At its most basic level, everything is energy. This includes people, thoughts, colors, rocks, plants, space, light… everything. Many people have called the Universe a “vibrational universe.”

Where do “you” begin and end, and where does anything around you begin and end? There is no boundary to energy. What we perceive is concentrations of energy with unique vibrational patterns. This makes things appear solid and separate from one another.

Spiritual awakening goes beyond the “obvious” of separateness and embraces the true nature of everything, which is unity. Spiritual awakening doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “finding God” in the religious sense. It can also be viewed as realization of one’s own energetic quality.

Shrinking and Growing Exercise

It often begins with a simple exercise like this “Shrinking and Growing Exercise.”

Imagine you are sitting in a country house, enjoying the afternoon sunshine, hearing the birds singing. You have a lovely view of your surroundings. Imagine the far-reaching and the intimate views. In your mind, take in every detail. See the space between the trees. Smell the scent of individual flowers. See each cloud as it floats across the sky.

Now, make yourself smaller. Image you shrink down to the size of a bee. Suddenly the house has become colossal. Everything is HUGE. Delicate rosebuds are much bigger than you. The cat is an enormous beast and you feel uncomfortable as the object of its interest. The spaces between things are much larger. Without wings, the journey from the front porch to the street is an epic journey. Take in the details around you. Imagine a teacup – now the size of a small swimming pool…

You shrink even more. You are now the size of a dust mite. The world has completely transformed. You don’t have any perception of your house anymore. It’s simply too big for you to ever explore in a lifetime. This room is your world. This room has a couch. But you don’t see it as a couch anymore. It appears as huge as a mountain, an enormous, rocky monolith. The upholstery fibers are far more massive than the biggest redwood trees. You can go between these fibers as easily as the ‘regular-sized you’ walks between trees in your garden. You can’t see the world beyond – the room – from the forest of fibers. You now have the ability to move around inside things that used to look solid to you.

You are now an atom. Your house is long gone from your perception because it is so vast. You are so small that you are deep inside a single cotton fiber of your upholstered couch. One individual fiber is your universe now. Interestingly, there is still space between you and other atoms…

You are a subatomic particle now. You float freely in space, noticing slight concentrations of other subatomic particles around you. Between you there’s still… space. What is this stuff? It’s not “air” anymore because you’re small beyond the molecules that make up air. So what is this stuff inbetween the stuff that makes up the particles that make up the air, the cotton fibers, the couch, the house… your neighbourhood, your planet, your solar system, your galaxy, your universe…?

And you go smaller, beyond what science has discovered so far. You have become energy. Pure energy. You are a conscious, intelligent, creative energy. You are everything and everything is you. You are the creator and the created.

And then you start growing. Soon you’re back to your human size. That was fun but let’s go bigger! You are tall as the trees now. Your house looks like a child’s plaything. The cat is the size of a tiny insect. You’re still expanding…

You are the size of the planet now…. and bigger. You hold the Earth in the palm of your hand, like a tiny blue/green jewel. Where is your house? Where is everything? It’s all right there… but you can’t see it because it’s so small. There is no space between anything, as far as you can perceive. The Earth looks like a marble.

You are bigger than our galaxy. You keep expanding. Billions of galaxies that seemed so very far apart are now clustered together like pearls on a necklace… what will things look like when you keep expanding? Soon the space between things seems to disappear, as they get closer and closer together – all because your perception has changed.

When you can grasp the enormity of this, you experience a spiritual awakening. It is really beyond our intellect to completely understand this, because the intellect relies on information from the physical senses. Our senses just can’t see that small – or that big.

This is how spiritual awakening happens. Whatever your personal beliefs, the best place to find this awakening is through using the imagination and going way beyond what we humans perceive. Try it today, and feel the one-ness of everything. Become awakened to your unity.