Five More Minutes

Sleep was so sweet to me as a child, which is why waking up early for school—or some other ungodly event—was always so painful. We've all been there before: mom comes into the room to get us up for school. We plead, "Five more minutes," knowing full well that once we slip back out of consciousness we won't know, or care, how much time actually passes—but we hope it's a lot. So maybe mom, feeling kind that morning, grants us that extra five minutes while she goes and does something else real quick.

Shortly after, she comes back and says, "Your five minutes are over. Now GET UP!" In my case, I pretend not to hear her—hoping, by some miracle, she'll forget about me if I don't draw attention to myself. I know this isn't going to end well, but the comforting magnetism of my bed is just too much to overcome in the moment. Plus, if she kills me, I kinda get to stay asleep—so it's a win-win.

Right as I begin to slip back into that sweet nothingness, I feel the covers fly off me as if a tornado had just spontaneously spawned in my bedroom. The chilly air swiftly accosts my vulnerable body, immediately erasing the comfort of that warm nest I had rested in just moments ago. I can still vaguely remember what it was like, and a part of me longs to go back to that time, just a moment ago, when I was unbothered and largely unconscious.

But deep down, I know that I can't go back.

It's time to wake up.

It Was All A Dream

Spiritual awakening is a lot like what I described above. Sleep is such a sweet refuge, and spiritual awakening—waking up from the dream you once thought life was—can be incredibly jarring, confusing, and disorienting for this very reason. Much like waking from a dream in “real” life, we are instantly transported from one world to a completely different one without ever actually going anywhere.

My first spiritual awakening happened back in 2014, while I was meditating in my bedroom closet—the only quiet spot I could find in the midst of my noisy apartment complex. Had I known I was about to encounter God, I surely would have chosen a better place.

In a single moment, I both lost my religion and became more devoted to God than I had ever been before. I say I lost my religion because the Divine presence I encountered in that closet was nothing like what I’d been preached about during all those Sundays at church. It was so spacious. So open. So free. So bright. So full. So unconditionally loving that even the very idea of “judgment” couldn’t exist within it.

And the most bizarre part? It seemed to arise from within me—not above me, not beyond me. As if it were a part of me and not separate from me. From that moment on, “spiritual awakening” became much more than an idea; it became my lived experience. That encounter revealed to me that I had been asleep—and having a bad dream—for 24 years.

You're it!

For 24 years I thought I was just a human being. A person existing in the world, whose sole purpose was to gain as much as he possibly could, reproduce, and die. A person who was extremely selfish because he felt separate from, and superior to, everyone else around him. A person who believed in God mostly because everyone else around him did—and because he was afraid of what the consequences of not believing in God might be.

But after a single moment in that closet, I was no longer a believer in God—I became a knower of God. And this knowing was entirely spiritual. I did not see God with my physical eyes. I did not hear God with my physical ears. I did not touch God with my physical hands. But God touched me… and I felt God more deeply than I had ever felt anything before. I received so much information in that transmission, but none of it was verbal. I felt God’s unconditional love for the very first time in that closet, and that love instantly and irrevocably changed my life. It became clear to me that the idea of “love” most people subscribe to does not truly deserve that label. And it opened me to an entirely new world that had somehow always been right here.

It felt like everything I knew about life, the world, and myself was a lie. While intriguing, this was also deeply disturbing. So, like most confused people, I began searching for information, hungry to read about the experiences of anyone who had gone through something even remotely similar. I was both comforted and surprised to discover that there was an abundance of such accounts online. For as long as history has been recorded, countless beings have encountered the same presence I had—in different ways. And for them, too, it awakened a hunger to discover more, just as it had for me.

I had been desperately longing to speak with God ever since I discovered that my mom’s life was being threatened by cancer. And then God came to me, tagged me, and said, “You’re it!”—before taking off, almost teasingly, provoking me to seek it out. And so I became a seeker, desperately searching for the source of that encounter and the truth about existence.

