CHAPTER 1

ABC'S OF AWAKENING

What do we mean by Awakening?

We have to be careful with the language we use, becauselanguage has history and baggage. As they warn you at thebaggage carousels in airports, many other bags may look likeyours but aren't. For instance, I used to use the term Self-Realizationto refer to a certain level of awakening. But Idiscovered that the term had too much baggage, some of itancient and some of it modern. Following the consciousnessof the various teachers using the term, it became clear thateveryone meant something different by it. And for studentsof mine who had moved through that particular level ofawakening, as they would interact with other groups or withpeople who had read material from other teachers, it createdall sorts of confusion. So, I had to abandon the term and lookfor new language—not just for that term but also for each levelof awakening. I had to find language that was relatively free ofbaggage but was also vibrationally aligned with each level, sothe new language could help to define the Map of awakeningthat I was being shown through my own process.

The one word I could not get away from, though, wasthe word 'awakening'. Thankfully, it has less baggage thanmost other terms in common use. Of course, other peopleusing this term may still mean something different than I do,but I will define specifically what I mean by it so there is noconfusion.

General vs. Specifics: The word 'awakening' has a general,commonly understood meaning that simply refers to the ideaof waking up out of some kind of sleep or dream or trance.Extended to the spiritual realm, the general concept is that theindividual, separate person or ego we experience ourself to beis really just a dream that our greater self is having, and weare caught in this dream, taking the experience to be reality.In this context, the idea of awakening is that it presents thepossibility of coming out of this dream of separateness andawakening to our greater, true reality.

This general sense of awakening is fully aligned with theway the term will be used in this book. In addition, because theMap presented here will point to various levels of awakening,I will develop specific language to differentiate these uniquelevels, as we go along.

Basic Awakening & the 'Core Veil': The term I use forsomeone's initial awakening, for the first level of awakening,is 'Basic Awakening'. People have all kinds of experiences thatthey like to think are awakenings, but most aren't. Most ofthose experiences are just expanded ego states. Most of therest are simply a momentary taste of something deeper, andthen the moment passes. The Map provides a clear definitionof how to tell a true awakening from one of these other kindsof experiences. Here is a quick rule of thumb: if the descriptionof the experience has the word 'expanded' in it, then mostlikely it was an expanded ego state. The overriding quality ofa true awakening experience is most aligned with the word'empty', for one's familiar sense of self has 'emptied', leavinga space in its place. And if it is a true awakening and not justa taste, then what has become empty stays empty. The senseof expansion, on the other hand, usually refers to an expandedsense of self. In awakening that sense of self does not expand,it disappears.

Here's an example: a student of mine—we'll call herAlice—had a shift of consciousness that stayed stable for overa month. She believed she had awakened, but I was doubtful.At first glance, there seemed to be an emptiness that resonatedwith true awakeness, but my 'spiritual intuition' told me I wasmissing something. A red flag then popped up as she described,among other things, "feeling expanded". So, I looked moreclosely. To understand what I saw, imagine writing the word'I' with an orange marker on a small, green balloon, and thenexpanding the balloon to 100 times its normal size. Now, youwould no longer see the I that you had written on the balloonbecause the letter would be so stretched out it would just looklike odd bits of orange on the green background of the balloon.Alice was like that: her I, her ego, had been so expanded thatit had become almost transparent, making it very hard to see.Yet it was still there, and my spiritual intuition had sensed it.At the same time, I could see that she was actually ripe enoughto have a true awakening, so I worked with her to facilitateit. The moment the awakening happened, her expanded statebroke down, and I couldn't sense that I any longer. I asked herhow she felt now, and she said, "Well ... nothing," in quite asurprised tone. The expanded state and the sense of I in it hadbeen a 'something', and that something was now gone. Thiswas not what she expected, but it was the real thing. Nowshe was awake.

Awakening is never what we expect. This is both becausethe ego expects to be there in the awakening, and becausewith Basic Awakening, you have awakened out of the illusionof who you thought you were but not yet awakened to whatyou are. That comes later, as a deeper awakening. Yet even thedeeper awakenings are never what we expect.

We still need to define what happened to Alice. Whatwas the nature of her Basic Awakening? What happened toher sense of I? To bring this out of the conceptual realm,let's...