I wanted to fall into a Wikihole because I was bored, so I typed “spiritual awakening” into Wikipedia, where I was redirected to “enlightenment”.  A few clicks later, and I found myself on the page for “Sati (mindfulness/awareness)” (not to be confused with the extant practice of widow immolation: ew).  There is, of course, a discussion on the page about what the word actually means, that being a point of difficulty between East and West.  Originally, the word referred to something more like “memory” but became connected to the act of meditation as a critical way of achieving enlightenment.  I was reminded of the Ancient Greek word for “truth”, which is aleitheis: literally “to not forget” (a=not, lethe=forget, a la the River Lethe in the Greek underworld), as well as the multiple references I have seen in various spiritual and philosophical writings to an “original knowledge” that we all have that can be accessed by employing the right kinds of life practices.

The Sanskrit word for the same concept is smriti: “that which is remembered”, presumably through being “mindful”.  Like dharma, this seems to be a word that means different things depending on the context, though those meanings are interrelated.  Sati literally means “to remember to observe”.  Both sati and smriti refer to the remembrance of sruti, or “that which is heard”, which is how the Vedics referred to the knowledge written down by the early sages.  The idea was that the sages were privy to Divine information directly transmitted to them, which they then wrote down as the first Vedic texts.  Sruti is more important than smriti/sati, but the latter is still important in maintaining a connection to sruti.

Achieving enlightenment isn’t learning something new: it’s remembering something very, very old, something that gets lost in the process of incarnating and living unless you live in an environment in which the cultivation of that knowledge is actively pursued (such as the Ancient East), which it isn’t in a lot of places, at least not in the West.  That’s the “original knowledge”: that everything is interconnected and therefore, one.  As a matter of simple cause-and-effect, one’s current existence, everything in it, and everything that led up to it can be seen as a path of Time through Space and Matter.  Focus hard enough on that path and you can follow it to the Source.

A couple of other commentators on the concept raised the truth that sati isn’t just bare awareness of a thing, but of all things and how they relate to one another, of the interconnectedness of the Universe as well as “the proper discrimination of the moral valence of phenomena as they arise” (Robert Sharf).  I recalled how the phenomenon of synchronicity in my life was incredibly confusing until I figured out how to give weight to each thread connecting everything.  Suddenly, instead of a world filled with threads of equal thickness and strength that rendered only chaos, they varied in quality, making it so much easier to see what was truly important and what was not, instilling order.  A connection resembling a bridge support cable gets a lot more priority than one resembling a thin thread, though a lot of thin threads together create their own strength.  Everything, ultimately, is important in some relative way.

Throughout this whole journey over the last five years, I have repeatedly seen the places along my path where others have also traversed, but fell off the main Path for whatever reason.  Sometimes they fall into illusion traps.  Sometimes they’re fooled by a path of “false enlightenment”.  Sometimes they stay stuck in that place where all connections have equal weight, which is what enables someone to believe in something like the Flat Earth (it makes sense to them, and they can’t be dissuaded).  Sometimes they fall into one of the many ego traps that lie along the Path.  I’ve observed where others have fallen off the Path and tried to learn from their mistakes so that I can stay on mine.

I feel uncomfortable making these observations, like there’s a part of me that feels superior and judgmental.  I know perfectly well that once one goes around proclaiming one’s state of enlightenment that you can be sure that person isn’t enlightened at all, so it’s hard for me to discuss what I Know in my bones is a level of Knowledge others don’t have without breaking my own rules about humility.  And yet I feel this is information that is important to disseminate because I feel like the world needs it right now.  Mindful awareness of the interconnected reality of existence would go a long way towards solving our problems, both individually and collectively.