Awakening, as it applies to higher consciousness, mystifies most people when they hear about it, and this mystification keeps them from going any farther. The choice to wake up is actually open to everyone. The process is natural, and under the right conditions, it isn’t difficult. In fact, a small percentage of people wake up spontaneously. Looking back, they know exactly the day it happened, although why is something no one can explain.

For everyone else, waking up is a choice. That you have that choice, here and now, is the first step. It isn’t a mystical or religious choice but a practical one. The opposite of waking up isn’t being asleep, because “awakening” is just a metaphor.

Higher consciousness as an experience feels like waking up. To be more literal, what is involved is breaking out of the limited state of awareness that each of us occupies. 

Sheer inertia keeps the choice to wake up at a distance and prevents us from having a clear view. Inertia keeps everything the same so that today feels much like yesterday. As applied to consciousness, someone’s life is ruled by

• Routine

• Habit

• Old conditioning

• Stubborn beliefs

• Second-hand opinions

• Ego needs

• Patterns of desire

• External demands and duties

• Hidden fears and insecurity

The list could be much longer because even the most routine, boring, unfulfilled, and thwarted life is complex –even if you could describe every cause and influence that shaped you, their interaction increases things by an order of magnitude. Simply answering the question, “Who am I?” ventures into territory that the most brilliant philosophers have been unable to solve, and the proposed solutions go far beyond the average person’s understanding.

What saves the situation is our ability to experience life. No one needs a detailed explanation of how life works. From day to day, we confront our experiences and respond to them. If you take everything on the list you’ve just read, each item feels constricting. The possibilities of life are narrowed down, and the potential for fulfillment is diminished. 

If you have that experience of being hemmed in, frustrated, and limited, you are ready to wake up, because the sole factor that defines awakening is expanded awareness. Two people can differ in every recognizable way—age, race, gender, intelligence, family background, interests, work, religion, etc.—and yet both can be awake. Awareness isn’t governed by what you think, say, or do.

This is a mark of how free human beings are at the level of awareness. It is a field of infinite possibilities. Yet at the same time, each person strongly identifies with the very things—age, race, gender, intelligence, and all the rest—that distract us from waking up. Or to go even further, these things keep us from seeing why waking up is necessary or desirable.

If you are on the road to waking up, you already understand why waking up is worthwhile, because you value expanded awareness. Without it, there is no creativity, insight, imagination, deep fulfillment, personal growth, peak experiences, or self-understanding. If you value any of those things, you know the worth of waking up even if you have never used that term. 

One advantage of the modern secular world is that waking up no longer comes wrapped in religious notions about getting closer to God or becoming saintly. The process occurs in awareness, not in a church or temple. Yet there needs to be some context that makes the process understandable, and for myself, experience is the most practical and personal context. Experience is immediate, and if waking up isn’t immediate, it gets shunted to the side as we fill our days with things that are immediate, like going to work, eating, and dealing with family issues.

Here we encounter the divide between waking up and the rest of life, which is all about doing, thinking, feeling, talking, etc. That dimension is infinite but external. Awakening is infinite but internal. This difference turns out to be the key because the two worlds of “in here” and “out there” aren’t separate but intimately linked. There is no such thing as an experience without a response. The response includes a set of mixed elements.

You have to perceive the experience and also interpret it. You have to fit it into the context of your life, and this primarily involves saying yes or no to the experience. We say yes to pleasurable, familiar, promising, and otherwise desirable experiences; we say no to strange, unknown, painful, and otherwise undesirable experiences. 

Saying yes or no is a very subtle, personal thing, not measurable by any scientific means. The person you fall in love with can’t be measured by data points, for example. Here is where explanations of the ordinary kind fall short. There is no map to how uniquely each of us perceives and interprets an experience. No two people have the same context or the same desires. The whole setup can seem impossible to unravel, except that the two worlds of “in here” and “out there” are bound up in one thing: awareness.

If you pay attention to your state of awareness, nothing else is needed in order to wake up. Once you start paying attention, you are falling back on self-awareness. This is key. For all practical purposes, your self-awareness is the place where waking up occurs. It helps to refer back to those few people who wake up spontaneously. What they experience contains the following ingredients:

They have fewer thoughts, mostly those that involve practical matters.

There is an absence of anxiety.

They feel present in the moment, not overshadowed by the past.

The face the moment with openness and lack of assumptions.

Their sense of “I” feels expanded.

They experience bliss in some form.

They don’t feel trapped inside the limitations of the physical body. There might be a sense of physical lightness or expansion.

The five senses are more alert.

This list is just a basis; each thing on it can be intense to varying degrees, and not everything might be present. What is undeniable is the contrast with the ordinary experience of self-awareness that came before the person woke up. 

For anyone who doesn’t spontaneously wake up, we are talking about a process that begins wherever you happen to find yourself. Consider how you relate to your self-awareness, using this article as a guide. For more details, you can go to my book, Superhuman, which discusses at length how self-awareness actually expands. I hope you now appreciate more fully how desirable awakening is to you personally.

DEEPAK CHOPRA MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of The Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global, a whole health company at the intersection of science and spirituality, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. Chopra is a Clinical Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, San Diego, and serves as a senior scientist with Gallup Organization. He is the author of over 90 books translated into over forty-three languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Chopra has been at the forefront of the meditation revolution for the last thirty years. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Digital Dharma: How to Use AI to Raise Your Spiritual Intelligence and Personal Well-Being. TIME magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” www.deepakchopra.com