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Fundamental Stages of Realization

sensingradiance

Updated: Nov 20, 2024

The stages of realization described here are just a dream. They may or may not resonate with you. I do not claim this is the only or the best way of talking about awakening. This is just one way to describe the universal facets awakening tends to move through that I have recognized in my own journey, as well as in that of others. 


When you read these descriptions try not to compare your own direct experience with them as something you should be experiencing. I invite you to listen to the energy behind the words, and if there is a sentence that touches your innermost core, allow that resonance to silently fill your being and guide you from within.


The stages are not meant to be taken hierarchically but more in terms of depth, subtlety and totality. If you grok what true no self is about you can see every apparent stage is this. Just This Is It. In truth, there is no process.


In truth there are no stages, but there are stages of dreaming, and each stage has its specific form of beauty and bondage. That is what the aspects of awakening actually are. Realizing truth means waking up from the dream; the question of awakening (or unawakening) simply becomes null.


Keep in mind the unfolding is nonlinear, often we have glimpses to certain aspects of realization preceding permanent shifts in perception, there is no finish line. I offer this simple outline to support the integration of your awakening insights. The deeper the realization unfolds the more challenging and paradoxical it is to describe.



Experience of separation: identification with thought

Initial awakening experience: inwards turning movement of consciousness

Dark nights begin: repressed emotions and trauma start to surface

First awakening: abiding recognition of true nature

Expansion of the primary awakening: awakening to the unity of all existence

Transcending the dream: awakening to the Absolute

True no self: off the map





Experience of separation. Consciousness contracts around thought processes, and identifies with mental reflections. Identity gets entangled with self images, concepts and narratives, and we experience what is known as suffering.


I experience myself as a separate entity that moves in time, in the world, with a life history and individual identity. My thoughts, beliefs, feelings, life conditions, achievements, failures, experiences ... define who I am. 



Initial awakening experience. Something penetrates the veil of conceptualization. Direct encounter with deeper, mysterious, even threatening reality that underlies the habitual sense of self and the world. 


The initial awakening experience can be a powerful transcendental opening. It can be an inexplicable flash that lacks experiential qualities, yet drastically alters our orientation in life. It can have a spiritual nature to it or not. It can appear as an act of healing grace, or as an act of fierce grace. It can be a profoundly inspiring revelation, or an unexpected traumatic loss that breaks through the trance of conventional existence. 


In regards to awakening the flavor of the initial awakening experience does not matter. What is important is that there is now an experiential taste of direct reality, and the inwards turning movement of consciousness has begun. The initial awakening experience is often followed by more experiential glimpses, which is as close as it is possible to get to awakening without anything yet shifting at the identity level.



Dark nights begin. Dark night of the soul is like a barren spiritual and emotional  landscape that often precedes illumination. They also come with deep shadow work through which we encounter the defense and avoidance mechanisms around the core wound of separation. The experience of separate self is grounded on a very visceral sense of inadequacy, a belief so internalized and embodied that you cannot simply rationalize it away. This fundamental contraction has to be accessed with thorough inquiry and intimacy, and released at the level of head, heart and gut.


When a dark night kicks in, medicating the inner sense of lack and deficiency ceases to work. Our most disturbing and uncomfortable psychological issues tend to come bubbling up to the surface with unexpected intensity. We begin to experience directly the fundamental suffering of separation, unworthiness, and mind identification. 


Approaching the mysterious emptiness at the core of egoic consciousness, we come into contact with fear, doubt, resistance and meaninglessness. That unknown vacancy must be fully surrendered to and entered through. The roots of the ego may persist through immersive awakenings, therefore the unbinding continues. Unresolved experience and trauma comes out increasingly more unfiltered.


For most people there will be more than one dark night, preceding and following the first awakening. Some pass through them quickly, and some slowly. Some barely notice them, whereas for some they are experienced with great difficulty. In whatever form they appear this is a vital part of the process and what is instinctively most resisted. The intuitive insights that come as a gift, that I describe next, are grounded on this subterranean movement of active surrender. 





First awakening. Abiding recognition of true nature. I am … something that cannot be known in conventional ways pure awareness … pure presence … pure being.


First awakening is a permanent shift at the identity level. What is directly apprehended here is so natural, ever-present and obvious that it is simply ridiculous. Now you know, non-conceptually, that what you have been seeking all along is what you are. It’s quite astonishing and funny.


Primary awakening is an act of spontaneous reverse, a step into the enigmatic pause at the core of the psychological processes and space-time continuum. Many have stepped into it, and no one has ever returned. This is not a state or an experience but a profoundly familiar non-event; an astounding shift in perception, which opens up an unbound way of experiencing oneself and reality. 


However, it’s good to be aware that the primary awakening is just the beginning of the journey, and not the end. We step into primordial clarity, get our foot into the door, so to speak — but the nature of this new found lucidity is not yet quite clear. One could say that with the first awakening the way in which our true nature abides is recognized, but the apprehension is still somewhat dim. Later on that initial opening blossoms into almost impossible vividness and spontaneity.


Thoughts, feelings and life conditions do not define or affect what I am. What I am transcends all content of experience yet is intimately ever present. What I am is something timeless, uncompounded and pristine, something that has always been here underneath the fabricated sense of self.





Expansion of the primary awakeningEverything has the nature of my innermost awareness. What I am is one seamless whole of experiencing.


A thorough disidentification from form – Not This, Not That – is followed by a movement of recognizing one's true nature in everything that was previously transcended. Also This Is It! And This! The knot of the heart opens, and fundamental self-contraction releases in energetic boundlessness. All that arises is experientially included in living recognition and infused by universal joy. 


