Awakening

The manifestation of Pure Being is the experience of awakening. One merely wakes up and realizes one's pure nature. It is as if one is usually dreaming, but is taking the dream to be reality. Then he wakes up and spontaneously realizes the true state of affairs... There is no sense of discontinuity of experience in awakening. It is not that something that was not there is now manifest. It is more like becoming cognizant of the presence of something that has always been there, and known to be there, but ignored. (The Pearl Beyond Price, pg 446)

The soul informed by the ego is asleep. This is why enlightenment is called awakening -- your soul wakes up to what is really here. Many people believe that this awakening happens automatically the moment you have an experience of Being. Some parts of your soul may wake up, but the soul is very deeply imprinted by the egoic sense of inferiority, and this depth of the soul does not awaken easily or rapidly. When your awakening does approach this level, the first thing you wake up to is this sense of inferiority. The most evident manifestation of the soul being asleep is one's unshakable conviction in conventional or consensus reality, and in the content of one's overall social conditioning. Regardless of what profound experiences of Being you may have had and how objectively you may have seen reality, when you get up off your meditation cushion or leave a meeting with your teacher, you act, feel, and behave as if reality is the world you learned from your mother. When you do this, you are expressing the asleepness of your soul. (Facets of Unity, pg 222)

Awakening and brilliancy

This experience of awakening operates on two dimensions simultaneously. First is the psychological one. To be awake means you are literally awake—like having awakened from long sleep, or from illusions, from dreams, from all the sufferings of ignorance. This is the psychological awakening: Now you see the truth and wake up from the lies and the ignorance that you have been living in. It also means you wake up to your true nature: You now see what and who you are, instead of what you thought you were. The second sense of awakening is phenomenological. It is the sense of being awake, clear, and bright, as if you just woke up. Suddenly your head is above the clouds and you start seeing. So this awakening is not only a matter of awakening to some truth; it is a certain state of Being. It is being awake—you actually and literally experience yourself as a bright and brilliant presence. You have not only awakened, but you are the awakeness, you are the awake and brilliant presence. (Essence of Intelligence, pg 338)

That is what Brilliancy does when it explodes in the brain. When it explodes in the perceptual centers, it is a sense of waking up in Essence. We’ve seen Brilliancy in many ways—as intelligence, as synthesis, as completeness, and so on—but now we are seeing it in terms of actual enlightenment. You are awake not only because you have an insight about something, but also by the fact of being the state of awakeness. You feel as if you were a light bulb. You are actually awake, and everything is awake. All your senses are bright and open and clear. You are an awakeness that is awake to everything. This awakeness is also you, your very beingness, the very substance of your soul. (Essence of Intelligence, pg 339)

What do you become clear and awakened to? Your nature, to what is you. You become a light, but the light—by becoming light—becomes awakened to itself as a light. You become a light unto yourself. What you awaken to, which is a specific effect of the brilliant drink, is that your nature itself is pure preciousness itself, the utmost preciousness that there can be. So you realize that your nature is not only luminous and brilliant intelligence, but that it is precious. You see and appreciate now the sense of preciousness of Being, your essence, the substance of your consciousness. It is this preciousness that awakens, it is this preciousness that wakes you up, and it is this preciousness that you awake to. This is the preciousness of Being, of Essence, and the preciousness of what a human being is. (Essence of Intelligence, pg 339)