On the Suffering of Awakening — From Spark to Blaze
Introduction
No one tells you that awakening begins with loss.
The books speak of light. The teachers smile with a particular stillness. The traditions promise liberation — moksha, kenosis, the great release — words that shimmer on the tongue like cool water. What they rarely say, or say only in hushed footnotes to the ecstatic literature, is that the path to that light first passes through a kind of dying. Not metaphorical dying. Something that feels, in the marrow, like the end of the self you were. This essay does not speak of the water pressing at the door, or of longing, or of what it feels like when the flood finally arrives. Others have written of that — including, elsewhere on these pages, myself. This essay speaks of what the flood does to the house.
I have been walking a contemplative path for more than fifty years. I know what it is to sit at the feet of a teacher, to offer the heart in devotion, to feel the current of bhakti — that river of sacred love — moving through the chest like something ancient being remembered. And I know the other side of that: the long silences when the current stops. The weeks when the practice feels like speaking into a room where no one lives. The strange grief of a seeker who has tasted the Real and then, inexplicably, cannot find it.
This essay is not a warning against the path. It is an act of honest witness to what the path actually costs — and why that cost, seen rightly, is not a mistake. The suffering of awakening is not incidental to awakening. It is, in many traditions and in my own experience, its very mechanism.
Let us follow the arc. From the first crack in the ordinary world, through the furnace, through the ash, to whatever is waiting on the other side of all that burning.
I. The First Crack
What does it mean when the world you lived in no longer holds?
Something happens. It may be dramatic — a brush with death, a sudden grief, a moment in a temple or a forest when the air seems to thin and something vast looks back at you. Or it may be quiet: a morning when you wake and find that the life you have built, the identity you have inhabited for decades, feels — for the first time — like a costume.
This is the spark. And it is not comfortable.
Ramana Maharshi’s awakening came as a spontaneous death-terror at sixteen. He did not seek it. He lay on the floor of his uncle’s house and submitted to what felt like the ending of his body, following the fear all the way down until he arrived at something — a luminous awareness — that could not be killed. The experience transformed him utterly. But notice: it began with terror. With the sense that the ground was dissolving.
The Bhakti saints knew this differently. Mirabai, that incandescent lover of Krishna, experienced her first awakening as an impossible longing — a viraha, a separation-ache — that made ordinary life unbearable. She had glimpsed the Beloved and nothing else would do. The spark, for the devotional heart, is not a philosophical recognition but a wound of love. You see, dimly, what you have always been separated from, and the seeing is agony.
I remember the first time I sat in meditation and something broke open — not pleasantly, but with the quality of a fever breaking. There was a moment of extraordinary clarity followed immediately by a kind of vertigo: if this is real, then what have I been living? The question was not rhetorical. It had teeth.
The first crack is merciful in retrospect. In the moment, it is disorienting because it attacks the one thing we are most attached to: our sense of a continuous, coherent self. Nisargadatta Maharaj spoke often about this — the recognition that what we take ourselves to be is a construction, a story told by thought about thought. When that story first flickers, the psyche responds not with liberation but with alarm.
This is where many seekers retreat. The spark frightens them back into the familiar. There is no shame in this. But for those who do not retreat — who hold the question, who let the discomfort deepen rather than flee it — the path continues into darker territory.
II. The Dark Passage
What does the night of the soul actually demand of us?
There is a reason John of the Cross named it noche oscura — the dark night. Not dusk. Not twilight. Night. The kind where you cannot see your hand before your face.
This is the phase that spiritual literature tends to aestheticize and that lived experience refuses to. The dark night — in whatever tradition you encounter it — is the period in which the old self has been sufficiently destabilized that it can no longer provide meaning, but the new ground of being has not yet been reached. You are between worlds. The scaffolding has been removed. And you are in freefall.
In Sufi terminology this passage is approached through the concept of annihilation — the dissolution of the constructed self in the ocean of Divine reality. But I will not dwell here on that teaching, which I have explored elsewhere. What I want to name is the phenomenology of the experience from the inside: the quality not of ecstatic dissolution but of grinding, unglamorous loss. The noche oscura of John of the Cross is not a poetic conceit. It is a precise clinical description. The faculties go dark. The consolations of practice withdraw. God, as one has known God, becomes unavailable — and one is left with nothing to hold but the bare fact of one’s own continuing existence, which itself begins to feel uncertain.
The Jungian frame offers a parallel without the theological scaffolding. Jung understood the dark night as the necessary confrontation with what he called the Shadow — the unintegrated dimensions of the psyche that the persona, the constructed self, has spent a lifetime refusing to see. This is not mere introspection. It is encounter. The Shadow does not present itself politely. It arrives as compulsion, as projection, as the sudden recognition of capacities for darkness one had comfortably assigned to others. The seeker who believed themselves significantly advanced may find, in this passage, that they are face to face with their most primitive fears and most carefully hidden wounds.