Challenging situations and emotions are seen as opportunities to encompass what was previously rejected and disowned. There is nothing ‘other’. The remnants of the pain of separation stored in the body gradually surface, integrate and assimilate in the gentle throb of unification — an unbinding which is not always just ease and flow. Willingness to sustain discomfort and an attitude of continuous self-offering is essential here.


This is one of the hallmarks of a mature realization: do you actually live this? It is one thing to recognize the innate unity of existence, and another to cease acting in ways that imply separation and otherness. The bliss that appears with unity consciousness is a byproduct. There is a lot of joy that comes with undivided being, but if you attach to this you miss the essence of what the integrated state is truly about. 


The intimacy with ten thousand things is unconstrained, unreserved — you can’t turn it off. It embraces everything indiscriminately, whether we like it or not. It lovingly softens into what is enjoyed and what is detested, until all extremities dissolve. The way it moves is irresistible; it shakes you to the core of your innermost being and cracks you wide open.


Waking up from the dream of separation is a magnificent rebirth. Authentic participation, deep reverence for life, organic responsiveness and flow, unguarded openness and curiosity, release of control … these are all hallmarks of unbound consciousness. 


I recognize myself in all being. I recognize my true nature in all thought and sensation. I recognize my true nature in all that I encounter. Everything I see, hear, touch, smell, taste is what I am. The world is no other than myself. My true nature is indivisible oceanic boundlessness. My heart softly expands and contracts in the natural pulse of creation. This universally expansive consciousness, I Am That I Am.





Transcending the Dream. All sense of self dissolves in pure potentiality ... Supreme Absolute Void. 


When the fundamental I-sense dissolves you basically experience your own death while still alive, and then it can be seen you never existed to begin with. There can be disorientation, grief, and even terror related to the loss. This can only be understood by going through it firsthand, but with the I-sense disappears everything it has been in relation with ... the world, other people, one’s interior life, all orientation, all meaning. 


Another way of saying this is that nothing disappears, as nothing really existed in the first place. Even consciousness is seen to be utterly empty of existence. The author Jed McKenna describes this as post-apocalyptic lightmare. It’s a bit like permanently entering deep sleep, but eyes open. The dissolution is often succeeded by intense energetics, and sudden emergence of raw unresolved experience.


The totality and power of this realization is so all-consuming that it can almost possess you. The tendency to fixate has not necessarily been fully liberated, and it can take some subtle and obscuring forms. This is completely natural, but there is a price to pay for this later if this particular phase gets prolonged. Transcendental immensity feels utterly untouched by the fleeting sensations of human life, and a tendency to bypass the dynamics of relative reality can play itself out. 


It can only be seen in retrospect, but this is kind of the last attachment … a fascination with the dreamless dream of non-existence. A truly wondrous immersion, but this is not where this thing lands. This is very difficult to talk about, but eventually it becomes clear that something is not fully complete here. It does not make sense, there is this undeniable finality and release — nothing transcends supreme transcendence — yet a strange silent voice appears and says further


The depth of vulnerability and surrender exposed in authentic realization is quite merciless. Somehow this metamorphosis has a perfect intelligence beyond all reason. Collision with the Absolute has an energetic aspect to it, and at some point it just takes fully over. There is no control, no choice ... and now it’s obvious there never was. 


What I am is something unborn and undying. Everything continuously pours forth and subsides back to this original womb … the Great Silence … pure void of Eternity …  complete absolute aloneness ... impenetrable mystery of one primordial presence.





True no self. Just This. 


This is the secret phase the nondual traditions barely discuss. A re-entrance into humanness ... this is actually the true release. The realization disappears into ordinary life, almost as if it never happened. The intimately empty, vivid universe of the relative everyday life is the Absolute, but without contrast or capacity to differentiate — when everything just is it, equally — the whole enlightenment loses its meaning. 


The depth of this homecoming is unspeakable. There is no arriving because there is no possibility of leaving. It’s crazy that in the end no one gets liberated, there is no one here to claim this, and no way to experience this — the medium is gone. Like a thief entering an empty house … it’s completely mindless. It’s somewhat accurate to say there is no self, but what that self was is rather impossible to say. 


A singular drop merges into the infinite ocean and loses itself forever ... this is the great death. But it's not the end. The infinite ocean merges back into a singular drop, and in that act both are annihilated. Gone! Complete! Here and gone! Perfection!


And the journey continues. There is ever deepening visceralization. This embodied paradox seems to have a growth pattern, in a sense that maturation and refinement is intrinsic to its nature. In timeless expanse, the vastness explores itself, moves through itself. The very ordinary human life with its ups and downs is the place where embodied realization lands. In this mysterious consummation, there is no path, no ability to distinguish ... no beginning, no end.


This is forever undefinable

Forever unknowable

Ecstatically paradoxical

Radically intimate

Ravishingly immediate

Uncaused satiation

Unconditional appreciation

Infinite cessation

Spontaneous creation

This is home





1 comment

1 Comment


kimg69
Sep 09, 2024

Beautiful and profound. The following is my experience from 25 years ago.


What Am I?

·         I am not the thoughts; I am pure awareness witnessing the thoughts.

·         Thoughts are but waves on the deep and still ocean of pure consciousness.

·         In deep meditation, when the mind is still- a pure, clear, vast and unbounded awareness remains.

·         One abides in a state of pure joy and lightness of being.

A deep feeling of interconnectedness with all of life and nature.

 Kim

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