In recent years, stories of awakening have circulated widely. Near death experiences, sudden conversions, spiritual breakthroughs, and moments of existential rupture appear in books, interviews, podcasts, and quiet conversations between friends. These accounts often arrive with a shared promise. Something decisive happened. Life was reordered. Fear loosened its grip. Meaning became vivid.
It is not difficult to understand why such stories draw attention. They speak to a longing that many people carry quietly. We want assurance that life is not merely accidental, that suffering is not final, and that clarity is possible even after long confusion. Awakening stories seem to offer a shortcut to that assurance. They compress meaning into a moment and transformation into an event.
Yet there is a risk embedded in this attraction. When awakening is narrated as a qualification, something one has undergone that others have not, it quietly introduces comparison. The story no longer functions as a witness to change but as a marker of distinction. Even when unintended, the implication can arise that insight belongs more fully to those who have crossed a dramatic threshold.
This is not usually framed as arrogance. More often it appears as gratitude or testimony. But the structure remains. A line is drawn between before and after, between those who have seen and those who have not. Over time, this framing can distort both the experience and the listener. Awakening becomes an asset. Suffering becomes a gate. Meaning becomes conditional.
The danger here is subtle. It does not require ill intent. It grows naturally from the human tendency to organize identity around moments that feel decisive. The problem is not that such moments occur, but that they are too easily turned into proof of depth, legitimacy, or spiritual rank.
To speak responsibly about awakening requires another posture, one that honors transformation without converting it into privilege.
Remembering Without Claiming
During the pandemic, I experienced a severe COVID infection. My condition deteriorated quickly, pneumonia progressed, oxygen levels dropped, and consciousness faded in and out. Medical intervention became urgent, and for a period of time, survival was no longer assumed. I did not experience vivid visions or structured narratives. What I remember most clearly was a thinning of ordinary awareness, a sense of being held at the edge of something irreversible.
When I recovered, life did not become extraordinary. I returned to work, family, routine. Yet something in the texture of time had changed. Days felt less elastic. The future no longer stretched indefinitely. Attention became heavier, not oppressive, but weighted with consequence. Ordinary moments carried a quiet seriousness that had not been present before.
It would be easy to frame this as a near death experience and to place it alongside other accounts of transformation. But doing so raises an immediate ethical hesitation. To share such a memory publicly risks implying equivalence or qualification, as though proximity to death confers spiritual legitimacy. Even careful language can unintentionally invite comparison.
This hesitation is not about denying the impact of what happened. It is about refusing to turn experience into claim. Memory can be honored without being leveraged. Transformation can be acknowledged without being announced as status.
In that sense, discretion becomes part of integrity. Some experiences change us precisely because they strip away the desire to be seen as changed. They ask not for recognition, but for response.
Awakening Is Not Achievement
Across many traditions, awakening is described not as attainment but as interruption. In Buddhism, enlightenment is never the reward of effort in the way ordinary accomplishments are. Practice matters deeply, but awakening itself cannot be grasped. The moment one claims it, it slips away. The middle path exists not only to moderate behavior, but to prevent spiritual ambition from disguising itself as insight.
This understanding guards against a particular illusion. If awakening is framed as something earned, then it becomes another form of possession. The self remains intact, merely upgraded. But genuine awakening does something different. It loosens the structure of ownership itself. It diminishes the impulse to measure, compare, or accumulate.
From this perspective, dramatic experiences are not guarantees of wisdom. They are simply events that may disrupt habitual patterns. What matters is not the intensity of the experience, but the quality of the life that follows. Does one become more patient. More attentive. Less eager to prove something.
This is why many traditions treat claims of awakening with caution. Not because transformation is impossible, but because the human capacity for self deception is persistent. Insight that inflates the self is suspect. Insight that quietly reduces it is more trustworthy.
Awakening, then, is not an achievement to be displayed. It is a destabilization that demands careful integration.
Damascus Revisited: Passion Without Privilege
Christianity offers one of its most dramatic awakening narratives in the Road to Damascus. The conversion of Paul the Apostle is often cited as evidence of divine intervention, chosenness, or sudden enlightenment. Yet a closer reading reveals a more complex continuity.
