What Being Awake Truly Means: An Interview with Jeff Carreira
“When we experience things that break the rules of what is supposed to be possible, our experience of reality expands. And it only takes one reality-expanding experience to change everything, because now you know anything is possible.” — Jeff Carreira
Quick doses of spirituality are readily available to anyone and everyone in our current culture, from just about anyone and everyone. But is that enough to truly change the life of someone?
In my chat with Jeff Carreira, we took a deep dive into just what it means to be Awake, choosing the right path for ourselves, and why spiritual experiences alter the lives of some but leaving others with simply the memory of an episode in life.
Jeff has chosen a devoted spiritual life over 30 years ago, and has since written over 30 books on spirituality and shifting consciousness, including the newly released: The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough: From Awakening to Cosmic Awareness. He is a spiritual mentor, speaker, and meditation teacher who hosts retreats and teaches all over the world. I was delighted to sit down with him and hear some of his phenomenal spiritual experiences, as well as his thoughts on destiny.
Q:
You mentioned in your book that you had “decided to go back to sleep” after having a spiritual awakening at a very young age. What made you decide to do that?
A:
I have always had an interesting spiritual connection to cosmic consciousness, I was just born with it. I used to go into the bathroom when I was about 4 to 6 years old and just stare into my own eyes and expand into the size of the universe until my whole body was the cosmos. I would experience an enormous amount of love, joy, and the feeling of being home and then I would shrink back into my body until I was back in the bathroom again. And then when I was a little older, I would lock myself in my father’s car and try to stop my mind from incessant thinking. By the age of 12, I would spend hours staring at the stars and getting lost.
I was superficially happy as a child, but existentially I felt like I didn’t fit in anywhere. I felt very alone and very isolated. I remember sitting on the bus when I was in kindergarten, listening to all the other kids talking, and thinking to myself I have no idea what they are talking about and I have nothing to add, but when I’m in the 4th grade, I’ll have something to talk about. Then came the 4th grade, I was sitting on the bus and thinking to myself I still don’t have anything to talk about. Nothing anyone was talking about made any sense to me and I wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing there.
That continued into the 5th grade, and it was then that I decided that being isolated and not fitting in wasn’t working for me. I remember watching TV one night and saw a random character on a sitcom who was funny and lovable, so I thought to myself, that looks like a good person to be, I think I’ll be him. I went to school the next day and just played that part. I was terrible at it and told a lot of stupid jokes. But I kept at it, and eventually went from being very shy and isolated to being someone that everybody liked because I joked around all the time. And that was my way of fitting in.
I think I decided to play a role for the sake of fitting in a particularly conscious way, but I also think a lot of people do that. People with spiritual inclinations have early childhood experiences of being uncertain about what the world is presenting to them, because they were not presented with the option to live a spiritual life. It’s not really something you could go to your guidance counselor for. So people think to themselves I better turn this off so I could fit in. I think that’s what most people end up doing.
If you ask a lot of young kids, most of them can probably tell you about some kind of spiritual experience. But as people get older, no one seems to have those experiences anymore, because our environment doesn't make it okay for us to have those experiences or to share them. A friend of mine pointed out that even at 7 years old, I felt the need to lock myself in my father’s car. Somehow I knew it wasn’t safe for me to have those experiences in public.
A metaphor I’d like to use as an example is imagine I saw a UFO in public and pointed it out to people on the street. Maybe someone next to me says they don’t see anything. Then another person says they don’t either. How many people would have to say they don’t see it before I stop talking about it? How many others would have to say they didn’t see anything before I stop seeing it myself? We are all culturally conditioned to not have spiritual experiences. But it’s not that we stop having them, we just stop paying attention to them. They just become something we ignore.
Spiritual experiences are not that hard to have, but it’s very hard to integrate them in a way that’s sustainable, that takes time and you can't cheat at that. You might be able to find a shortcut to having a spiritual experience. There are ways to help induce a shift in consciousness and you can even get good at it. But to incorporate it into a life that works so that it actually leads to transformation takes time, and you can’t really shortcut that process.
