The Path to Spiritual Enlightenment — Part 7 of 7

For many years, I have guided people on the path toward spiritual awakening. And time after time, I have witnessed the same pattern: People with a deep and heartfelt desire to awaken — who never arrive.

Not because the goal is unattainable. But because they stumble over the same obstacles, caught in the same traps, without knowing what holds them back.

This article reveals the nine most important reasons why 99% of all seekers never cross the threshold into spiritual enlightenment. It is written for you who wish to avoid these traps. For you who want to complete the journey — not just begin it.

For it is only when you see what stands in the way that you can begin to move beyond it.

True spiritual awakening is not a reward you can achieve through performance. It is not a mystical state reserved for holy masters on distant Himalayan peaks, or monks who have meditated for decades in remote monasteries.

Awakening is something entirely different.

It is a process — raw, real, and often painfully challenging — where everything that is not you must fall away. It is an inner journey that demands you face what you have fled from your entire life, let go of what you have clung to in desperation, and dare to step forward in your naked, unfiltered truth. Without defenses. Without excuses. Without the safe masks you have hidden behind since childhood.

It is only when you see what stands in the way — truly see it, without looking away — that you can begin to move beyond it. And perhaps you will discover something surprising: What you long for has never been far away. It has simply been hidden behind everything you thought you had to be in order to be accepted, loved, and worthy.

Awakening is not about becoming something new. It is about becoming what you have always been — when you strip away everything that was never truly you. It is a journey back to your true essence, to who you were before the world told you who you should be.

Pål-Esben Wanvig

In a world where many seek but few truly find, it is easy to believe that the path to spiritual enlightenment is hidden behind a distant and impenetrable fog. That it requires special abilities, unusual circumstances, or an entire life in an ashram.

But the truth is more uncomfortable and direct than we like to admit.

Most people never arrive — not because the goal is unattainable, but because they turn back when the journey becomes difficult.

When the comfort zone is challenged and old patterns must be released, many choose to return to the familiar and safe. Even if it means remaining trapped in their own limitations. Even if it means living a half-life, a life in the shadow of what they could truly have been.

This article is a reminder of why so many stumble just before the doors open, and why true spiritual awakening is the most demanding — and most liberating — thing you will ever experience. It is an invitation to look deeper into the mirror and recognize the obstacles that hold you back from your own liberation.

For it is only when you see your own blockages clearly that you can begin the real journey toward freedom.

Through more than two decades as a guide and teacher, I have seen a clear pattern repeat itself again and again. There are nine main reasons why most people never get to experience the deeper truth of who they really are in this lifetime. Despite a heartfelt desire for growth and awakening, many become stuck in illusions, fear, and old identities — and thus miss the life-transforming realization of their true self.

Here are the 9 most crucial reasons why many never complete life’s most important journey:

1. You Lack a Qualified Guide, Teacher, or Guru

You cannot see with your eyes what can only be recognized through the deepest stillness of the heart.

The path toward true spiritual awakening is not a highway with clear signs and rest stops. It is a narrow, often invisible trail that winds through the unknown. It cannot be understood through logic alone or mastered through willpower. Without a guide who has walked this path before you, it is easy to lose yourself in the mind’s endless labyrinths — trapped in the games of thought and the ego’s seductive illusions.

But the mind cannot free the mind.

It is like trying to lift yourself by your own hair. No matter how hard you try, you remain trapped in the same system. It was only when I found a guide who could see me — truly see me, not just hear my words — that something began to loosen.

In our modern culture, it is common to misunderstand what a guru, guide, or teacher actually is. Many associate it with control, submission, or authoritarian dominance. They envision cult leaders demanding blind obedience, or spiritual masters placing themselves on pedestals high above their students.

But a true guide does not seek power.

A true teacher is rather a living mirror that reflects your true nature back to you. Not to lead you where you “should” go, but to remind you of who you really are — beneath all the layers of conditioning, fear, and defense. A good guide does not point at themselves, but at the light that already burns within you. The flame that has always been there, waiting to be discovered.

