The transcendent experience of awakening — from sleep
Let’s talk about those days where you awake without alarms, headaches, nightmares, or after a night of insomnia. Those strange days where you just spontaneously awake from having a good and nice sleep.
Let’s go to the moment you’re awakening. You’re only minutes, maybe seconds away from being unconscious. Completely unconscious. You’re confused. Even if it’s for an instant but you’re living the confusion of awakening, the confusion derived from a transition — from unconsciousness to consciousness.
Some questions arise. Where am I? What happened? What was I doing? What time is it? What day is it? This may happen only for an instant before you answer them, of course, especially if you are on your bed at home. But the questions arise.
Your brain is collecting the answers and putting them together to make sense of the experience, to feel better, comfortable from the confusion. it’s just for an instant. It can vary from day to day and sometimes the experience is a continuum, not a state.
This confusion is the confusion of uncertainty. When you are awakening you are living uncertainty. Just for an instant — if you wake up at home — but uncertainty. Without fear or anxiety, a neutral uncertainty. An uncertainty without judgment.
Your brain is completely fresh. Everything that looks or sounds familiar during awakening it’s good because they are little pieces that let you reach certainty in small steps.
Awakening is a trip from uncertainty to certainty. Usually, a nice trip because there is no fear or anxiety. And it’s relatively fast, especially if you are awakening at home.
When you are awakening your mind and senses are wide open looking for answers. Again, without fear or anxiety. And it feels good. It’s the experience of learning, in its simplest form. That’s why it’s a moment you can be open to new ideas or new experiences.
Any big step we crave to do to reach certainty when awakening is a sign of anxiety — picking up the cellphone is a fast way to look for certainty. Actually, anxiety is one of our possible responses to uncertainty.
Unless you are awakening with an alarm or the strident noise of the lawnmower in your neighbor’s yard, what you hear in awakening is silence. Yes, there could be some noise but usually, you experience the noise in the background. Remember, your brain is asking questions. In some way, you are not in the world yet. You’re arriving. Awakening is arriving. You experience silence not because there is no sound but because you perceive every sound apart from you, in the distance. Silence is a subjective experience so maybe the silence is more in your mind than in reality, but you feel silent.
If you are lucky, you are cold during awakening. No matter where you are, mornings are the coldest moment of the day. And that’s good for you because you feel your body, you feel the experience. Feeling cold is a sign you are not dreaming anymore.
Awakening involves all your senses because your brain calls them to collect data to answer the questions that resolve an uncertain moment.
Awakening is this moment when you experience everything as new and as old at the same time. As new because you don’t know where are you, and as old, because your brain relies on the known experience of awakening itself.
During awakening, you are a child again. You experience the world without preconceptions or rapid judgments. Awakening is a down-to-top experience and not a top-to-down one.
Uncertainty depends on perception—it’s subjective. That’s why it’s different facing uncertainty when awakening from sleep than in more conscious moments: our judgemental ego is not in the middle of the way.
There’re two interesting things derived from this.
One, it’s realizing that during pure uncertainty — the uncertainty without anxiety or fear — your brain finds certainty in the experience itself. What it’s familiar — certain — to your brain in a moment of uncertainty is the experience of uncertainty itself.
In other words, what it’s not uncertain during uncertainty is that you have lived uncertainty before.
On the other hand, we can see why awakening is the word that most spiritual traditions use to describe the entry to spiritual experience — awakening is the ultimate experience, the experience itself, the pristine experience, the experience in a pure form.