Q:
Our current world is full of quick-hit spiritual teachings. How are today’s teachings different from traditional spiritual teachings, and how do we safeguard ourselves from following the wrong path?
A:
That’s a great question. Traditional spiritual teachings a long time ago, for example, in the East tend to be taught in monasteries. And in that environment you would be doing a lot of practice on a daily basis to develop a capacity to hold higher consciousness, which involves strong character, a stable sense of self, the intellectual capacity to understand, etc. — an important foundation before you were initiated into practices that could lead to dramatic shifts in consciousness.
The danger in having some of these practices readily available without any prerequisite training at all is that dramatic shifts in consciousness can have a disassociating effect on some people. Not everyone is ready for dramatic shifts in consciousness at any given moment. We need to take into consideration the mental stability and psychological makeup of each person. When I conduct longer and more in-depth retreats, I often use a questionnaire and I also sometimes have a psychologist present for longer retreats. I want to be prepared for any issues that might come up during intense practice.
Spiritual experiences are not that hard to have, but it’s very hard to integrate them in a way that’s sustainable; that takes time and you can't cheat at that. You might be able to find a shortcut to having a spiritual experience. There are ways to help induce a shift in consciousness and you can even get good at it. But to incorporate it into a life that works so that it actually leads to transformation takes time, and you can’t really shortcut that process.
From my experience, more often than not, big spiritual experiences don’t really lead to much change. Temporarily we are very excited by them, but unless you are able to integrate it into your daily life, they eventually just become a memory of an incredible event that happened.
Most people think one day they will have a spiritual experience so big that it will change their life and so they keep looking for that experience, but the thing is, spiritual experiences don’t really do anything TO you. Personally, what really changed for me was that after having many spiritual experiences, I realized I didn’t need anymore proof. I didn’t need anymore mind-blowing experiences to be convinced in the sacred. I was no longer seeking and I just relaxed. What I realized in that process was that we can spend a lot of time looking for powerful spiritual experiences only because we want to be convinced that life is miraculous, that life is sacred. Of course if you think about it, if we need a spiritual experience to convince us that life is a miracle, it can only be because we are ignoring how miraculous it is to be alive to begin with.
Q:
Was it a difficult decision to end your first marriage and pursue a spiritual life? What made you realize that it was inevitable?
A:
I was with my wife at the time for about 7 years and we had about the happiest marriage that I was aware of. We had fun, we both had good careers and made good money so there was nothing wrong. Then I began to have a series of spiritual experiences and within a year I was getting involved with a spiritual group that was becoming more and more a part of my life. I was beginning to invite her into it and she was starting to get involved, but at some point it was clear that this was not her path.
She was happy for me to continue on my pursuits but she desired a more traditional life, with family and kids. I realized that in order for us to stay together we would both have to make a big compromise and live half the life that we each really wanted to live. And if we fast-forwarded 30 years, neither of us would be happy because she’d never quite had the life she wanted, and I’d never quite had the life I wanted. I understand all marriages require compromise but when your ultimate goals are that different it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be sustainable in the end.
That’s when I decided to have a conversation about it. So we talked about it and she understood. I explained to her parents why I came to that decision; I explained things to my neighbors, who were livid with me and wanted to have an intervention to stop me. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I lived with an enormous amount of guilt for years, until my wife remarried and had kids and got the life she truly wanted. And I am remarried as well. So it was a happy ending.
Q:
Can you share your most shocking, or most moving spiritual experience?
A:
The most shocking, that’s hard because they were all pretty shocking!
I will share two experiences that have had the most effect on me, and they happened on the same retreat I mentioned earlier. That was a retreat I was on for about 2 months and I had to quit my job to do it because I was teaching at the time and I wanted to stay on the retreat and wasn’t going to make it back for the school year. I was doing an intense amount of practice and was incredibly focused. Afterall, I just gave up my career for this retreat, so I wasn’t going to screw around.
