Wysdomly

At its essence, spiritual awakening is a shift in awareness from the lens of the ego self to the perspective of your higher self.

What is awakening?

Traditionally referred to as spiritual awakening, because one awakens from the dream of separation created by the egoic mind. We realize – often quite suddenly – that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs, and images, is not really who we are.

– Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

As awakening begins, your centre of identity starts to shift from the ego’s perspective to the awareness of your Higher Self. You see through the roles, beliefs and inherited patterns that once defined you. Gradually, it becomes clear that the world you experience “out there” is a mirror of your own inner state, reflecting your thoughts, emotions and energetic patterns back to you.

Most of us move through life guided by our conditioned ego-self, a structure shaped by upbringing, trauma, ancestral patterns, cultural norms, beliefs and fears. It becomes the lens through which we perceive and create our reality, our default operating system. Rarely do we pause to question it, instead, we let it determine how we strive, adapt, belong and stay safe.

We rarely realise that parts of this inner operating system have become outdated. Long before we’re consciously aware of it, it begins to create friction in our lives. We notice recurring patterns – familiar themes, conflicts, or disappointments repeating in new forms. Beneath it all, there’s a subtle unease: a quiet dissatisfaction, a restlessness that no achievement or distraction can ease.

Awakening begins when your inner eyes start to open – when self-awareness comes online. You start to perceive from a higher vantage point, one that observes rather than reacts. You start to witness your thoughts, fears and defences, instead of being absorbed by them. The moment you see yourself clearly is the moment the old identification begins to loosen.

And that changes everything. You realise your external world is not simply happening to you – it’s reflecting what lives within you. Reality mirrors your inner patterns, beliefs and state of consciousness. True transformation no longer comes from rearranging external circumstances, but from shifting the perception through which you experience them.

The ego resists

But this shift in perception isn’t easy. Awakening can feel deeply disorienting to the ego-self because it dismantles its entire framework of reality. The ego-personality that once believed it had life figured out begins to unravel. The beliefs, habits, and identities that once provided structure and certainty start to fall away.

To the ego-mind, this feels like annihilation – the death of you, the personality self. It resists with everything it has, because what’s being dismantled is the identity it built to keep you safe in the world. The ego reads any challenge to that identity as danger, as if a force outside itself were trying to erase that protection. In truth, this is transformation: dissolving of the illusion of identity and safety so a deeper reality – the presence of your Higher Self – can emerge.

This stage is often called ego death or ego dissolution, but it’s really the moment the light of awareness begins to outshine the identity that once mistook itself for you.

Your nervous system may feel shaken. Your mind may begin to destabilise, and your ego will rebel in fear. Emotions can surge like waves, grief, fear, confusion, even resistance to the very light of your true Self breaking through.

An internal battle ensues. The ego fights this shift – this rising of consciousness to a higher perspective – with everything it has, unable to comprehend what’s happening because it cannot perceive from that vantage point. It longs to return to what is familiar, to reassert control, to go back to “normal.”

But once it begins, the awakening process can’t be stopped because beneath it, something deeper is coming online. A higher intelligence. A wider field of perception. A new way of knowing and being. This is your Soul.

And it is you, the Soul, that chose this awakening.

Why I created the Three Phases

Over the years – through my own awakening and through witnessing others – I began to recognise a pattern. Three distinct energetic movements seemed to weave through every genuine awakening: collapse, clearing and integration.

When I went through my own long and often disorienting process, I struggled to understand what was happening. The raising of consciousness is not linear, and words often fail to capture the depth of what is unfolding. So I began searching for a language that could hold both the psychological and the mystical – something that could map the inner terrain without reducing it.

I found that language through the tarot, which offers archetypal mirrors for the soul’s journey. Three of those archetypes stood out to me as universal stages of awakening:

• The Tower – initiation through collapse, when life as you know it begins to crumble, often triggered by sudden upheaval in our life.
• The Hermit – the descent inward, the dark night of the soul, when you retreat from the world to face the shadows within.
• The Fool – rebirth and reorientation, when you go back into the world, learning to embody your new level of consciousness.

Each phase carries its own lessons, intensity and initiations. Together they form a map, not to predict your path, but to help you recognise that no matter how chaotic or challenging to the ego-personality, awakening is a universal human process.

When we can see awakening through this lens, what once felt like breakdown begins to reveal itself as personal transformation.

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The Three Phases of Spiritual Awakening

The Tower Phase: Breakdown Before the Breakthrough

You are not being struck down – you are being struck awake.

In the tarot, The Tower is struck by lightning from the sky – sudden and unexpected. It symbolises the very thing the human ego fears most: sudden and shocking change.

The lightning doesn’t punish, it liberates. The lightning bolt is divine intelligence in action, the soul breaking through the ego’s structures that no longer serve your evolution. Every foundation that crumbles was built upon fear, control, or conditioning. Its fall is the invitation to rebuild a life from something truer.

The Tower phase often begins when life collapses across one or multiple fronts, personal to everyone but typically relationships, work, health, purpose. The events that unfold seem cruel or chaotic, but they are not random. They are perfectly orchestrated by your soul to dismantle what can no longer sustain the frequency of the highest potential of you.

You find yourself standing in the ruins of the life you built, with plans dissolved, certainties gone, identity stripped bare. There is shock, disbelief, and the existential fear of powerlessness. Your ego-self is desperate to rebuild, to restore what was, but the Tower’s lesson is clear: you cannot return to the structure that trapped your true Self.

The Tower phase is not the end. It is necessary destruction that forces open the gates you were too afraid to walk through.

The Hermit Phase: The Journey Inward

There is no where to turn but within.

