When a direct spiritual awakening occurs it immediately becomes completely clear, as the spiritual teachers throughout the ages have described, that there is only the one infinite ground of being - the source and identity of everyone and everything.
For a period of time afterwards, from a few brief seconds, hours or days, the previously hidden nature of reality is unmasked.
The Pendulum of Identity Swings
After an awakening, or series or awakenings, it is common to start optimizing life from this radically new perspective.
It is as though a pendulum has now swung from residing in the polarity of life as an individual to now residing in the opposite polarity of identity as the source of all life itself.
This new transcendent identity supersedes all previous perspectives, and for many giving much attention now to anything personal is regarded as merely a miss-seeing of the truth.
Aspects of our humanity such as personal growth, development of skills, enhancing relationships or action in the face of global issues such as war and climate disruption can easily fall away - after all it’s no longer really real in the same way anymore.
Stabilising as Infinity
Many spiritual teachings that invite direct spiritual awakening, both traditional and modern, encourage and support this separatist stance.
To some extent it can’t be helped since on awakening it does become completely clear that world of the person, with personal interests and endeavours, is no longer our real identity.
Our personal identity has now been supplanted by identity as the non-personal infinite ground of Being.
From Seeking To Finding
The seeker may well have also undergone an extensive search for awakening, with many intensive practices over a great deal of time, so when the secret of life finally reveals itself in all it's immense and breathtaking glory, resting in and as the truth is utterly blissful.
Fear, pain and constriction are now gone and who would want to hurry to revisit the world of duality with all its attendant suffering after that?
For myself, the falling away of separation came with a massive feeling of of relief, the seeking had finally ended and there was a sense of at last coming home.
Modern Cultural Influences
Another contributor to the tendency to polarization is that from an early age we are taught to focus on one particular aspect in life, discard options, and to optimize our life for that one thing.
Schools expect children to pick just a few subjects, and on moving to university these typically narrow even further to just one Major, which then funnels into a job aligned with the Major that they have just spent so much time and money on.
That is a premature optimization because the student has had to make a choice when they were still a teenager, and often way before, and the rest of their life can be an echo of these early life decisions which were made before their brain was even fully formed at 25 years old.
Usually unconsciously accepted as the norm, the ramifications of this cultural narrowing down approach carries on into awakening, where it also subtly contributes to the lack of questioning of the focus onto only one polarity of identity.
Ultimately spiritual teachings that polarize only the transcendent aspect of enlightenment leave people ill-prepared for the fully liberated life after awakening.
Abiding Enlightenment
The pendulum of identity does swing back to revisit its former polarity, the world of the individual and duality, many times - now however this is from a radically different perspective.
In time, if enough personal healing, growth and soul alignment has taken place. either before, during or after awakening, and the individual is therefore grounded and embodied sufficiently, the pendulum eventually finally comes to rest in the middle as it encompasses both polarities of being both human and divine.
What remains is unwavering and unbroken enlightenment - where the timeless unmoving infinite and the time bound and ever emerging individual now co-exist simultaneously as a seamless and ever emerging living wholeness.
Life is living Itself
This is the ultimate center where the apparent paradox of the seemingly separate identities as the infinite and the individual is now finally resolved.