In an age where quick fixes and superficial spirituality are sold as salvation on every corner, the ancient understanding of the guide-student relationship has been forgotten. We live in a culture that celebrates individualism and independence above all else. “I don’t need any help,” we think. “I can do this myself.”

But this attitude keeps us trapped.

The guide-student relationship is absolutely essential — not to make you dependent, but to set you free. For without a living anchor, without someone who knows the way through the darkness, it is like trying to cross a stormy sea without a compass. You can sail for years and never reach land.

Many, like Columbus, never land where they thought they were heading — if they land at all. They mistake movement for progress and remain trapped in an eternal dance within their own minds. Year after year. Decade after decade. Always seeking, never finding.

In our time, even the most profound spiritual seeking is often reduced to a superficial scrolling pattern through TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. We are fed fragments of insights, inspiring quotes, and beautiful guided meditations — all available in an instant, all just as quickly forgotten. We collect knowledge as if it were pebbles on the beach, without understanding that what we truly need is a guide who can show us the ocean.

Artificial intelligence can simulate answers, mirror wisdom, and even formulate deep truths that sound impressive. But there is something AI can never give you:

Presence.

The gaze that sees you. The silence between the words. The intuitive power that knows when you need a gentle hand — or a radical mirror showing you what you do not want to see. The living presence that can hold space when everything falls apart, and celebrate with you when the breakthrough comes.

Spiritual awakening is not information.

It is transformation.

It does not happen through consuming more content, but through meeting yourself in that which cannot be clicked past or scrolled away from. It requires a human being who can stand by your side in the darkness, who has been there themselves, and who knows there is light on the other side.

No algorithm knows your soul’s path. No video can walk with you into the darkness where you lose yourself to find something greater. And without a living guide — a human being who sees you, mirrors you, and holds space for your deepest developmental process — you risk mistaking spiritual inspiration for real transformation.

It is the difference between hearing the music — and becoming the one who plays.

2. You Refuse to Let the Old You Die

Spiritual awakening is not just about becoming a better version of yourself. It is not a gradual improvement or a friendly adjustment of personality, like upgrading the software on your phone or decorating a new room in your house.

It is a breakdown.

A breakthrough.

A radical, ruthless dissolution of everything you thought you were.

Not just a symbolic death, but an existential annihilation of the identity you have worn like armor your entire life — the roles, the masks, the stories you have told about yourself to survive. “I am the capable one.” “I am the strong one.” “I am the one who always manages.” All of this must die for the second birth to begin (see the article “The Prerequisite for Your Second Birth – Healing “The Dark Night of the Soul” Through a Shaman Death”).

It is an inner cleansing where everything that is not real must perish. The person you have built up through an entire lifetime — consciously and unconsciously, carefully and strategically, often in deep pain and despair — must be burned down to ash. Not merely adjusted or improved, but completely destroyed.

For it is only when the old has died that the new can be born.

Think of the caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. It does not improve itself gradually, stone by stone like a house under renovation. No — it dissolves completely in the darkness of its own cocoon. Everything it was — the form, the structure, the identity, the body itself — becomes a kind of soup. A formless mass without recognizable features. And it is from this apparent destruction that something entirely new emerges. Something that never could have come into being if the caterpillar had clung to its old form.

In the same way, you must melt — without promises, without safety nets, without guarantees — and enter into the total void. It is terrifying. It feels like dying. Because it is dying — not physically, but in every other way that matters.

This is where most people turn back.

They gaze into the sacred fire of the flames, feel the heat against their skin, sense what awaits — and quietly retreat to the familiar routines of the comfort zone. Safe, but imprisoning. Known, but suffocating. They choose the known hell over the unknown heaven.

They cling to their identity as if it were their life raft, without understanding that it is precisely this that holds them down, trapped beneath the surface of what they could truly become. They grasp at the sinking ship instead of swimming toward land.