In Tarot, The Hermit stands alone, lantern in hand, illuminating only the next few steps of his path. It represents introspection, solitude and the search for inner truth, where the light of our outer world fades so light of our inner world can finally be seen.

After The Tower collapses, the world you once recognised no longer exists. What remains is emptiness, a void where your previous life, identity and certainty once stood. You are left face to face with yourself, without distraction or direction, stripped of the external scaffolding that once gave your life meaning.

The Hermit phase can feel like being dropped into a void of external nothingness. The plans, beliefs, and structures that once shaped your life have been dismantled. You may feel isolated or disconnected from what used to be “normal.”

The Inner Descent

This isn’t a voluntary choice to withdraw. It’s what happens when the Soul itself strips away everything the ego could cling to or escape into – every distraction that kept it from looking at itself. What remains is an inward pull, a redirection of consciousness and energy toward the only place left to turn: within. From here, the deeper inner work can finally begin.

What follows is uncomfortable for both mind and body. The ego, still reeling from the collapse of The Tower, resists with everything it has. It tries to rebuild the old life – grasping for distraction, validation, or control – but nothing seems to work.

Every effort to force movement externally is blocked until the internal alignment is complete. What feels like stagnation is actually sacred reconfiguration.

To the ego-self, it feels as though every strategy to get your outer life moving again hits an invisible wall. The external world becomes unresponsive because the energy has shifted inward. The Soul is now guiding a deeper phase of inner work – one that can only unfold once you’ve been unhooked from the outer world.

Under this inner pressure, the Soul begins to push to the surface everything our ego-self buried to keep us safe. Old wounds, painful memories, traumas, and emotions long held in the body and psyche start to rise.

These buried wounds and impressions are the programmes and filters that unconsciously run our lives, shaping how we react, perceive, and recreate recurring negative patterns. By allowing them to come into the light of our own compassionate awareness – to be witnessed by our higher consciousness rather than acted out – we begin the alchemical process of transformation.

These aspects surface because the Soul knows it’s time for them to be seen and released. Each one carries energy that has been frozen in the past, waiting to be integrated back into light. The unseen is finally brought into the light of your consciousness.

The Ego’s Battle with the Soul

You are not being destroyed, you are being reconfigured from the inside out. The ego will resist because it cannot yet see what’s emerging.

However, the ego interprets this inner work as dangerous to itself because it believes it’s being annihilated – what’s often called “ego death.” It feels this way because the ego has spent a lifetime identifying itself as you, your thoughts, memories, roles, your story. So when those structures begin to dissolve, it mistakes transformation for destruction.

That’s because the ego cannot perceive beyond its own frequency. It operates within the dense vibration of the 3D psychological self, the realm of separation, fear, and control. The Higher Self, however, exists at a higher octave of consciousness, one that perceives both the lower and the higher, the density and the light.

The ego cannot recognise this light because it isn’t built to hold that frequency. And that is precisely what the soul is teaching us: to look up, trust and surrender to the infinite wisdom of the higher consciousness within our very being.

Even for long-time seekers, this phase can feel like hitting a wall. You may want life to return to “normal,” but the soul has other plans. Every effort to force movement externally is blocked until the internal alignment is complete. What feels like stagnation is actually sacred reconfiguration.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul. – Swami Vivekananda

This quote captures the essence of The Hermit phase: no external teacher, belief, or path can replace the direct guidance of your own inner light of awareness.

As the ego’s resistance begins to ease, you become more familiar with your Higher Self and start to align more naturally with that aspect of you. The Hermit’s solitude no longer feels like cruel isolation but a necessary – even welcome – space for integration and rebuilding from the inside out.

The Fool Phase: Walking Between Two Worlds

Now begins a gradual return where the wisdom you’ve gained seeks to be embodied.

In the Major Arcana, The Fool is both the first and the last card – numbered zero, the alpha and omega of the soul’s journey. Carrying no baggage from the past, The Fool moves freely, unburdened, with only a small satchel of wisdom gathered through lived experience. The cliff represents stepping into the unknown with faith, trusting that the path will be guided by the Higher Self. It is not recklessness but surrender.

After the intensity of inner work, life begins to move again, but differently. The outer world feels familiar and foreign at once, as if you’re re-entering it with new eyes. You’re freer, lighter, yet still adjusting to this new way of perceiving. The mind by default searches for the old structures of control, but they no longer fit.

This is walking between two worlds: the higher frequency of your new consciousness and the lingering echoes of the old. Integration takes time because embodiment is slower than insight. The higher self may have leapt forward, but the body and mind must catch up.

You find yourself navigating both: moments of clear alignment followed by flashes of the old conditioning. Like climbing a ladder, there’s a point where you’re stable but must lift one foot to move upward. For a time, it feels as if you’re balancing between rungs, between who you were and who you’re becoming.

The spiritual process isn’t any different before awakening than afterward. It’s just that, after awakening, the process is happening from a different perspective; you may think of it as a bird’s-eye view versus a ground-level view.

Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

You may feel called to reshape your external life and build new frameworks, habits, and relationships that reflect your expanded awareness. Yet progress in the ego sense unfolds slowly. You can’t rush the stabilisation of a new frequency, it anchors through lived experience, not mental will.

The Fool archetype represents this recalibration: walking forward in trust without the full map. You don’t yet know where the next step leads, but you sense it’s aligned. The external world may lag behind, still reflecting fragments of the old vibration, but now you can see the difference. The illusion no longer holds you.

You begin to live from presence, not performance. The same situations that once triggered pain now invite awareness. The same challenges that once defined you now reveal how far you’ve come. Over time, your new consciousness integrates into daily life.

This is embodiment is a union of the soul and personality walking together. The ego still has its say from the sidelines, trying to reclaim control, but you no longer mistake its voice for truth.