When I review the years that have gone by and what earlier cycles of awakening looked like, the moment that a big shift or a big opening happened was always completely unexpected. Always random. It was never something I could will to happen, never something I made happen. The best I could do was lay the conditions and lay the foundation for that awakening to occur. That's what I did through practice and through study, through really dedicating myself to learning as much as I could about spirituality and about Buddhism. I learned from teachers. I lived with teachers. I was fooled. I was deceived. I was wrong for years. But I just kept going. I didn't really have a choice. I allowed myself to, in a way, be a slave to the awakening drive, to that fire inside that wants to know, that wants to understand, that wants to awaken.
Maps of awakening matter because they give you a framework for what's happening. Without a map, you can chase the wrong thing for years. I know because I did exactly that. But maps also have limits. They can make the path seem more linear than it is. They can create goals where there shouldn't be any. So I offer these five stages with both of those things in mind, as a framework that can be genuinely useful, not as a fixed ladder.
Stage 1: The Seeker
Before awakening happens, there's this fire. This hunger. An unsatisfied searching that can last years, even decades. You're reading every book, sitting with every teacher, practicing every method. You're obsessed. You can't get away from it. I couldn't get away from it even when I wanted to. I kept practicing even through so many cycles of, God, what am I doing? I just want to give this up. Please. I can't take it anymore. But I kept going.
And there were things that had to be sacrificed at every stage. Maybe certain habits, or certain psychological patterns, or beliefs about ourselves and about the world, and about spirituality, things that don't serve us anymore. In that letting go, something very profound happens to consciousness. In the different cycles of awakening, in the different breakthrough moments, the wisdom that awakens in that moment is so powerful that it forces, essentially, a letting go. It forces the vanishing, the incineration, of what you used to think yourself to be.
The seeker stage is not a failure. It's a necessary gathering of momentum. The fire that burns in the seeker is the energy that will eventually cause everything to collapse into something real. But the seeker usually doesn't know that yet.
Stage 2: First Opening and Stream Entry
The first opening, what Buddhism calls stream entry, is a shock. It comes from nowhere. It's not what you expected.
Three or four years ago, I read Ramana Maharshi. There was a line in his book, Talks, that said liberation is to know that you were never born. When I first read that sentence, it didn't compute. My brain just almost short-circuited. I started sweating profusely. And after that, it was gone. I didn't think anything of it. But in that moment, a grace descended. I just didn't know it yet.
I got off the plane and I started driving. And this Ryan, who had been really the core and the forefront of my entire life up to that point, just completely receded into the background. Just wasn't there. And this profound I Am arose. An awareness that wasn't subject to thought, an awareness that wasn't identified with Ryan or with the body. And that awareness was very continuous, and as it opened up and flourished, it became this clear understanding of being everything. Of I am everything. And that realization, the moment-to-moment experience of it, lasted ten days. I was never the same after that.
I was driving on the Five Northbound when it happened. Separation and duality just vanished. I couldn't tell where my hands ended and where the car began. All the people on the freeway in their cars, it was like my heart reached through space and time and appeared as all of them. All of our hearts were these nodes in this web, in this network. My chest just cracked open and I just started laughing. I couldn't stop laughing.
I called my friend Ricardo that night. I said, dude, this is it. I think this is the beginning of enlightenment. This is the most immaculate thing that's ever happened. It's not stopping. It's been ten days. And before I knew it, the next morning I woke up and it was as if it never happened.
The characteristic mark of awakening in this first opening is that you awaken from your previous form of identification. Up to that point I had identified as a person in time, as a practitioner, as a meditator. When that moment came, my whole life vanished. Just incinerated. The depth and clarity of that presence that dawned in that moment was so overwhelming, so expansive, that I was not able to ever identify as a person after that day.
What's arising in first opening is the recognition of what Ramana Maharshi calls the Self with a capital S, and what Vedanta calls awareness. The sense that there is a background, a consciousness upon which everything arises, and you are that background. You're not what arises. You're this witness, this vast I Am.
Stage 3: The Dark Night and Cycling
Here is what nobody tells you: after the ten days, the ego comes back. And it is devastating.
The energy, the more solid and dense pranas, re-emerged. Suddenly Ryan was back in the picture. And it was like being completely kicked out of the garden of Eden, banished from the promised land. It was so depressing. The night before, I had called Ricardo and said this is it. The next morning I woke up and it was as if it never happened.
If I had a teacher at that time who was awake in this way and had been through this, it could have saved me a lot of years. But I didn't have that teacher. So I spent the next three years chasing the I Am everything realization, chasing the I Am everything state. And that chasing was the suffering of the dark night.
The dark night is like being at the ocean. God is sticking your head in the water and drowning you. That's the dark night. And then you're pulled out, you get some air, you're like yes, and that's the bliss. This whole bliss and dark night roller coaster. You're being dunked in, pulled back out, get some air, dunked back in. And then eventually you just lose consciousness and your self vanishes. You just can't hold on anymore. And then deeper awakening happens.
So for some of you that are in the abyss right now, you're getting the cosmic water-boarding. I know I have a very inappropriate sense of humor for this subject, but it captures what it's like.