But here lies the mystery and the freedom:

Only when you dare to go through your shamanic death — within yourself, for yourself, with full trust in the process — can your soul finally become free. It cannot fly as long as the ego continues fighting to survive. The butterfly cannot fly as long as the caterpillar refuses to let go.

Awakening demands everything. And gives everything back — but not until you have let everything go.

3. You Seek Comfort — Not Truth

Comfort is perhaps the most subtle and silently operating prison that exists.

It whispers soothing words in your ear, soft as silk: “You are safe here. Everything is working fine. Why risk disturbing what already functions? Why put everything on the line for something you don’t even know exists? Think of everything you have built. Think of everything you could lose.”

But behind this seductive whisper hides a creeping stagnation. A slow, almost imperceptible standstill that gradually drains life of color and meaning. It is like a golden cage that keeps you trapped — not with locks and chains, but with promises of safety and predictability. The cage may be beautiful, perhaps comfortable, perhaps even enviable to others. But it is still a cage. And you are still trapped.

True spiritual awakening never happens in the warm embrace of the comfort zone.

It blooms in chaos. It grows in the aftermath of earthquakes, takes shape in the eye of the storm, and finds its strength in the deepest abysses of pain. It is in these moments — when everything you took for granted is torn away, when the ground beneath your feet suddenly disappears — that the essential, your true nature, can finally emerge in all its naked clarity.

I learned this the hard way. In 2003, when burnout brought me to my knees, it was not comfort that saved me. It was the breakdown. It was the loss of everything I thought defined me. It was the total dissolution of the identity I had spent an entire life building. And it was only in this darkness that light began to seep in.

While comfort wants to keep you unchanged and “safe,” truth has an entirely different agenda.

It wants to transform you completely. To break down all false structures. To tear down the walls you have built around your heart — walls that protect you, yes, but that also shut out love, connection, and life itself. Truth wants your authentic essence to shine through without filter, without dimming, without compromise.

And what about your soul?

It longs for something entirely different than safety and comfort. It does not seek what is pleasant or easy — it seeks what is true, real, and authentic. It would rather have a naked truth that burns than a comfortable lie that suffocates.

No matter what price must be paid.

4. People Disappear from Your Life — and You Think It’s a Mistake

When you begin to awaken, when you start your genuine spiritual transformation, much changes in your life — including your relationships. Perhaps especially your relationships.

The people who loved and accepted you as you were may not recognize the person you are becoming. The new you is foreign to them, unsettling, even threatening. Some will withdraw in confusion or fear, uncertain how to relate to the change. Others will openly condemn your choices, call you self-absorbed, naive, or lost. And still others will remain standing on the sidelines — confused, disappointed, or afraid of what you have become.

This hurts.

It hurts incredibly to see people you love pull away. To watch old friends become strangers. To experience family members who no longer understand you. It feels like betrayal, like loss, like proof that you have done something wrong.

But remember this:

You have done nothing wrong.

You have simply stopped playing a role that was never truly yours. You have put down the mask and begun to show your true face. And the true face is not always the face others wish to see. It does not fit into their image of you, their expectations of you, their need for you to remain unchanged.

Most people, when they encounter this painful reality of disappearing relationships, choose to go back. Back to old friends, safe relationships, predictable jobs, and superficial conversations that felt so “secure.” They put the mask back on, suppress what has awakened in them, and pretend nothing has changed.

But this apparent safety is built on a fundamental lie:

That you must dim your light, hide your truth, and deny your own essence to be loved and accepted. That love is conditional upon you remaining who others want you to be.

When you awaken to your true self, you will see who loves you without masks — and who only loved your echo. It is a painful but necessary process where you discover that some people were attracted to the role you played, not to who you really are. They loved the actor, not the person behind the character.

Like when an actor removes their costume after the performance, and the audience realizes the person on stage was an illusion. A beautiful illusion, perhaps, but still an illusion.

Some will miss the illusion more than the real you. And that is okay. For those who love your authentic self — those who can see you and love what they see — will find you.

