate.
What is enlightenment
Spiritual enlightenment is a state of grateful acceptance of the world as it is.
An enlightened person accepts the events around them as good not because this was prescribed by someone as a rule, but because they hold a deep inner conviction that everything happening in the world is unfolding exactly as it should. They feel a profound rightness, even if outwardly these events do not look like “light.”
That is why enlightenment is not the duration or frequency of your meditations, but immersion in bliss during meditation through the understanding of the greatness and depth of the divine design. This state cannot be imposed on you by teachers. It comes from within you as an inner conviction, even if you cannot explain it logically.
The point is not to try to reach enlightenment through meditation, but to realize that you have already reached it, and that even in stillness and inaction, you feel calm and well.
If we speak in terms of cultural traditions, the roots of the term “enlightenment” go back to Buddhism, where followers devote years of their lives to attaining this state. In the Christian tradition, enlightenment is not a foreign concept either. Such people existed there as well, and within religion they are called the “blessed.”
The spiritual awakening of a person
Awakening is a mental movement beyond the established boundaries of your old beliefs.
The original mental frames, or walls, may be set by upbringing, culture, tradition, and other rigid canons. A synonym for “awakening” would be the term “exit from the Matrix” — you can find material on leaving the Matrix in the Library.
An awakened person has a logical basis for seeing the incorrectness of the old settings that govern their life or the life of society. And the change in worldview is not for show, but as an impulse toward building a new spiritual path.
If you see the imperfection of the social order or of events, then you are walking the path of the awakened.
If enlightenment can come in a single instant as something given, awakening is truly painstaking work on yourself, the exploration of yourself and of the world around you.
How to recognize in yourself the enlightened or the awakened
To put it simply, with examples:
- Enlightenment. I know that everything is going as it should. I am calm and grateful for everything that is happening. I feel good both in this world, in society, and alone with myself. I love everything and everyone. I have reached, or am close to, a state of unconditional love. I do not try to change this world; it is already beautiful.
- Awakening. I see the mental traps set before me and before society. I recognize them and can move around them. I accept other people’s rules of life, but I can change them in order to form my own path. I try to bring to people my vision of a new world.
What is Lilith’s place in each of these states
Here the answer is unambiguous: Eve is the path of Enlightenment and unconditional love; Lilith is Awakening and the movement beyond what is established and “normal.”
Lilith’s path is not about continuous meditation and all-embracing love. It is about “ordinary” life: active, full, and often lived by one’s own rules.
Lilith’s independence and views often do not fit into generally accepted frames. She herself shapes the “rightness” of being, and her dark side is a direct challenge to society. To follow Lilith’s path is not to freeze in enlightenment and bliss, but to form your own convictions and build your own reality.