This last experience is perhaps the most frightening for the devoted seeker, because we are taught — rightly — that the relationship between devotee and the Beloved is sacred, reciprocal, alive. When it goes silent, we assume we have failed. We search ourselves for the cause: have I become too attached? Too willful? Too self-deluded? The interrogation can become relentless.
What the tradition knows, and what experience eventually confirms, is that this silence is not abandonment. It is a different kind of instruction. The Bhakti path holds this as the deepest form of viraha — the longing that arises when the ego can no longer manufacture the feeling of divine presence, when the heart must love in total darkness, with no experiential reward. This is love purified of the lover’s need for return. It is devastating. It is also, ultimately, a grace.
The Jungian frame offers a parallel insight: this dissolution is the necessary prelude to individuation. The persona — the face we show the world and often, to ourselves — must be surrendered before the deeper self can emerge. The encounter with what Jung called the Shadow, the unintegrated dimensions of the psyche, is not pleasant. It demands that we see what we have refused to see about ourselves. But the refusal to descend into this seeing is, in Jung’s view, a spiritual stagnation dressed as contentment.
I have sat with this darkness in my own life. There have been periods when the bhakti-current that has animated my practice since 1971 — that warm, unmistakable sense of the sacred flowing through the day — simply stopped. And I am not young. At eighty, you might expect that the path would have settled into certainty. It has not. What it has settled into is a deeper willingness to inhabit the uncertainty without demanding that it resolve.
That willingness was not given to me. It was forged. In the dark passage.
III. The Furnace
What does it mean to be transformed by what you cannot control?
If the dark passage is the night, the furnace is the hour before dawn — when the heat is highest and the burning feels total.
This is the phase of what we might call active suffering — not the passive dryness of the dark night but something more acute. Here the psyche, having been stripped of its habitual defenses, encounters what it has been avoiding. Old grief rises. Ancient wounds from the lineage of the soul surface. Attachments that were thought transcended reveal themselves as very much alive. The seeker who believed they had made significant progress may feel, with terrible clarity, that they have made none.
The Advaitic tradition is unflinching here. Nisargadatta would say, with the directness that made him both loved and feared, that the seeker is the problem. Not the world. Not the body. Not the karma. The very act of seeking — the one who seeks — is the veil. This is not intellectual posturing. When it lands, it lands with devastating force. The sincere seeker who has offered years, decades, of practice suddenly confronts the possibility that the effort itself has been a subtle form of avoidance: the self seeking to secure itself through spiritual achievement.
For the Bhakti devotee, the furnace has a different quality. It comes as the dissolution of the devotional relationship as it was understood. The God you loved with a personal, relational love — the Beloved who listened, who responded, who was present in the sacred image, in the music, in the teacher’s gaze — seems to withdraw their personal face and reveal something vaster and more impersonal. This is terrifying for the loving heart. It feels like the death of God as you knew God.
And yet: what is dying is not the Divine. What is dying is the ego’s image of the Divine. The projection. The inner representation that allowed the small self to feel in relationship with the Infinite while remaining, subtly, in control. The furnace burns that image. And what remains — if one does not flee — is a nakedness before something that cannot be represented, cannot be named, will not be held in the mind’s familiar containers.
The fire does not destroy what is real. It reveals it. Everything that burns was always only smoke.
This is the paradox at the heart of all genuine contemplative suffering: it is not punishment. It is precision. The tradition has always known what neuroscience is now beginning to articulate — that the self is a construct, and constructs can be revised. The furnace is the revision. It is painful because we are identified with what is being revised. But identification is not reality.
Ramana, after his death-experience at sixteen, spent years in silence so complete that he did not eat unless food was placed in his mouth, did not bathe unless moved by water. His absorption in the Self was total. What looked, from outside, like withdrawal was, from inside, the aftermath of a furnace that had burned everything and left only the pure awareness that he would later call the Heart. He did not plan this. He did not manage it. He surrendered into it, because there was nothing else left to do.
Most of us will not undergo such extremity. But all genuine paths involve a version of this: something beloved and familiar must be released before the deeper reality can be entered. The degree of release required is proportional — the tradition suggests — to the depth of the transformation being prepared.
IV. The Ash
What does it mean to live in the aftermath of burning?
There is a stage that comes after the furnace that the literature often skips, moving too quickly to the light. It is the stage of ash.
The burning is done. Something has genuinely shifted. The seeker who sat down in this fire is not the same person who rises from it. And yet: they must still live. They must still move through the world, speak with people, inhabit a body that has needs, navigate a life that has structures. And they discover, sometimes with black humor, that the world did not change while they were being transformed.