5. You Want a Map and Guarantees — But Get Only an Open Landscape

The world has taught you that everything can be planned. Career, education, retirement, and vacation. You have been conditioned to believe that every journey requires a detailed roadmap, GPS coordinates for every stop along the way, a precise timetable for arrival. We live in a culture obsessed with control and predictability.

So you ask: “What are the steps to awakening? Give me a recipe. A checklist. A guaranteed method. How long does it take? What can I expect along the way? How do I know I’m on the right path?”

But the truth is brutal in its simplicity:

There is none.

No sequence, no guarantees, no recipe. It is like navigating unknown waters without a compass, where the old maps no longer match the terrain. Every time you think you have found the way, the landscape changes. Every time you think you have understood the rules, it turns out the rules do not apply.

The way forward often feels like a breakdown, a total dissolution of everything you thought was solid and reliable. It does not go straight ahead like a highway with clear kilometer markers, but winds in spirals, cycles, and sudden setbacks. What feels like progress one day can seem like regression the next. You can feel enlightened in the morning and completely lost by evening.

Stillness feels like emptiness.

Progress feels like loss.

Everything you thought you knew, everything you held as true, falls apart like a house of cards in the wind. It is like being an explorer in unknown terrain, where every step could lead to a new abyss or an unexpected revelation. And you do not know which until you have taken the step.

This is not wrong.

This is the portal.

It is the very entrance to a deeper reality, where the map must be replaced with trust, and control must yield to surrender. Where you learn to trust the process even when you do not understand it, and to continue even when you cannot see the way.

6. Your Own Mind Will Become Your Greatest Opponent

When the ego understands that its days are numbered, it fights like a wounded animal in a corner.

It mobilizes all its resources in a desperate attempt to survive. It has, after all, spent an entire lifetime building itself up, creating structures and defense mechanisms, keeping you “safe.” Now it sees the threat, and it will do everything to stop it.

It sabotages you with thoughts of fear, guilt, and inadequacy — like poisoned arrows shot from the shadows of your own consciousness. Thoughts you believed were your own, but which are actually the ego’s desperate attempts to regain control.

It will shout that you are crazy.

That you are alone.

That you are heading toward the abyss.

That you will lose everything you have.

Like a masterful manipulator, it will use every trick in the book — from subtle doubt to open fear. It will tell you it is dangerous to continue, that it is safer to turn back, that you have already come far enough. “Why risk more?” it whispers. “Isn’t your life good enough as it is?”

But this is only the mind’s defense against losing control. Its desperate battle to maintain the illusion of a separate self. It is like a hologram fighting to remain solid as the light begins to fade, like a shadow fighting against the sunrise.

The more you observe this drama, without reacting or identifying with it, the more it loses its power. Not by forcing it into silence — that would only strengthen the resistance, like throwing gasoline on a fire.

But by no longer believing its stories. By seeing through the illusion. By acknowledging the ego for what it is — a protection mechanism that has served its purpose, but which must now let go so that you can fly.

7. You Fear the Silence

Silence feels empty at first.

Like a dark room where the walls seem to close in. Lonely. Unknown. Frightening in its absolute presence. We are not accustomed to silence. We live in a world that fills every moment with noise — music, conversations, notifications, news, an endless stream of impressions that keeps silence at bay.

But silence is not empty.

It is full of you.

Full of your true essence. Your authentic self that has waited patiently, perhaps for years, to be rediscovered. Silence is not absence — it is presence. Not emptiness — but fullness of another kind.

In silence, alone without distractions, without the noise from social media, TV, radio, or endless conversations, you lose everything that is not real. Layer after layer falls away. It is like removing old clothes until you stand naked before the mirror. Vulnerable. Exposed. With nowhere to hide, nothing to distract you from what you see.

And you meet perhaps for the first time the naked, unfiltered version of yourself. The one you have always been, but have seldom dared to see.

It hurts.

It is uncomfortable.

It can feel unbearable.

