Awakening / Enlightenment

Awakening / Enlightenment

or is it realization and liberation?

The concept of Awakening or Enlightenment can be very confusing. Upon hearing it, it can cause us to build a certain conceptual idea around it, and that concept is usually as follows:

“Other people have gained awakening, or enlightenment, but I am not awake or enlightened. Maybe some day, through my own volition, I will figure out what to do in order to be awake or enlightened.” We tend to think and believe that awakening is something we can come to acquire that we don’t already have, through our own effort either through action or learning. For example we believe we can take steps towards awakening like practicing an instrument to learn the skill of playing it or by studying a language to learn to speak it. This gives us the notion that we are on a “spiritual path”. Awakening or Enlightenment will never occur through these means.

It is important to really understand what awakening is to see why striving for it is futile. It may be more clear to think of awakening and enlightenment as realization and liberation. When one first awakens, it is not that they have acquired something new or added something to themselves, but that they have realized something that has always been the case. Something obvious. For instance like realizing that the sky is blue. Just because you have just come to realize that the sky is blue, doesn’t mean that it had not always been the case, you just failed to notice it before. Nothing new needs to happen.

This is why many teachers say “ You are already awake” This can be infuriating, but it is true. Realization is simply realizing that you are life itself, in the form of a human. This is what you have always been. We often identify exclusively as the form that we are, and build a concept around this, called our ego, and forget about first simply being life itself. No effort is needed to realize this just in the way that there is no path to understand that the sky is blue.

While realization is momentary, liberation or “enlightenment” is lasting. Just because we have had an awakening, or a realization that we are life itself, and that life itself is everything, that often doesn’t mean that we are liberated. More often than not, after having this realization, we fall right back into old patterns of thinking. We believe that we are exclusively the body and that we are separate from the rest of life. This can be a confusing dilemma in that it feels like you had something and then you’ve lost it, but that is not the case! In fact, the exact opposite is true. It is prior to realization that we have something: a deluded idea of who we are, upon realization we have nothing, and then our realization is forgotten when we start believing again in the deluded idea of who we are.

Through this whole process it is important to see that we are life itself the whole time, not the separate person who has had a realization but life itself either realizing that it is life itself, or falsely playing and believing it is something other than life itself. It’s impossible to ‘fall out” of who we are but it is possible to ‘fall into” believing the false identity and forgetting what we are. Liberation from the false identity is found when it is settled, that you know what you are as this life itself and cease identifying exclusively with the idea of being a separate self.