After about four years of relentless inquiry, I finally found what I was looking for. And I was completely baffled to discover that “You’re it” had a much deeper meaning than simply being my turn to chase after God. No—the truth I uncovered was that God is everywhere and in everything… including little ol’ me.

But this discovery was not all 'love and light.' It also brought about an incredible amount of darkness. I've experienced my share of "Dark Nights of the Soul"—extremely painful experiences, metaphorically similar to having the covers ripped off of me as a child, but instead of the covers being ripped off, illusions were. Illusions that I found very comforting. Illusions that much of my hopes and dreams were founded in. Illusions that laid at the foundation of the world I lived in.

Spiritual awakening set fire to my world—or, rather, to the illusion of the world I believed in. But from those ashes a new world emerged. A world far more vibrant, interesting, hopeful, and peaceful. A world where no one truly suffers, because there is no separate “one” to suffer. A world in which death exists only as a passage through which one evolves into a higher form.

A world where God is all that is—and you're it.

Spirituality Vs. Religion

If you were to ask me the biggest difference between religious people and spiritual people, I would say this:

When you really want to find something, you look everywhere—and you will not rest until you find what you’re looking for.

In the Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic text of teachings attributed to Jesus, he is quoted as saying: “Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all. [And after they have reigned they will rest.]”

It seems to me that most religious people only seek God in a few places: in their households, in the book of their religion, in the church, the temple, or the sky. They refuse to even consider the idea that other spiritual traditions might also provide a valid perspective on the experience of God. Because, for many, what’s more important than actually communing with the Divine is being right.

But what made me spiritual, in an instant, is that I first experienced God in the one place I would never have been encouraged to look by my religious counterparts: within myself. The search for God that followed that fateful encounter in the closet has led me deeper and deeper within—and with it, the realization that God exists within everyone else as well. So while I don’t necessarily agree with any religion’s definition of God, I can appreciate every religion as a collective attempt to connect with and understand the Divine. For that reason, I can find value in just about any genuine tradition.

I’ll admit, I truly do feel like I’ve found what I began looking for all those years ago. But what’s wild is that the spiritual awakenings haven’t stopped, and my journey hasn’t ended. On the contrary, the deeper I go, the more there is to uncover. That has been one of the most profound discoveries along the way—there is no end. God is infinite, which means the experience of God is infinite. We can never truly say we “know” God in full, because this knowing is a bottomless pit. If you’ve arrived at a dead end with your God, then your God is probably dead.

But the God I discovered is living, evolving, expanding, everlasting—impossible to contain in a book, a building, or even a brain. It is everything that is—and there is always far more to what is than meets the eye.

The Mirror In The Man

Collectively, we’re having a really bad dream right now. It seems like every day it gets worse and worse. And this is horrible news for anyone who wishes to remain asleep—because, as we all know, bad dreams only end once we wake up. Upon waking, there is immense relief in discovering that all the suffering we were experiencing wasn’t real.

From my perspective, there is no peace in the world. But personally, I am totally at peace with the world because I can see what the world is. To say that the world isn’t real may sound dismissive—though it is true. But telling a character in a nightmare that the nightmare isn’t real will probably do nothing to calm the fear they’re experiencing.

So instead, I’ll say this: the world we experience on the outside is inseparably tied to the world we experience on the inside. So much so that if we are at peace inwardly, the outer world will also appear peaceful—no matter what is happening.

Imagine this: you’ve had a crush on someone for years. Not just a crush—you are absolutely head-over-heels in love with this person, and you want nothing more in the entire world than to be with them.

Then, one day, you turn on the news and discover that an asteroid is headed toward Earth at a rapid pace. Impact is imminent, and because of its size, there is nothing we can do but wait for our inevitable demise. Fear and dread overwhelm you as you wrestle with the certainty of the world’s—and your own—destruction.

Suddenly, you get a text. It’s from your crush. They write: “Hey, looks like the world is ending, so I feel compelled to tell you that I’ve always been in love with you. And there’s nothing I’d like more than to spend whatever time we have left together.”