But it is also here that the true connection to the creative force, to the sacred, to the boundless begins to sprout. In this silence you find not the emptiness you feared, but a fullness you never knew existed. Not absence, but presence. Not death, but life in its purest, most intense form.

No one awakens in the crowd.

Awakening happens in the darkness — in the silence between heartbeats, in the pauses between thoughts, in the sacred space where everything artificial disappears and only the real remains. It is here you find yourself. And it is here you find home.

8. You Believe Awakening Is About Learning More — Instead of Letting Go of Everything

Spiritual awakening is not about accumulating more knowledge or collecting more experiences. It is not about reading more books, attending more retreats, mastering more techniques.

It is about a deep and fundamental process of letting go.

This is perhaps the most paradoxical truth on the spiritual path. We live in a culture that tells us more is better, that knowledge is power, that growth means adding. But awakening is the opposite.

Awakening is not an intellectual exercise. It is an existential transformation that requires you to dare to stand face to face with your own truth — not by adding more, but by removing everything that hides what you already are.

You must be willing to let go of all the external things you have used as crutches on your spiritual journey. The teachings that gave you security. The books that promised answers. The rituals that gave structure and meaning. The spiritual identities you have built with pride and invested years in developing.

You must dare to release your grip on everything you thought defined your worth as a human being. Everything you believed made you special, developed, advanced, or worthy. For who you truly are, beneath all the layers of conditioning and protection, needs no improvement or upgrade.

It only needs freedom to be.

9. You Stop at Discomfort

Most people instinctively retreat when they encounter pain on the spiritual path.

They interpret the discomfort as a danger signal, a sign that something has gone wrong or that they have taken the wrong direction. “This cannot be right,” they think. “Awakening should feel good, not painful. I must have done something wrong. Perhaps this path is not for me.”

But this interpretation turns the truth upside down.

Pain is not a stop signal.

It is the very portal to deeper insight and transformation.

Pain, whether it manifests in the body as tension and unease, or in the mind as fear and resistance, is a powerful signal that something in your life has reached its breaking point. It is a messenger showing you exactly where you have held onto what no longer serves your growth. Where you have clung to patterns that have expired. Where you have refused to release what holds you back.

Pain points. It shows the way. It reveals what must change.

If you can find the courage to remain in this fire — without fleeing into old patterns, without distracting yourself with food, alcohol, work, or entertainment, without judging the experience as “good” or “bad” — then the real transformation begins to unfold.

It is only when you stop fighting against the pain, when you give up all attempts to escape it, that you can move through it. Like a birth — you cannot avoid the pain and still get the child. Pain is part of the process, not a sign that something is wrong.

And on the other side awaits something you could never have imagined.

The Only Promise That Matters

This path comes without assurances or guarantees.

It does not promise you a life filled with comfort and convenience. It does not guarantee success in the world’s eyes or recognition from others. It cannot promise you stability, predictability, or that everything will work out as you wish.

The only promise this path gives you is:

Your own true essence.

The real, unadulterated version of yourself. The part that has always existed — patiently waiting behind all the masks you have worn, behind the layers of fear that have protected you, behind the need for control that has governed you, behind the pain that has shaped you. The part of you that is older than your name, deeper than your personality, truer than the story you have told about yourself.

This essence stands ready to emerge in all its power.

When you finally find the courage to let go of everything that is not true.

Ask yourself this essential question: “What am I still afraid of losing — that I know deep down I never truly owned?”

When I guide students on the journey toward spiritual enlightenment, I find it crucial to illuminate the most common pitfalls that can arise along the way. Having awareness of these challenges before you take your first steps gives you an invaluable advantage: You can meet them with clarity instead of letting them become hidden obstacles that sabotage you in the darkness.

Then you can turn a 99% probability of failure into a 99% chance of success.

In this way, you strengthen the possibility that the journey toward your highest potential — perhaps the most important journey you will undertake in this lifetime — is not interrupted, but fulfilled. Does not end in disappointment, but in freedom.