The more we learn, the more maturation and the more freedom there is. Freedom is one of those things that is difficult to define, and there is no practice or method to achieve freedom. You cannot strategize it; you cannot plan for it. You cannot evoke freedom, because freedom is not a particular state of true nature. It’s not an aspect, dimension, or condition of realization. Freedom has to do with many things. It includes the realization of true nature because freedom is implicit in true nature no matter how true nature is presenting itself. When we talk about waking up, the primary awakening is usually an awakening to the fact that there is something beyond our individual consciousness, something beyond that is the source of all capacity. Discovering what that is requires an endless journey because each realization is simply a further approximation of reality.

The second ingredient needed for essential activation is what I call “primary awakening.” Necessary awakening is necessary in the sense that without it there would be no activation. Primary awakening is central to awakening, the most important part. But neither necessary nor primary awakening are necessarily sufficient for activation—that is to say, more conditions are often needed. For some people primary awakening is sufficient, but not for most. Although it is implicit in necessary awakening, primary awakening is something different; it is the awakening to the truth that we are true nature, regardless of what form or formlessness it takes. If you directly encounter true nature and know it fully, primary awakening is the next natural step. But for most people, there is a wide and deep chasm between necessary awakening and primary awakening. This is the gulf that we try to bridge by working on the narcissistic abyss. This is the gap between encountering true nature and being true nature, between recognizing that spirit is and recognizing that spirit is what you are. It is a movement from a dual encounter with true nature to a nondual one. It is also the movement from experience to realization.

At some point, as we recognize this light or illumination or presence, we come to see that it is not just something that we experience, it is our very being. This is the primary awakening, when we begin to see something about what we are and what the world is apart from the perspective of being an individual who is having a spiritual experience, who is experiencing spirit or true nature in one way or another. We begin to realize that we as individuals are simply experiencing the beingness that we are and, by experiencing the beingness that we are, we are experiencing our nature in the sense that we know what we are. We know what we are fundamentally, apart from the fact that we are individuals and we are human beings and we are bodies and we are minds and we are hearts. That is to say, we recognize the nature of all of these. We recognize that true nature, even though it is radically other than our ordinary experience, is the nature of all things. It is the beingness of these things. It is what makes these things be, what makes them appear and makes them available to experience.

This recognition is an explosive insight, a momentous awakening. Pure presence is now revealed, felt, and known as the very presence of awakened awareness, the very reality of awakeness. Soul awakens to her true nature, and experiences her presence as the presence of awakened awareness. She is now awake, bright, clear, lucent, and transparent. She is also full of bliss and delight, beyond mind and reflection. She is drunk with awakeness, delighted with lucidity, and free beyond bounds. The primary awakening is the recognition of her ordinary awareness, which has always been familiar to her, as her true nature. Such recognition intensifies ordinary awareness to a phenomenological and psychological experience of awakeness. Ordinary awareness becomes awakened awareness, which now reveals itself to be the true nature of all phenomenal appearance. She recognizes that her ordinary awareness is actually both presence and openness, fullness and nothingness, inseparable and undifferentiated. She also wakes up to the fact that she has never lost her true nature, that her nature has always been with her, in all her conscious experiences, and that she can never lose it. True nature is so near to her that it does not make sense to lose it, an insight that intensifies her joy and delight, and shows her that she has always been free, always herself. She can lose touch with many of the differentiated qualities of her true nature; but its undifferentiated ground is always what she is.

Primary awakening is usually referred to as true nature awaking up to itself. It is a shift from awakening to true nature to true nature awakening. We recognize “true nature is what I am,” where “I” is a figure of speech. There is no “I”; it is true nature recognizing itself. True nature sheds the garment of the self and recognizes itself with its own light, with its own luminosity. And by recognizing this, we see that not only does true nature make possible the existence of everything but that without true nature, there would be no experience, no awareness, no consciousness, because true nature is the source of pure light, pure awareness, and pure consciousness. We realize that without true nature there would be no life, no experience of life, no conscious experience, no perception, because all of those things come from the luminosity of true nature. In primary realization, we are recognizing that light; and that light is recognizing itself, not by self-reflection but by being itself, by being the fullness.