A spiritual awakening is what you are, with nothing added
You typed a question into a search box. You deserve a straight answer to it. So here is mine, in simple words, before anything else: an awakening is what you are. You are that right now, while you read this sentence, with nothing added to you. Nothing has to arrive first: you have been here all along. (And, yes, I know what the mind does with a sentence like that. Mine does the same.)
Usually, of course, the answer comes as twenty-three signs and seven stages. I will get to those lists in a moment, because you have read them. They left you with a picture. That picture is of an event.
In that picture, something happens to a person, one day, once enough effort or enough luck has piled up, with a clear before and a clear after. This post takes that picture apart, piece by piece. In its place, I put the only honest definition I know. You can check every piece against your own experience as you read. In fact, that is the one check that counts.
Every definition you have found describes an event
Look at what you actually found when you typed "what is a spiritual awakening". Lists of signs came first. You cry more easily, they say. You cannot bear small talk any more. You wake at three every night, and your ears ring. Stages came next, usually seven of them, with you somewhere on the ladder. Then came symptoms, as if awakening were a condition you catch.
Underneath every one of these pages runs the same silent assumption: an awakening is an EVENT. It has a date. It has a before, in which you were asleep, and an after, in which you are awake. It happens to somebody — to you, if you are lucky or diligent enough.
Many of these lists describe real experiences, and some of them describe yours. But notice what kind of experience that is. Whatever begins at three every night is an experience like any other. It came, it stayed a while, and then it went — one more entry in the long record of your life. The assumption beneath these pages is older than the pages themselves — you just rename the destination 'awakening', while you keep running from what is already here.
Whatever comes to you will one day leave you
Here is the test, the only one you need, and you can run it on anything: does it come and go? A headache does. A love affair does. A promotion does, and so does a diagnosis. And — yes — so does the brightest state of mind you have ever been in. That state came on a Tuesday. By Thursday the laundry was back.
You know this. You have had the glimpse, the openness, the hour in which everything made sense. (Most people who type this question have had at least one.) Then it faded. You spent months trying to get it back.
So, then, apply the test to the awakening these pages promise you. If it comes, it will go. If it has a date of arrival, it has a date of departure, even if that day is far off. Whatever goes was never what you were after. It was one more experience, however exquisite, filed next to the others. Yet this conclusion is a relief rather than a loss. It clears the ground. Because now you can ask the only question worth asking: is there anything in your life that has NEVER come and gone?
Your awareness was already here before your first thought
One constant in your life has stayed put through all of it, and you know it, even if you have never given it a name. Before your first thought this morning, something was already awake. Before you remembered who you are — your name, your worries, the day ahead — that same awareness was there. It watched you remember.
That awareness did not switch on when you opened your eyes. It is what noticed your eyes opening. Your thoughts rise and fall in it. Your moods pass through it. Your entire life story unfolds inside it. It remains as it is.
Now, notice two facts about this awareness. First, it never arrived. Every moment you can find in your life was already lit by it. (Actually, the one looking for its beginning is this same awareness — more on that in a while.)
Second, it stays the same. It was as bright when you were ten as it will be when you are eighty. The content changes constantly, while the awareness of the content never moves. What the word awakening points at is this. It has gone unnoticed all your life for a single reason: there is nowhere to stand to get a look at it.
To have something you must stand apart from it
This brings me to the claim in my title, which sounds like a provocation and is, in fact, mere arithmetic. You have a car because you are not the car. You have a thought because you can watch that thought come and go. Having needs two: an owner, and something owned.
Here, apply this to awareness — to what you are. Can you stand apart from it? Try, right now. Stand apart from your own awareness and take a look at it. You cannot. The reason is this: whatever stands apart to look is awareness itself. The sole position on offer is the one you occupy now. There is no vantage point from which to watch your own seeing.
You are one. That is the entire arithmetic: what is one cannot HAVE itself. That goes for everybody. I reached this same spot once before, by another road — who you think you are cannot wake up — and the arithmetic came out the same. Only the wish to have what you are makes it seem absent.
