The volcano, the mountain, the stillness.

A true spiritual awakening, over time, is not soft. It escalates.

It begins as the self dissolves, merging with the divine, the sacred, and the living world around it.

At first, it is destabilizing. The equalization of energy, the awareness of every thought within and without, it shatters the stability of the mind. The thought-mind was never built to hold the vastness of all-that-is.

During the stages of awakening, peace will come. And then it will leave.

Life will erupt again: sudden events, unexpected endings, small devastations that demand your wholeness. These moments force you to meet the parts of yourself still hidden — the fears, the defenses, the unintegrated fragments of personality not yet absorbed into love.

They masquerade as moods, or pain, or chaos. But they are in truth the disruptions of God. Volcanic eruptions on the landscape of awakening.

And yet, once the eruption quiets, the mountain remains. Still. Whole.

When these moments are met with presence, the self steadies. The turbulence eases.

The is-ness returns. The peace resumes.

Over time, you learn not to prefer one state over another. Peace and eruption are not opposites. Both are sacred movements of the same whole. To assume one is better than the other is to step outside of God.

And so it continues. Eruption, stillness, rising, dissolving, until even the distinction between awakening and awakened disappears. What remains is only being.

The volcano, the mountain, the stillness. All one.