This is the quiet suffering of the aftermath. The disorientation of carrying a changed interior through an unchanged exterior. The loneliness of seeing the world in a way that others do not yet see it — and not being able to explain the difference. The strange flatness that sometimes follows peak experience: the mystics call it desolation, the Zen tradition might call it the awkward phase after satori, when the laundry still needs doing and the insight does not make that more luminous, it only makes it more obviously itself.
Nisargadatta sat in his small room in Mumbai selling bidis — hand-rolled cigarettes — after his awakening. He was not elevated above the ordinary. He lived it, completely, without the story of specialness overlaid on it. This is, in its own way, harder than the furnace. In the furnace you know you are being transformed. In the ash, you must simply be what you are, without drama, without the comfort of seeking still to come.
In the Sufi tradition, the state that follows fana is baqa — subsistence, remaining. The mystic who has been annihilated in God must return to the world and inhabit it with the consciousness that has been opened. Al-Hallaj, that blazing Persian mystic, could not manage the return quietly. His mouth continued to speak from the place of union — Ana’l-Haqq, I am the Truth — and the world, unable to contain what it heard, executed him. Most of us will not be executed for our realizations. But the challenge of baqa is real: how does one live from the opened place in a world that has not been opened?
I find myself, in the eighth decade of this life, more acquainted with ash than with fire. The pyrotechnics of early seeking — the visions, the openings, the raptures — have largely quieted. What remains is something more like a steady warmth. Consistent rather than spectacular. And in honesty: there are days when I miss the fire, which is itself a teaching about attachment. Even our attachment to transformation must, eventually, be surrendered.
V. The Light That Remains
What does it mean to arrive at the other side of suffering — and find it was never somewhere else?
And then there is this: the moment — not dramatic, not necessarily announced — when one realizes that what was being sought was never absent.
This is the deepest paradox of the contemplative path, and the traditions state it differently but point to the same recognition. Ramana’s teaching was simply: you are already That. The Self you seek is the one doing the seeking. Nisargadatta: consciousness is your nature, not your achievement. The Bhakti tradition arrives at it through love: when the devotee has loved so completely, so wholly, that the distinction between lover and Beloved has dissolved, what remains is not a relationship but a unity. Not devotion directed toward something outside, but devotion as the nature of existence itself.
The suffering of awakening, seen from this vantage point, was never meaningless. It was the necessary dismantling of everything that prevented this recognition. The ego does not surrender its claim to centrality because it is asked nicely. It surrenders because the practices, the dark nights, the furnace, the ash — cumulatively — leave it nowhere left to stand.
But I want to be careful here, because spiritual literature often rushes to this resolution in a way that can feel dismissive of the actual human cost. The suffering was real. The losses were real. The years of confusion and dryness and grief were real. They are not erased by the light that comes. They are included in it.
The sacred music that moves me most deeply now — and I have written elsewhere about how certain music opens something in me that tears without emotion, a structural opening rather than a felt response — carries this quality. It does not deny the darkness. It holds the darkness inside its beauty. The minor chord does not resolve into major and then disappear; the tension is sustained, held, integrated into the whole. This is what genuine contemplative maturity sounds like: not the absence of suffering but its transfiguration.
The Vedantic term sahaja — natural, spontaneous, effortless — points to this. Sahaja samadhi is not a state achieved and then lost, not the fireworks of early practice. It is the settled recognition of what was always so, lived with simplicity, without theater. The light that remains is not the same as the spark that began everything. It is quieter. More ordinary. And infinitely more reliable.
We come to the path because something breaks us open. We stay on the path through seasons we could not have chosen. And we arrive — if we arrive — not at a destination but at the clear recognition that we were never, at any point, not already home. The journey was real. The suffering was real. And so is this.
VI. The Lie of Separation
What does it mean to discover that the distance we suffered was never real?
Here is the question that lives beneath every other question on the contemplative path: how did we come to believe we were separate from the One in the first place?
Not philosophically. Not as an abstract puzzle. But as a lived, felt, bone-deep conviction — the certainty that there is a self here, bounded and alone, and a divine reality there, vast and other, and that the distance between them must somehow be crossed. This conviction is so fundamental, so woven into the fabric of ordinary human experience, that we rarely notice it as a belief at all. It feels like simple fact. The sky is blue. I am here. God is elsewhere.
And yet every tradition that has gone deep enough arrives at the same astonishing report: the separation was never real. Not diminished by practice. Not healed over time. Never real. The Upanishads state it with the economy of the already-obvious: Tat tvam asi — That thou art. Not ‘that thou mayest become,’ not ‘that thou wilt approach asymptotically through sufficient discipline.’ That thou art. Present tense. Unconditional. Now.
