What is awakening?

At one point during the spiritual journey, there is an awakening. As mentioned in my previous post, it can come before or after a point of crisis and breakdown. (Not every crisis leads to an awakening, though.)

I want to talk about how I define awakening. For me, it meant becoming aware that there is something more than the visible and tangible 3-dimensional realm. I realized that there was an invisible force behind the scenes which was orchestrating events and guiding me.

It started out as slowly changing belief systems, like ‘angels do exist’, and ‘we still exist even after death’, and it culminated in the insight that I am consciousness which is another dimension and that my thoughts coupled with emotions are creative and can manifest events.

Before awakening, I thought that consciousness comes from the neurons in the brain. After awakening, I was aware that we are consciousness and that it is another dimension which embraces and permeates everything here in the 3-dimensional world. This is a shift in perception which is comparable in magnitude to the Copernican shift of world-view. This was my experience on my own journey. Other people may define it differently what awakening meant for them.

Awakening can happen in many different ways

There are many ways how awakening can happen. For me, it happened initially by reading stories about children who spontaneously remembered their past lives. That was when I first realized that we are consciousness which survives after death. And then this awakening developed over time with observations of synchronicities and during meditation. But for other people it has happened it different ways.

People can wake up via a Near Death Experience (NDE) or after having taken a psychoactive drug.
Or it can happen during meditation, maybe via a spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE).
It can be a flash insight seemingly out of nowhere.

Some have reported a disastrous time of crisis where they reached the end of their rope. And just when they hit rock bottom, the voice of God or a spirit guide started to speak to them.

Awakening can be a sudden and fairly complete event or it can develop gradually over time.

Now, I want to share some metaphors about waking up.

Awakening is like waking up from the virtual reality game

Imagine you are playing a computer game with an artificial world and avatars running around. Maybe the game has virtual reality goggles which provides a very convincing experience that this whole thing is real. The game has a goal, like that the people in the game must achieve a mission, for example, to defeat someone or to build a city structure or something like that.

Being in the game means feeling as if we are the character in the game who is trying to accomplish a mission. Waking up from it means we recognize that we are not a character in the game but that we are more like the person sitting in front of the computer who is steering several characters and who has programmed the whole game.

Awakening is like seeing that we are the movie screen and not the movie character

This is a metaphor which was used by Ramana Maharshi. Before awakening, we think we are the characters in a movie. After awakening, we realize that we are that which is unchangeable, which is the movie screen. This points to the awareness in which everything happens.

For me, this revelation came in a flash insight where I felt myself as consciousness expanded like a balloon skin on which everything in my field of awareness appeared. Body, bed, pillow, and wall were all like painted on the inflated balloon skin.

Awakening is like stepping out of the timeline

Imagine an anthill, but a two-dimensional one. Something like these ant farms which can be bought online as educational toys for kids. These are narrow, transparent plastic containers which contain some substrate in which the ants can build their tunnels.

Each ant tunnel is like a timeline. An ant in the tunnel is like a human on their timeline. Behind them is the past. Before them is the unknown future. And they are moving slowly forward on their timeline and are only aware of their past in memory and their present. They are usually not aware of the other parallel ant tunnels.

In this metaphor, waking up would mean to step outside of the acrylic container and view the whole thing from the outside. The kid who watches from the outside what the ants in their tunnels are doing is aware of the future branch of a tunnel. The kid can also see other tunnels which are parallel to a specific tunnel.

Waking up is going to the timeless place inside of us which is awareness itself. The witness place or the void. Being in this place can sometimes give rise to dreams or flash insights about future events, for example.

All these examples above were meant to say that awakening was a shift of perception for me. It was not necessarily that anything inside my bubble of experience changed, at least not immediately. It was just that the way I in which I thought about what I saw had shifted.