True understanding comes from the direct experience of our true nature. This is not something that is found in our mentality or habitual and conditioned egoic minds—our direct experience is the ground where awakening arises. The most basic definition of awakening is that awakening is a fundamental shift in identity out of our personal, separate and egoic conditioning and into Awake, Spacious, Luminous, Ineffable Awareness as who and what we are. Years ago, when I first heard these words from my teacher Adyashanti, it stopped me dead in my tracks. It ended so much confusion about what awakening actually was and what I was left with was a direct experience of Alive simplicity, a simplicity that I had been craving for years. This simplicity is totally ordinary and yet, as vast as the sky. It includes everything and is the great nothingness at the same time. It is beyond any thought, concept, experience or perspective; and because it is always arising or existing in the present moment it continues to be totally ground shaking to our everyday sense of self and leaves us immobilized by an incredible Beauty and intimacy that we see and experience in everyone and everything. This door that my Teachers have opened changed my life forever. Because once the door opens, it is like waking a sleeping lion, and as this lion wakes up to itself, our days of egoic identification are numbered and we begin to come home to the Beauty and Divinity that we are, right here in our mortal frames. As we wake up to our inherent Divinity, we realize that we are Divine, that everyone and everything is Divine, and that we are and always have been the dynamic vibrancy of Life itself.
Yet, awakening cannot be summed up in some brief definition; it has to experienced and lived. After 20 years, I am still contemplating, and discovering what it means to be awake in the world, and I struggle to put into words, that which is beyond words and understanding, because the deepest truths are paradoxical, ever evolving and expanding. Our educated Western minds want truth to fit into a simple definition, or a neat little box; but the Truth that I am speaking about does not fit within a box, within a religion, or in a book. Truth is much larger than a definition, than a book and cannot be contained by any walls or boundaries. This Truth is beyond the play of opposites, and includes the hugeness of Life, includes the incredible complexity and simplicity of the totality of Life. This Truth is opposed to nothing and includes everything. Some speak about one truth, as opposed to some other religious or mental perspective of truth. I have no desire to speak in a way that divides our world into true and false. Our world, Life itself is paradoxically, terribly wonderful, and to live in Truth is to be awake, beyond the play of opposites of our minds or mental constructs. To live in this Truth as this Truth, we have to first be willing to become humble. For our humility is our doorway out of our egoic conditioning and into our true nature. What this practically means is that we are willing to drop our preconceived beliefs, opinions, and judgments about life and others, and in this space of humility allow the Divine to show us Her face in every moment, no matter what arises.