One night, I woke up in the middle of the night, after meditating from 4 am to about 10 pm each day, with an intense pain at the base of my spine. It was right at the tailbone. I couldn’t stay in bed, I had to get up and walk around. I didn’t know what was wrong, it had really hurt. It felt like someone had hit me with a hammer. I remember thinking to myself, could I have hurt myself because I was sitting all day on a meditation cushion? Is it possible that I could’ve broken my tailbone?
I was in so much pain and I didn’t know what to do, so I sat down on the bed. And as soon as my butt hit the bed, an explosion of a white light burst up through the base of my spine and up into my head. It made a roaring sound. I thought the light was coming from my room, so I closed my eyes, but then I realized the light was inside my body. The experience didn’t last very long, about 30 seconds then it was done, and the pain was gone.
I didn’t know a whole lot about kundalini energy but I knew this had been an experience of kundalini awakening. I remember saying out loud: “Holy shit, I think that was kundalini energy!” LOL.
A week later, I experienced a whole new level of consciousness.
I was still meditating from 4 to 10 daily and was getting really tired, but I was determined to not fall asleep during this retreat so I was doing everything possible to stay awake. One night in meditation I was very tired and I had a headache and started having weird thoughts from sheer exhaustion. I heard a voice in my head that said: “You’re not tired.” That's when a new awareness kicked in and made me realize that I really wasn’t tired — my body was exhausted and my mind was exhausted, but I was fine. I was watching the same tired body and tired mind with the awakeness of someone who had just woken up after a solid night of sleep. I realized that the awareness that I am is always 100% awake. Sometimes, it experiences a tired body and mistakenly thinks that it’s also tired.
For the rest of that meditation, I observed my body as my eyes teared up and my head was aching, but it wasn’t me anymore. When I went to lay down on my bed, I didn’t quite know what was going on, but as I lay down, I felt a hum, and a numbness overtook my body. I realized that I had fallen asleep but my mind was still awake. And then I watched my mind slowly turn off and there was only blackness. But my awareness was still there. I thought to myself, oh my God, my body and mind are asleep but I’m still completely awake. And suddenly, I was witnessing a dream, but I was completely aware that I was dreaming.
This continued to happen for the next night, the night after, and the night after that. For 3 days, I forgot how to lose consciousness. That’s when I realized and believed with certainty (and still do) that the awareness that I am is always awake, even when my body and mind fall asleep. That awareness is who I really am. It was awake before I was born, it will be awake after I die. I have no doubt that the awareness that I am is eternal and universal. It is the universal source of awareness, which is no different than the source of your awareness or anybody else’s. It just becomes associated with the experience of our body and mind while we are here, but it’s meant to wake up to who and what it truly is. That’s what “waking up” truly means — waking up to the part of you that’s always already awake.
Without attaining some degree of spiritual freedom, you are always going to be chasing something to make you okay. Once you experience spiritual freedom, you will realize that you’re okay, no matter what your body might be going through and no matter what your mind might be feeling. You are inherently okay.
Q:
What is your method of teaching and what are some of the programs and retreats you offer right now?
A:
First of all, I would say that I believe that there isn’t this one destiny for all of us. I don’t know what everybody’s destiny is, but as a teacher, I am here to support everyone to fulfill their own destiny. I have tools I’ve explored and developed over the past 30 years of a devoted spiritual life that many people find helpful, but those tools can serve many different paths.
Fundamentally, there are two things that I experienced in my spiritual life that were truly valuable. The first one is Spiritual Freedom. That essentially means having the capacity to be content with whatever is, no matter what happens. It’s equanimity. When you are free you don’t need anything from outside of you in order to be okay.
Without attaining some degree of spiritual freedom, you are always going to be chasing something to make you okay. Once you experience spiritual freedom, you will realize that you’re okay, no matter what your body might be going through and no matter what your mind might be feeling. You are inherently okay. So Spiritual Freedom is the first thing that I teach, and I teach it generally through the vehicle of meditation. I do a lot of meditation retreats and love doing them. I have one coming up in a couple months and another one in February. I answer a lot of questions during those retreats; many people find them very transformative.