Nisargadatta was characteristically blunt about this: the sense of separation, he said, is the root illness, and every other spiritual problem — the seeking, the suffering, the dark night, the ego’s endless maneuvers — is simply a symptom. The medicine is not a new experience. It is the recognition that what you are has never been other than what Is.
But if this is true — and the traditions speak with remarkable unanimity that it is — then why the suffering? Why the arc at all? Why fifty years of practice, of dark nights, of furnaces, if the destination was never elsewhere?
This is where I find the Bhakti understanding most tender and most honest. In the devotional frame, the apparent separation is not an error to be corrected but a creative act of the Divine — what the Shaiva traditions call lila, sacred play. The One becomes many not by accident but by design, as an act of love so complete that it includes the experience of longing for itself. We are the Divine forgetting itself in order to remember. The separation is the mechanism of the love affair. The viraha — the ache of the lover for the Beloved — is not a defect in the cosmos. It is the cosmos feeling itself from the inside.
Separation is not the wound. Separation is the longing of the One for its own depths — given a face, a voice, a heart that breaks open.
This reframes the entire arc of awakening’s suffering. The spark, the dark night, the furnace, the ash — none of it was punishment for the sin of being separate. It was the One, moving through the apparent individual, dismantling the structures of forgetting in order to remember itself. We suffer the awakening not because we are broken but because we are loved — because something in the nature of reality refuses to allow us to remain permanently asleep to what we are.
I have sat with this understanding long enough now that it no longer feels like a consolation — which would make it smaller than it is. It feels like description. The years of practice, the devotion, the dryness, the return: all of it was the One doing what the One does, in the particular form that is Stefan Bright, in this particular lifetime, on this particular shore. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was outside the field. There was no moment, however dark, that was not already the Divine moving through its own creation.
This is not a passive conclusion. It does not dissolve the path into irrelevance or make the practices unnecessary. The practices matter — not because they build a bridge across a real gap, but because they thin the membrane of forgetting. They create the conditions in which the recognition that was always available can finally surface. Meditation, devotion, inquiry: these are not ladders to God. They are the ways the Divine loosens its own disguise.
And here is what moves me most, after all this time: the recognition that there is no separation does not diminish love. It deepens it. When the Bhakti heart discovers that the Beloved was never elsewhere — that every moment of longing was the Beloved longing through you, for you, as you — the love does not dissolve into abstraction. It becomes everything. The ordinary world, unchanged in its appearance, is suddenly radiant with what it always was. The neighbor. The sparrow. The glass of water. The morning light arriving without announcement, as it has always done, asking nothing, offering everything.
We are not separated from the One who holds us. We have only, briefly, magnificently, believed that we were. And even that belief — even the suffering it generated — was the One, playing its infinite game of hide and seek with itself, in love with the moment of its own discovery.
Epilogue
The fire was not your enemy.
It came for what was never yours to keep — the identities, the certainties, the carefully constructed distance between yourself and the ground of your own being. It burned those things with a precision that looked, from inside the burning, like destruction.
What remains is not less than what you were. It is what you always were, beneath the accumulation.
The ash is not the end. It is the soil.
Stand in it. Let it be ordinary. Let the morning come without theater — as it does, as it always has — and notice that the light asking nothing of you is the same light that was always there, before the first crack, before the dark passage, before the furnace.
You did not arrive here. You were always here. The suffering was the remembering.
Sources & References
1. Ramana Maharshi — The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, ed. Arthur Osborne (Rider & Company, 1959); also referenced in David Godman, Be As You Are: The Teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi (Penguin Arkana, 1985).
2. Nisargadatta Maharaj — I Am That, trans. Maurice Frydman, ed. Sudhakar S. Dikshit (Acorn Press, 1973).
3. Mirabai — For the Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai, trans. Andrew Schelling (Hohm Press, 1998); also referenced in Prabhu & Rao, The Life and Teachings of Mirabai (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan).
4. Jalal al-Din Rumi — The Masnavi, Book I (reed flute prologue), trans. Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford World’s Classics, 2004).
5. Mansur al-Hallaj — referenced in Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1982).
6. John of the Cross — Dark Night of the Soul (Noche Oscura del Alma), trans. E. Allison Peers (Image Books, 1959).
7. C.G. Jung — The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works Vol. 9i (Princeton University Press, 1969); also Aion, CW Vol. 9ii.
8. Fana and Baqa — Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Practice of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (HarperOne, 2007).
9. Sahaja Samadhi — referenced in David Godman, Living by the Words of Bhagavan (Sri Annamalai Swami Ashram Trust, 1994).
10. Tat tvam asi — Chandogya Upanishad, 6.8.7, trans. Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanishads (Oxford University Press, 1998).
11. Lila (Divine Play) — David Kinsley, The Divine Player: A Study of Krsna Lila (Motilal Banarsidass, 1979); also Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga (Advaita Ashrama, 1899).
Numinous Waves 