Why do people seem ‘crazy’ after an awakening? Their old drives have fallen away and they’ve emerged from the shell of ego. Just look at Rasputin’s spiritual transformation!
Have you known someone who appears completely transformed and different, and they claim to have had a spiritual awakening? They may have experienced a spiritual transformation. One of my favorite stories of spiritual awakening comes from the tale of a famous figure in modern history: Grigori Rasputin. In 1897, Rasputin abruptly left his village in Russia to make a pilgrimage to a monastery three hundred miles away (between Pokrovskoye and Verkhoturye) where he underwent a spiritual awakening and returned totally changed:
Whatever his reasons, Rasputin cast off his old life: he was twenty-eight, married ten years, with an infant son and another child on the way. According to Douglas Smith, his decision “could only have been occasioned by some sort of emotional or spiritual crisis”…He returned to Pokrovskoye a changed man, looking disheveled and behaving differently. He became a vegetarian, swore off alcohol, and prayed and sang much more fervently than he had in the past.
Of course, he is widely remembered for being a crazy man who bewitched members of the Russian royalty and consequently was murdered under strange circumstances wherein he consumed poison without feeling any effect and resurrected himself from gunshot wounds. He was beaten and shot, but still would not die, so they bound his body and threw him — still alive — into a freezing river.
Before this, however, he became a trusted spiritual advisor to the Tsarina, giving personal and political advice, which of course made other advisors nervous. At one point, he healed their son, Alexei, of a serious illness:
The Czar’s sister, Grand Duchess Olga, wrote that she observed Rasputin healing Alexei by kneeling at the foot of his bed and praying.
In my interpretation, having had a spiritual awakening myself, this is a great example of a person who transformed and became connected with the divine. He may have had a sort of kundalini awakening (a type of spiritual awakening) where he woke up suddenly and understood that it is not spiritually kosher to consume meat or to distort the senses with alcohol. It makes total sense to me that he had a special connection to God and could heal others with the powers of his mind and prayer. It also makes sense that he could manifest his body in ways that resisted poison and bullets. Of course, skeptics will never accept this and we have no way of traveling to the past to find out the truth.
But we do have the ability to analyze common characteristics of spiritual awakenings and how they can transform people.
They see their place and purpose in the great story of the universe.
Like Grigori Rasputin, people who have undergone a spiritual awakening seem completely different because they have cut through their ego to find their true self and higher purpose. Very suddenly, they see that everything they’ve done up until that point was based on a mindset of superficiality and attachments to the wrong goals. Internally, they become aligned with new goals — usually related to the oneness of the universe and serving others — and it becomes urgent to make changes in their behavior and habits.
This is well described by this article by January Nelson in Thought Catalog:
You feel a sudden need to make radical changes in your life. This can include everything from your diet to your job to the people you spend time with. More than anything, you realize what isn’t working.
To others, this new behavior and the expression of these new ideas seem crazy and radical. No wonder most people think Rasputin was crazy! Be kind to the people in your life who have undergone this transformation — though you may not understand it, they are becoming better. However, they will feel as though they can’t open up to most people about it because of the labels that will be associated with their new beliefs.
All attachments that created their personality have gone.
People who’ve emerged transformed from a spiritual awakening are almost the same at first glance, but they have severed ties to their previous habits and preferences. These things dictated a lot about what drives them and their perceived personality. Like Rasputin, they may give up meat or alcohol, no longer finding pleasure in those things. They were superficial pleasures anyway.
People who have had a spiritual awakening now extract joy from the great energy of life around them. Their understanding of the world and the rich meaning in every moment replaces the joys they may have taken in physical pleasures before. Their attachments to material things and the drives of their ego are gone. They no longer act out of anything related to the ‘self’ since they can clearly see that it is an illusion.
“EGO stands for Edging God Out.”
— Deepak Chopra
They don’t identify with their actions of the past.
You may be upset that a person who has undergone a spiritual transformation doesn’t take responsibility for their past actions. For instance, Rasputin left his wife and children to travel from Siberia to St. Petersburg to fulfill some purpose. This probably seemed insane to most people. However, you have to understand that while awakened people know that their previous attachments caused them to act a certain way before which was harmful to them and others, now they just don’t feel a connection with that past. They feel like a completely new person.
When you have an awakening, you feel like you’ve been reborn. That sometimes doesn’t sit well with others because you are still in the same body! But you don’t feel like the same person at all. Your memories tell you the way you used to feel, but they seem like memories of another person entirely.
Final Thoughts on Spiritual Transformation
Rasputin’s story is a great example of a spiritual awakening, but there are people in the world going through awakenings every day. If you have not had one, you may think their behavior is strange, and like skeptics of the powers of Rasputin, you may be tempted to use the word ‘crazy’ or feel confused about their strange behavior. Hopefully, I have given you reasons to open your mind a bit and try to understand these events. Having undergone a spiritual journey, I understand that Rasputin was definitely not crazy, in fact, he seems pretty normal to me.
It’s the people who stay attached to the physical and their fears that seem pretty strange to me these days.
If you’ve had an awakening, I hope that the people around you in your life have compassion. Spiritual transformation is awesome but people in your life may not understand. But hopefully, your new perspectives rub off a little on them! In my experience, you will start to attract an entirely new crowd into your life with total ease.
