What exactly is awakening? Does someone who has really attained it have accurate answers?

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Awakening is, at the very basic level, a rising of awareness to a reality that was previously hidden. I have observed two types. Spiritual in nature, or non-dual in nature. My own awakening is detailed here: Vincent Guidry's post in Spiritual Musings

A spiritual awakening is when the being has an experience outside of material existence. For it to really ‘qualify’ as an awakening, and not as just some random experience, the being should recognize that they have a role to play in this reality and agency.

A non-dual awakening is not spiritual in nature, instead the person is awakened to a pathway of surrender that can ultimately culminate in enlightenment. There are non-dual experiences just like there are spiritual experiences that, similarly, are not enlightenment. These are broadly called satoris.

One can differentiate an experience from an awakening in that the experience ends, like a dream might, and you awaken from the experience back into regular reality. But in awakening, it’s the mundane reality that proves to be the dream that has been woken up from.

Spiritual reality is really neat and leads one to want to integrate spiritual modes of existence into mundane reality. One typically finds a spirit guide in order to facilitate the process. Mine identified as a white witch at first, but soon shed the ‘clothes’ and just called itself my higher self. I am unable to distinguish the higher self from God. At some point a few years ago I just started seeing it as God and that seems to suit us just fine.

Non-dual awakening is generally arrived at through meditation. The awakening provides an experience of the stripping away of ego elements and one is able to experience existence unhindered by any sort of negativity ‘clouding up’ the mind. It is very common for non-dual awakening to be mistaken for non-dual enlightenment, but this isn’t the case. Usually the state passes after some time.

Another generalization I can make over the two forms of awakening is as such. Picture a mountain at which you’re currently at the base. Awakening gives you a brief vision of the peak, and a pathway up the mountain. You climb up the mountain to the peak, clearing a trail behind you. You reach the peak and have a satori, after which you tumble back down the mountain, needing to find another path back up.

Most people mistake the peak of the mountain for enlightenment. But that’s not what enlightenment is. Enlightenment is the realization that it doesn’t really matter where on the path you’re on. You’re aware of the climbing, the summit, the vista, and the tumble back down, the finding of the new path. Spiritual progress is in the smoothing out of the process of the arising and the passing.

Of course it’s not really a mountain. It’s your brain making connections and gathering awareness of itself. The mind wants to hold on to the peak experience and it’s this very hold that the mind exerts that causes the being to lose its grip. Then you have to find a new pathway back to the state. Everything, ultimately, passes.

Non-dual and spiritual start to blend together after enough time exploring them. Concentration meditation eventually leads into what are called the formless realms. Enough spiritual exploration eventually yields the insight that the non-dual state is being driven at by the lessons.

Spiritual enlightenment is when Dark Nights, the tumble back down the mountain after acquiring a new spiritual ‘ability’ become muted or non-existent.

Winding this back around to myself, as the question asks, I consider myself to be enlightened in the non-dual sense, since birth. I use the spiritual awakening outlined in the blog post I shared at the top of my answer in order to explore what I have taken to calling the meta-rational space. I want to have insight into the ultimate nature of existence. Spiritual exploration, the insights of which get funneled through non-dual experiencing, in order to produce a truly objective map of being-existence.