Awake vs Enlightened

What is awakening? Is it the same as enlightenment? Is it something that can be created? Conjured? All I can speak to is what it looks like from here, and If there is deep experiencing of oneness, and the experiential and recognized, however brief, lack of a personal self, then that’s it. Awakening. Enlightenment. And just like coming out of deep sleep, it is but the starting point of a new day. Awakening isn’t the end of anything other than delusion and is also the beginning of the gradual and constant coming to clarity about what is. 


My preference is to use the word awakening over enlightenment, as the Enlightenment word bears a lot of baggage. From what, to what, is one awakened? Strictly speaking, the answer to both is nothing. This can be confusing until the actual awakening, yet from the angle of ultimate view, it’s the only answer. Look at it this way: There is but one thing here, a singularity, nothing existing other than that, so there is not a thing from which to travel into another, different thing. It’s always the same thing. Yet it’s absolutely accurate to say we wake up from the illusion of separate into the clarity of oneness, from dreaming of many to living as singular. We step out of thinking about life, and into experiencing it as it is, many many fewer thoughts imposed on top, coloring it all. Oneness becomes experiential and what is oneness- This, right now. It’s also the source of this, and the seeming two are never more than one. Such a paradox. -Bye the way, paradox is the point of power.