Awakening meant awake long before anyone started selling it
Let me reclaim the word itself for a moment, because the word is far older than any retreat. To awaken means to wake up, and waking up leaves you with just one thing: being awake. Awake means the opposite of asleep: aware of what is here, and aware that you are aware of it. You are awake right now, in exactly this sense, or you could not be reading. The word, then, taken at its word, describes your ordinary condition. All anyone could ever add to it is to notice it.
Now, then, what happened to this word? Somewhere along the way, awake became an achievement. It became a rank, a before-and-after story with a teacher at the hinge of it. The ordinary condition it names became the lowest rung of a ladder you had to climb.
I did my share of climbing, and I will come to that. But look at the price of this new name. It turns what was never missing into what you lack most. That is the whole trick. Once you have seen it, the ladder loses its grip on you.
One Sanskrit verse calls you the witness of everything
The answer above is an old one, and I take some comfort in its age. Centuries ago at the very least, a dialogue between a sage and a king was written down in Sanskrit. (The scholars still argue about the date.) The king asks the questions you have been asking: "How is one to acquire knowledge? How is one to attain liberation?" The sage hands him no ladder. He tells the king what the king already is.
In John Richards' translation: "You are the one witness of everything and are always completely free." One sentence does all the work.
Read it again, slowly, as a description rather than a promise. "Always" is the word that matters: before you ever heard the word awakening, and after you have forgotten it. The dialogue goes by the name Ashtavakra Gita. For twenty chapters it keeps saying the same thing in different ways — "you are really unbound… already", "you have no bondage or liberation". Why? Because the mind keeps asking the same question in different ways.
It is a short book, and a new edition of Thomas Byrom's translation came out this year — the entire dialogue fits in a hundred and sixty pages. That is roughly a hundred and fifty-nine more than the point needs.
What you were searching for is doing the searching
What happens, then, when all this sinks in? No event takes place — I did warn you. Something quieter and far stranger happens: your search turns around. For years your attention has pointed forward, towards a state you would one day enter. At this point it turns back, towards whatever has been pointing all along. And there, at the source of your looking, you find the same awareness. It was here before your first thought this morning. It has been searching from the start.
Here is a sentence that is funny until it stops being funny — you are what you are looking for. And it is literally true. The one who searches and the one searched for are the same awareness, wearing two names.
This is why nothing needs adding. Your searching did its job. It brought you here, to this sentence. But it looked in the one direction where it could never find what it wanted. What it wanted was behind the very eyes that looked. Turn around once, and your question changes. "When will it happen to me?" becomes "who is this me it was supposed to happen to?"
I spent decades trying to have what I am
I am not writing this from any "after". For twenty-five years I looked for something that was freely available to me the whole time. I built instruments to find it. I wrote seven books about it. I taught others to look for it. I treated awakening the way your search results treat it: as an event ahead of me. The right practice or the right teacher would finally hand it over. Every time a state came, I tried to keep it. Every time it left, I read its departure as my failure.
What changed was the direction in which I looked — and, with that turn, the whole project of having fell away. You cannot have what you are, and I had spent decades trying. Twenty-five years is a long time to search for your own eyes. I am still on the same path, by the way. I have arrived nowhere. By this post's own definition, that is where everybody is.
Decades on this exact path have given me one thing: I can feel where you're stuck almost before you can name it yourself.
Spiritual awakening points at the awareness that never left you
So, then, let me come back to your question, with everything above in hand. An awakening is what the word has always pointed at: the awareness reading this sentence. That awareness was here before your first thought. Every experience of your life has come and gone in it. It has never once left you — it is you. Nobody will ever hand it to you (anybody who promises to is selling you back to yourself). You also keep it, whatever happens — which is the part the lists leave out.
That is the complete definition, and it is a good deal shorter than the one you came for. The ladder is gone from it, and that is precisely what makes it true. Take the event away, and what remains is everything: you, awake, as you have always been, reading these words. You will never have a spiritual awakening — and you have never, for one single moment, been without what the word points at.
There is no how, there is no why, there is only YOU.