The reason for the cycling is a misunderstanding about what happened in the first opening. What I saw was an experience. I saw it as something I entered and something I left. But that's not actually what happened. There is no entering. There's just the falling away of the obscuration. It's like the sun in the sky, and it gets obscured by some clouds. Your whole life, the sun of your true nature has been obscured by the clouds. The sun and the rays of the fundamental awareness are not recognizable. And then one day, by grace or through practice, something happens. The clouds part. The clouds vanish. The true nature is cognized. Mind recognizes itself. And in that recognition there's all this bliss and expansiveness and profundity. But because the bliss is so profound, because the non-duality is so profound, it's perceived as a state. Awareness, for my understanding of it, is not a state. And awakening, while there are many non-dual states, any experience where there's a loss of subject and object, there's a difference between those non-dual states and non-duality as nature, the very nature of experience.
So the dark night is the period when you cycle in and out of openings without the understanding that would stabilize them. The experience keeps happening and then closing. You keep losing the thing you found, because you conceptualized it as a thing to find.
Stage 4: Stabilization and the Emptiness of Awareness
This stage is what I sometimes call the great simplification. And it comes not from trying harder, but from a specific insight.
After three years of chasing the I Am everything realization, there were many cycles of that I Am everything expansiveness followed by these abysmal dark nights that were awful. And then one day they ended. A very clear insight happened. Awareness turned on itself, and it was realized that this I Am that I'd been chasing is actually empty. The awareness I'd been chasing is actually empty. It's not a thing. It's empty. So I'm chasing nothing. Why? What am I chasing? I've been chasing myself. This is pointless.
Boom. The I Am everything cycles, the abyss cycles, the whole up and down roller coaster I was on for three years, done. Finished. Over.
The way that insight comes is this: you stop running after the non-dual experience and instead turn awareness back on itself. You look at what is looking. What you find is nothing solid. No substantial witness sitting behind the curtain. Just this transparent knowing that has no inside or outside to it. Self-inquiry is the method for this. All self-inquiry practices have one purpose, which is to turn inward and look at consciousness, to look at what we experience as beingness. Ramana Maharshi calls this the Self with a capital S. When you look for awareness, you find nothing other than what appears.
If my earlier self could have said something to 24-year-old Ryan, it would have cleared up those three years immediately. I would have said: find me the self that has re-risen. Ryan's come back to the forefront. Find it. Look at awareness. Tell me whether what you experienced over those ten days was a state, or whether it was just awareness. Because when it was happening, it was very clear that it was just awareness. And bliss and expansiveness came along with it, but it was just the awakening of awareness. After the state closed down, I saw it as something I entered and something I left. But you can't enter or leave awareness. You're already it.
This fourth stage is when the investigation begins to go all the way. The sense of being a background, a witness, an eternal consciousness, also gets deconstructed. Because even that formulation, even that I Am, is still a subtle form of reification. It's still claiming a something.
Stage 5: Non-Arising and Full Integration
The most recent shift has been this: there is absolutely no difference between the so-called background awareness and the awareness of scratching my knee. Absolutely no difference between background awareness and the awareness of blinking my eyes. No difference between background awareness and the awareness of eating a fruit. There is no background awareness. Awareness is inseparable from the constituents of experience. It is dependent on them. Just like the constituents of experience are dependent on awareness itself.
When this is understood, not just intellectually but as the actual texture of experience, there is no longer any foreground or background. There's no retreating to the witness. Every sensation, every touch, every word, every sound is witnessing. Everything is everything. That destruction of the background-foreground split, that beheading of the witness, causes the complete vanishing of duality. Everything is Buddha. Everything is the nature.
This doesn't mean life becomes some kind of blissed-out flatness. I've discovered that there really is a thing called destiny. There are things that are to be done in this incarnation, in your life. And if you don't walk through those doors, you will suffer. You will suffer a lot. So walk through them. The guidance is still there. The love is still there. I hugged my mom this morning and I remembered how much she loves me and how much I love her, and how important that still is, no matter what. Everything being luminous non-dual emptiness doesn't change the importance of love. It deepens it.
My teacher Peter Brown, before he died, gave a six-minute dharma talk from his deathbed. He said: people ask me whether they should do this practice or do this meditation or take this drug or go here or go there. He said it doesn't matter. What matters is radiant presence. That was his word for experience. What matters is the nature of mind. And then he said, this is what's always happening. Radiant presence is always happening. Come check it out. And then he died.
Important Caveats: Stages Are Not Linear
These stages don't unfold in a clean, sequential way. They cycle. They overlap. You can be in the dark night at stage three and have moments of stage five. You can be in stage four for years and then suddenly cycle back through a brutal dark night that feels like stage three. That's normal.
Awakening also isn't the end. It's the beginning of an ongoing refinement. In Buddhism, the stages of awakening are measured by the falling away of certain mental obscurations called fetters. The final ones wiped out are ignorance and conceit, the sense of an I. Until that's complete, there will still be reactions. There will still be preferences. I get frustrated here and there. I'm definitely not claiming to be an arhant.
The opening in combination with the insight, with the understanding of the nature of that state or the nature of experience itself, is what leads to awakening or realization. You can have many non-dual experiences, many experiences of unity consciousness, but unless there's understanding into the nature of what is arising, it'll just be something that comes and goes.
The value of having a teacher is that when this happened to me four years ago, the initial I Am everything opening, all it would have taken was a teacher to say turn awareness back on itself. That's it. That's all it would have taken. But that person wasn't there for me. I didn't have the fortune to have that person. I had to chase myself literally for three years until it finally clicked. So the reason I teach this, the reason I share these stages at all, is so that you don't spend three years doing what I did. So that when the opening happens, someone is there to say, look at awareness. Find me the self that has risen. Tell me if what you experienced was a state or just how things are.