Awakening

Wake up to a deeper reality.

There is a way of moving through existence that feels like living. But it isn't.

You can see, but you do not really see. You can hear, but you do not really hear. You respond to what is around you, make decisions, form relationships, build a life, make comparisons and yet something fundamental seems to be absent.

You are present in the way that a machine is present: you process, react, calculate, define. But that state is the state of being asleep to something greater.

Most people do not know they are asleep. And that is the nature of it. Life lived asleep is one of toil, suffering, and endless seeking.

The Shift

Awakening is not a concept. Not an achievement, or a place, but a state of being.

You could say that it is an event, sometimes sudden, sometimes gradual, in which the nature of experiencing existence itself changes.

The simplest way to describe it: you begin to feel through existence rather than think through it. Life stops being something you analyze from the intellect and becomes something you inhabit directly. There is a quality of immediate depth of contact with greater understanding. Things are no longer mediated by the constant commentary of the mind. They simply are, and you are one with them.

This is new sight. It isn’t about acquisition of information, or attainment, but a change in the organ of perception itself.

The Alarm Clock

Awakening does not follow a single path.

For some, it comes through what are called spiritually transformative experiences (STEs): near-death experiences, profound encounters in meditation, moments of such extremity that the ordinary structure of the self cannot hold onto it. These tend to be sudden. And if experienced in full presence, the before and after are unmistakable.

For others, it arrives more quietly through sustained practice, through grief, through love, through a gradual wearing away of what was false. And for some, it seems to arrive without any particular cause at all. A moment at a window. A pause between two thoughts. Something just gives way.

My journey through death and my near-death experience was the event which removed the self which had been constructing itself for the entirety of a life. What is found on the other side of that dissolution is not what left. 

There is a clarity hovering beneath each of you that most believe does not exist. I recognize it daily. It has always been there, waiting beneath the accumulated weight of everything you believe yourself to be.

Whatever the path, understand that none of these arrivals are accidental. What appears random from within the sleeping state is, from a wider view, something arranged. “The Hand”, the divine intelligence that moves and positions the circumstances of your life, is always working, even when you cannot see it. Especially then.

Unity

Awakening is the recognition of unity within a world of division.

The ordinary mind perceives separation as fundamental: self and other, inside and outside, here and there. This perception is not completely false. It is functional. It allows us to navigate. But it is incomplete. Beneath the apparent divisions, there is a ground that is undivided. Awakening is the moment that ground becomes perceptible.

This is when the witness steps forward.

The witness is the capacity for awareness to become aware of itself. To observe the stream of thought, sensation, and emotion without being entirely immersed in it. When the witness wakes up, you are still fully in life. You still think, still feel, still act. But there is a quality of presence underneath all of it that was not there before. A stillness that does not require stillness. A knowing that does not require thought.

This is a new way of living.

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It Can and Can't Be Lost

Awakening, once touched, does not remain at full intensity on its own.

The ego will most likely not disappear. Desire continues. Distraction is everywhere, and the world is designed to produce it. The pull back into identification, back into the story of who you are and what you need and what threatens you, is constant and resourceful. It knows exactly where to find you.

This is important to understand, because many people who touch awakening believe they have lost it permanently when the feeling fades. They have not. What they have lost is the experience of awakening, which is not the same as awakening itself.

Once you have tasted it, something has changed that cannot be undone. It leaves a mark. You may move away from it, sometimes for long periods. But you cannot return to a state of complete unknowing. The door, once opened, cannot be fully closed. You will always, at some level, remember.

It Is Also a Choice

This may be the hardest thing to hear.

Awakening usually arrives uninvited. It cannot be manufactured by effort or will. But once it has been touched, the return to it can be a choice. Not a choice in the ordinary sense of simply deciding and then having. But a choice in the sense of an orientation, of turning toward rather than away, of not abandoning the witness when the ego reasserts itself, of refusing to let the momentum of distraction carry you entirely out of presence.

The confusion is that people wait for the feeling to return on its own, as though they are passengers. But the feeling is not awakening. Awakening is a state of being. The feeling is its reflection in the body. When you understand this, you understand that you have more agency than you thought, not over the original arrival, but over where you stand in relation to what you have already found.

There is no reaching for awakening. There is only the revealing of the state.

A Practice

Sit quietly for a few minutes.

Before you act on any thought that arises, any impulse, any plan, any habitual response, pause. Do not stop the thought. Simply notice that you are thinking it. Then notice the one who is noticing.

This is the witness. This is the doorway.

You do not need to maintain it perfectly. You only need to return to it. Again and again. Each return is enough.

Reflection works the same way. At the end of a day, or in the middle of one, simply ask: Where was I just now? Was I present, absent? The question itself is an act of waking.

Awakening is not self-improvement. It is the end of the self that needed improving. Wake up.