What Is Awakening?

Awakening is the radical, and experiential collapse of the sense of being a separate individual looking out at a world. It is this direct seeing that the person you took yourself to be with all its history, fears, and desires, is actually a fleeting pattern of thoughts and sensations, and not a solid, monolythic entity called John, Sue or whatever name you use. This is an unmasking and the subsequent removal of an imaginary boundary, revealing that there is no central point where "you" end and "life" begins.

My first awakening happened in 2018. I woke up at 6.30 am, and sat up in bed. As I looked out at the room, it suddenly occurred to me that I wasn’t made up of my stories. My past did not need to define me, and in fact, I could not locate myself anywhere in thoughts, in the past, nor in the future. Whatever ‘I’ was, it was right here. What later followed was some very intense turmoil, emotional upheaval, and some very messy phases of upsetting people, as my inner struggles purged out.

For me, this was a profound shift, and I didn’t receive a new self to replace the old self. Instead, all concepts and personally identifiable thoughts and identities gradually dwindled into obscurity until the ever-present, indefinable reality that had been here all along was revealed. Life’s pleasant and unpleasant events continue to roll onwards, but are experienced as impersonal, energetic movements. I no longer need to struggle to protect, manage, and improve a separate self. All these coping strategies simply fall away, leaving behind a deep, inherent, and immovable peace that surpasses logic and understanding.

Initially, though, most people have a glimpse of this radical perspective, a momentary awakening that leaves them often in states of awe and wonder, only to re-form back into their original ideas about themselves. Some people shrug these moments off, and continue to lose themselves in their story, while others will actively pursue an answer to these glimpses. For me the insight of no-self was just too obvious and radical; there was no option but to drop everything and figure this out. But of course, I didn’t figure anything out. No special knowledge was given to me. For a long time, I bounced from boundlessness to feeling like I was the person in the story.

This return to the familiar self is not a failure, but an essential part of the process, driven by the sheer momentum of lifelong conditioning. The mind, in its deeply ingrained habit of seeking security, rushes to explain away the boundless mystery it just touched, re-inscribing the old boundaries and re-occupying the comfortable, known territory of a separate "me." The memory of that spacious freedom then becomes another story, another goal for this "me" to strive for, inadvertently reinforcing the very separation that was momentarily seen through. This is an essential and common conundrum for the seeker.

The real journey unfolds in the ongoing recognition of this very cycle: the seeing, the forgetting, and the noticing of that forgetting. Each time the old identity reasserts itself, it does so with a little less conviction, its foundations slightly more cracked by the memory of its own absence. It is in this patient, repeated seeing—not through a single, final event, but through the gradual erosion of belief in the returning ghost of the self—that the glimpse stabilizes from a fleeting memory into the lived, unshakable reality of what you truly are.

In the final end, the initial glimpse or insight of no-self is radically different from absolutely no-self whatsoever. It is not even no-self, as that implies that it can be defined by an opposite.