Immediately, the fear and dread are washed away by a wave of love, joy, happiness, and wish fulfillment. It no longer matters that you’re going to die—as you were going to die eventually anyway—because now, you get to spend the rest of your days in bliss with your Beloved.

There may be chaos all around you, fueled by the fear of others, but it no longer matters. Their world is ending, but yours feels like it has just begun. And having realized true love, you know it is immune to death. So even though death is still coming for you and your Beloved, it cannot part you. What do you really have to lose in death, when in love you have already gained everything?

Spiritual awakening is a lot like this story. It is a love story—except, instead of being about another person, it is about the love of God. A love so powerful that not even death can sever it. And once we have deeply realized that God’s love knows no bounds, not even the presence of suffering or the fear of imminent death can disturb our peace.

Outwardly, spiritual awakening doesn’t change how the world looks—but it does give you new eyes. And that makes all the difference, because in truth, none of us ever sees the exact same world anyway. The world each of us perceives and experiences is deeply tied to who we are. Not only that, we each see the world from the inside out, which means the world is quite literally a projection of our inner selves.

This is why spiritual awakening is such a transformative experience, and why, for many, it is the first step toward true happiness and fulfillment. Much of our unhappiness boils down to feeling powerless to change the world for ourselves and those we love. But spiritual awakening offers a solution: by realizing that our experience of the world cannot be separate from our experience of ourselves, we come to understand that we can change the world by first changing ourselves.

A true sign of awakening is that we evolve—and by evolving, the entire world evolves with us, because in reality we are not separate from the world or anything in it.

So, if you really want the bad dream of the current state of the world to end, you must wake up. You must stay awake. And you must become an example to others who are still sleeping, showing that there is a whole 'nother world available to us—a higher one, just beyond the one we all know. This is the only true way we will ever make our collective world a better place for all beings.

And perhaps that’s why, as the Gospel of Thomas says, those who truly seek are disturbed before they marvel. But once we fully awaken, we realize the disturbance was just the process of being reborn into a beautiful new world.

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A Glimpse at Samadhi

I've had many mystical experiences since my initial awakening in 2014 and one of the most profound was when, suddenly, this sense of total and complete Oneness and ecstasy came over me while I was at work one morning. I was so high, even though I hadn't done any drugs. My awareness was extremely heightened, as if I was paying attention to everything all at once. It felt like the border between Self and "other" had completely dissolved. Though I hadn't actually traveled anywhere, it truly felt like I was in an entirely new world.

It was so bizarre that I felt compelled to record the experience so that I could recount it. In addition to this week's reflection questions, paid members can click the button below to watch my recording of this experience that I later discovered was a glimpse at Samadhi—a state of pure, blissful consciousness.

The Inner Interview

This week's journal prompts/reflection questions:

Each week, paid subscribers get access to at least two journal prompts to help deepen your understanding of yourself and the world you live in. Plus you gain the opportunity to discuss these often under investigated parts of yourself with me!

If this interests you, check out the Inner Interview by clicking the button below.

Grow Your Light

Also, if you're currently going through a spiritual awakening and would like a guide to help you understand what you're experiencing, I offer 1-on-1 guidance sessions that will surely help shed light on what can be an incredibly disturbing experience.

What's Going On With Me?

I've arrived at a crossroads that I've realized I've been stuck at for quite awhile. And I'm choosing a path though, in truth, it's not a choice. Were it a choice, I would not choose. Rather it is a natural unfolding in the process of becoming who I am destined to be. And with it, there is a lot of relief but also a bit of anxiety as I'm letting go of one of the last footholds I've clung to within the matrix.

But the time to let go is now.

I'm going to take next week off as I need to focus on getting some other things done, but I'll have more to share when I return the week after next.

Thanks for being on this journey with me, and I'm really excited for what's about to come.

With love,

Micheal Sinclair 💜