What is awakening?

 


As I hope you can tell from the posts I’ve included in this blog so far, I like brevity and clarity. With the help of a friend, I recently had a go at summarising the first big step of awakening (in the sense of ‘realising enlightenment’ rather than ‘getting up in the morning’, what some refer to as the ‘transformation of consciousness’) in one sentence, and began with, “Being aware of the mind.”

We thought that might be a little too brief though, so then we came up with, “Being aware of awareness itself, rather than all that stuff you’re thinking about or looking at“.

I’m sure we could play around with this for a long time, but I think this points to the essence of it. 

I wanted to do this to help those who are just starting to consider this, so they don’t think that awakening is some deep experience that you have to work on for years just to get a glimpse of. It’s not like that. If you realise that awareness exists and it is independent of all the content of awareness – the stream of thoughts, sensory experiences, emotions, all your memories, plans, ideas etc. - you’ve got it!

The process can go on from there. Common developments include shifts in identity as in, “Hang on, if I’m not this body and all these thoughts and things then who am I?” Or, “Is this awareness in me, or is awareness everything (and nothing)?” It can lead in lots of deep directions and perhaps everyone’s awakening process is different so there is a limit to how useful the guidance from teachers might be. 

At some point I reckon everyone becomes their own teacher and if they stay as a follower of someone else they may well get stuck. Anyway, I’m starting to wander in a different direction and lose the original intention so I’ll leave it here…

Keywords

awakening, consciousness, awareness, Self, mind, kensho, satori, enlightenment, realisation, realization, spiritual insight, awake awareness,

The image at the top of this post is of a window, created by Tom Denny and dedicated to the 17th century poet and mystic Thomas Traherne

Location: Great Malvern, Malvern WR14, UK

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