The problem with explaining what being awake is to a general audience is that the abilities and perceptions once awake will vary from individual to individual. The most affective way for you to awaken is to be experiential…that is to say to be your own teacher by exploring and then contemplating what you have discovered. To write what my perceptions of being awake are, and for you to seek out those same perceptions means it is no longer about you, but about my awareness. With that in mind, please see this only as a map of landmarks, but not the terrain itself.

It was a few months after I had awoken before I even was aware of there being something different about me. You have to keep in mind that being awake is the eventual natural state of the Self, so being myself seemed ordinary to me. The Self is aligned with the present so my ability to look back and compare to a former version of me had already greatly diminished. I acquired my first computer soon before awakening, and coming into contact with people of varying degrees of awareness I finally had something tangible I could compare my own journey to.

Prior to this I only had experience with the spiritualism community in New England for a few years, and my travels teaching and healing afterwards to go by. The spiritualism community was barely above an entry level of awareness, and my students were about the same. So for those pre-computer years I was actually experimenting as I went along. As my online profile attests to I am not a follower of any discipline, teacher, philosophy or religion. This includes reading books about spiritual and metaphysical topics. I simply had no background to lean on in those early years prior to awakening.

It was during conversations in chatrooms years after getting my computer that I got clues that I was not like the people I was talking to. For one thing there did not seem to be any original thinkers in the rooms. It did not take long to realise that I was hearing the same definitions, labels, and words to describe people’s beliefs. It did not matter which room or online forum I went into, the belief systems were all nearly rote repeating of what had been read or heard. If I even ventured a few sentences of what I had experienced I was pounced on immediately by debaters parroting either dusty disciplines or New Age pabulum.

After a few years of attempting to interact with other seekers online my mother saved me from drowning in discouragement and disillusionment. I was in North Carolina at the time and she asked me to return to Maine to be her caretaker. Returning there and having little responsibilities day to day I began to contemplate on what I had experienced and learned over the prior 7 years. There was an abandoned strip copper mine 25 miles away where I could be miles away from the nearest human and could think out loud for hours a day in peace.

It was at the copper mine that I first discovered that I was awake. The waking process has several stages that I have experienced thus far. The first was the ‘knowing’, the second was the ‘emergent properties’, and the third was ‘perpetual wakefulness’. I know of only a few people that are awakening, and like I did they began in the ‘knowing’ stage. This means there is at least a likelihood that these stages may be the same for everyone that awakens. There may be some or many others that are awake, too, but I can only speak of the ones that I know of.

The ‘knowing’ stage is exactly what it sound like. Information seems to explode in your awareness at blinding speeds. It is like the big bang theory – not the old version where scientists believed it was a singularity that exploded outward – but the newer thought that the emergence of matter in the universe happened throughout it simultaneously. This stage of epiphany after epiphany is tough to keep up with. Your Self is essentially coming into the present moment with all it knows. Prior to this the brain coughed up information as it was needed…oftentimes incorrectly.

Now with the Self awake, it was doing the inventory of its previous aggregate awareness of lifetimes that had been dormant. This was a strange sensation because today’s truths and epiphanies were usurped the next day with more expanded truths and epiphanies. I learned very early on not to cling to any truth until it had been processed completely. It was during this ‘knowing’ stage that I became aware of my first few properties of wakefulness. The first was I could not remember the last time that I had a chatterbox mind. The chattering mind had simply vanished, and in hindsight likely happened upon awakening.

The mechanics of the chatterbox ceasing was simple enough. I was no longer perceiving and discerning with the brain. The awake Self perceives outward to the object, and gets information from the object itself. The sleeping Self is passive and before the sleeping Self can even initiate contact with the object the brain is busy comparing and predicting according to past interactions. This means the interaction with the object is clouded by prejudgment and predetermination. We have all been predator and prey using this obsolete discernment.

All of the information needed during interaction with another object is contained within the awareness of that object. Self can naturally see and hear the awareness of any animate object, including the deception or honesty of the interaction. Animals know the moment I am scanning them for information. People unconsciously pull their energies inward when being dishonest. It is more accurate than a lie detector test. A perpetually awake Self can feel the contractions and expansions of emitted energies of any individual regardless of imagined defenses. There are no walls or masks able to keep a perpetually awake Self from seeing the sleeping self beneath.

The other property of being awake that I came to realise months afterwards was the absence of boredom. Like most people I had always suffered from boredom my whole life, but I could not remember the last time I had felt bored. In hindsight, this too likely took place upon awakening as I was no longer identifying with the brain and its incessant need to be processing information. These two properties alone should be very sobering to the casual reader. I have been many years now without having been bored – ever. And for many years now I have had blessed silence between my ears. When I, the Self thinks, the voice is there. But when I cease thinking, the voice ceases too…because it my Self having the inner monlogue, and not the brain prattling on about unprocessed information unconsciously.

For me, the ‘knowing’ stage lasted about 6 months to a year. I cannot pinpoint the exact time as it ended as abruptly as it had started. It seemed as if I had finished processing what awareness I presently had and then from that moment on whenever I interacted there was a ‘knowing’ that was present that had not been there before. As a conversation was taking place there was present inner information regarding the topic, and if something came up that I was not sure of I would be silent for a moment, and the ‘knowing’ regarding what I had been previously unsure of would appear in my mind.

Over time I learned to trust these ‘knowings’ as they have most often proven accurate. The Self is not content was possibilities, however. If information did not feel correct then I would feel the need to contemplate on it later. During these contemplations I would ask questions of the information, and then ask questions of the answers I came up with…and so on until I ran out of questions to ask. That means I would tap my present awareness. The Self is not all knowing, no matter how much the unknowing try to convince.

The ‘knowing’ stage, just like the other stages continues to this day. Evolution being what it is, I on whatever inner or outer cycles have my awareness expanded – done to me, not by me. It most likely is a mechanism that when the present awareness is fully realised, then new awareness emerges to be processed, too. This means a new rush of tuths and epiphanies descend upon me sometimes. These days that ‘download’ runs in the background. I know better than to jump at any ‘aha’ moment.

These expansions are like your eyes and ears gaining more ability so that you see a clearer picture, and hear a clearer truth contained in interactions and communications. I became aware very early on that I did not ‘do’ anything to expand my awareness – it was a naturally occurring phenomena. It is my opinion that the Self never ceases expanding in awareness – just as the universe and possibilities are endless, so too should be the experiencing and discovering.

~ DC Vision