Paul was not transformed from apathy into passion. He was already intense, disciplined, and utterly committed to what he believed was truth. His awakening did not create zeal. It redirected it. More importantly, it removed his authority to define righteousness on his own terms.
After Damascus, Paul does not present himself as spiritually elevated. He repeatedly emphasizes weakness, dependence, and the inability to boast. His authority rests not in experience but in obedience. Grace, for him, is not a badge but a burden. It places him under obligation rather than above others.
This reframing aligns closely with the Beatitude blessed are the poor in spirit. Spiritual poverty here does not mean lack of conviction or seriousness. It means refusal to claim spiritual capital. It means recognizing that whatever clarity one has is not owned, and certainly not weaponized.
When born again language drifts toward superiority, it betrays this foundation. Rebirth is not elevation into a higher class of humanity. It is recalibration of orientation. The self is not crowned. It is corrected.
Seen this way, Damascus is not a story of selection but of interruption. It does not authorize Paul to stand above others. It dismantles his confidence in standing anywhere at all.
Ordinary Life After the Threshold
One of the most overlooked aspects of awakening narratives is what happens afterward. Not immediately, but months and years later. The drama fades. The body returns to habit. The calendar fills. Life resumes its ordinary weight.
In my own case, nothing visibly changed. I did not abandon my responsibilities or adopt a new identity. The world remained recognizably the same. Yet beneath the surface, time had acquired edges. The sense that life is given, rather than assumed, became difficult to ignore.
This shift did not produce urgency in the form of haste. It produced a quieter insistence. Certain distractions lost their appeal. Certain trivial ambitions no longer justified their cost. The question was no longer how much could be achieved, but how attentively one could live within the time that remained.
It is here that writing began to take on a different role. Not as productivity. Not as legacy building. But as a way of staying awake. Writing became a practice of attention rather than output, a means of honoring the fact that time is not infinite and words are not neutral.
This kind of obsession, if it can be called that, is not about compulsion. It is about care. When life is recognized as contingent, response becomes necessary. Not heroic response, but faithful response.
Writing as Watchfulness
Writing has always been a tool for thinking, but under this altered sense of time, it became something closer to watchfulness. To write was to remain present to what mattered, to resist the drift toward carelessness that easily returns once crisis passes.
This posture resonates across traditions. In Buddhism, mindfulness is not heightened awareness for its own sake. It is sustained attentiveness to impermanence. In Christianity, watchfulness is not anxiety about the future. It is readiness to respond to what is given now.
Writing, practiced in this way, does not proclaim awakening. It protects against forgetting. It creates a space where thought slows down enough to be examined, where assumptions are tested gently rather than asserted loudly.
Importantly, this kind of writing does not demand an audience. It does not require recognition. It can remain ordinary, even invisible. Its value lies not in persuasion but in fidelity.
This may be why writing feels like a humble manifestation of change rather than its proof. It does not elevate the self. It places the self under discipline. It asks again and again whether one is living in a way that matches what one has seen, however dimly.
Awakening Without Pedestals
Returning to the question of near death experiences and awakening narratives, the central issue is not whether such moments matter. They do. The issue is how they are held.
When experiences are treated as qualifications, they create hierarchies. When they are treated as responsibilities, they deepen care. The difference is not in the experience itself, but in the posture that follows.
Awakening without privilege does not deny transformation. It refuses to convert it into identity. It allows the shift in perspective to shape ordinary life quietly, without demanding validation or comparison.
Perhaps this is why the most trustworthy transformations are often difficult to point to. They leave few visible markers. They do not announce themselves. They simply make certain ways of living impossible to continue.
In that sense, the question is not who has crossed which threshold. The question is how one walks afterward. Whether attention has become gentler. Whether responsibility has become heavier. Whether love has become less abstract.
If awakening leads to humility rather than hierarchy, to care rather than claim, then it has done its work. Not by making anyone special, but by making care unavoidable.
And that may be the truest form of transformation available to us.
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