The second thing that I have found most valuable is Creative Illumination. I talk a lot about it in my book The Path of Spiritual Breakthrough. After the initial practice of developing spiritual freedom and learning to be detached from outcomes, you find yourself in what’s often referred to as the witness position. At some point I started to realize that when I’m in that position, I sometimes feel the divine coming through me in the form of deep energetic stirrings. It feels as if the divine wants me to dance, to remain detached and declining divine invitations to dance defeats the purpose. So for me, the purpose is to allow the divine to take me to have higher experiences.
I think one of the reasons I have had so many spiritual experiences is because anytime the divine wanted me to dance I was willing to go. So that is something I teach as well.
I think there are people whose purpose is to rest in perfect equanimity and that’s beautiful and powerful, it just isn’t my destiny. My destiny seems to be to have spiritual experiences and come back and write about them and create art from them. I have always been a creative mystic. I love to support people to navigate through higher experiences and express them through their own artistic means.
I have heard this difference referred to as Transcendent Enlightenment vs. Incarnate Enlightenment. Transcendent Enlightenment involves the disappearance into oblivion; Incarnate forms of enlightenment have to do with returning to the world with the fruits of higher wisdom. Whichever is your destiny, do that. Like I said, not everybody has the same destiny. For me, I once tried to not produce anything creative and found it just wasn’t me. It just feels that something wants to come through me and use me as a vehicle. I’m here to do something and I can’t deny it. So I surrendered to that.
What I’m aware of is that this journey is very long, and it involves multiple life times. How far along someone is in this lifetime isn’t necessarily an indication of how far along their soul is. Because there are often lots of contingencies here on Earth. Sometimes I meet people who seem to be just getting started on their spiritual journey but feel like a much deeper soul than me. I am lucky enough to have created a spiritual community now, that can serve as a home to a lot of these people.
I have an online community called The Mystery School where we all come together and share experiences. It’s a community full of people who are serious about their spiritual journey. I wanted a space where we can all freely share our experiences, where everybody’s wisdom counts. It’s a pretty amazing group of people, every week we have a number of things going on.
As for myself, I have a few retreats coming up. Two of which are already sold out, but there are a couple of spots left for the Brazil retreat coming up in February. The easiest place to get all that information is from my website. I offer lots of opportunities other than in-person retreats, such as learn-at-your-own-pace programs, courses, as well as many free courses.
Jeff Carreira is a meditation teacher, mystical philosopher and author who works with a growing number of people throughout the world. As a teacher, he offers retreats and courses guiding individuals in a form of meditation he refers to as The Art of Conscious Contentment. Through this simple and effective technique, he has led thousands of people in a journey beyond the confines of fear and self-concern into the expansive liberated awareness that is our true home.
As a philosopher, Jeff is interested in defining a new way of being in the world that will move us from our current paradigm of separation and isolation into an emerging paradigm of unity and wholeness. In his books and lectures, he explores revolutionary ideas in the domains of spirituality, consciousness, and human development. He creates courses and programs that encourage people to question their most foundational experience of reality until previously held assumptions fall away leaving space for a dramatically new understanding to emerge.
Jeff is passionate about the potential ideas that shape how we perceive reality and how we live together. His enthusiasm for learning is infectious, and he has taught at colleges and universities throughout the world.
In a world in which university education is often thought of as a vocational certificate, seeing someone obviously relishing the acquisition and sharing of knowledge for its own sake is inspiring.
— Dr. William O. Shropshire, Provost and Professor Emeritus Ogelthorpe University
Jeff is the author of numerous books including American Awakening, Philosophy Is Not a Luxury, The Soul of a New Self, Paradigm Shifting, and The Art of Conscious Contentment.
You can follow Jeff on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or visit his website for information on upcoming programs and retreats.
