How Do I Know If I’m Awakened? Measuring our Progress in Meditation [Episode 55]

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

When it comes to meditation, you can pretty much set aside questions like, “How do I know if I’m there yet?” or “How do I know when I’m doing it right?” Most of the time, these questions just aren’t that helpful when you’re meditating.

I know this can be challenging. You’re sitting there, trying to follow a particular technique, and there’s a natural desire to know if you’re doing it right or if it’s working. You want to know if you’re wasting your time or just spinning your wheels.

This is the paradox of spiritual practice. Any fixation on a specific goal, whether it’s trying to have a certain experience or attain a certain state of consciousness or hold your attention in a certain place, is going to be an obstacle to true meditation. As long as we’re attached to any outcome, we’re going to fall short of the goalless goal of the practice, which transcends anything we can fixate on. It’s beyond anything your mind will be able to grasp, or hold on to, or even know. I’m trying to point us beyond being fixated on any kind of goal. Don’t worry about whether you’re doing it right or not. There’s no need to worry about how you will know when you’re there.

Stop Trying to Get Meditation Right…It’s Holding You Back

The point of any meditation or awareness practice is simply to keep exploring it. It’s an exploration of awareness. It’s an exploration of consciousness. We’re working to remove our fixation on all of the objects in consciousness. This includes our thoughts, feelings, sensations and ultimately the entire world. This is where our attention normally always goes, and so we’re working to unglue awareness from all of the objects that arise within it.

Let’s unglue our awareness from identifying with any attachment to the things that are going through our minds—the feelings that we’re feeling, the sensations swirling in our psyches. Let's free ourselves from all of that so we can discover the spacious expanse that we really are. When we free ourselves from this attachment, we can discover the infinite depths that we are, because our attention is not just focused on the little things happening on the surface. It’s now free to discover depth.

So that’s the point of this practice. It’s something that we’re just exploring with no specific goal in mind. There isn’t a “there” to get to like there is with most goals you’re trying to achieve in life. There’s never a sense of “Okay, good. I’ve got it. Let me just hold my attention right there.” Of course it can feel a little bit like that sometimes. We can certainly have experiences where it feels like we’ve reached a peak experience or spiritual goal. But it’s not fundamentally what the practice is all about. And it’s not where you should have your primary attention when you’re practicing.

Navigating the Razor’s Edge of Awareness

That said, I want to make a distinction. As we begin to actually awaken to the subtle dimensions of who and what we are, we can become aware of a deeper consciousness that seems extremely delicate to sustain. The traditional metaphor for this dynamic is that we’re navigating a very thin razor’s edge.

For instance, when you become aware of awareness, you might realize that it’s the first time in your life that you’ve not been focused on an object. You realize, “Oh, wow. I’m focused on the subject. I’m focused on the experiencer, and it feels very new and different.” When this happens, you realize that what you’re experiencing is an incredibly delicate awareness. You realize that in a split second, you could fixate on this experience, turning it into an object that you can hold on to. And then your mind can get back involved.

And then you realize just how subtle it is to not be involved in the mind, and to just sit there being aware of awareness without fixating on any object. You discover that your consciousness can’t even move a millimeter. If you move even the slightest bit in any direction, you’re creating an object. You’re fixating on it and you’re back in the mind. So, it’s like walking a tightrope.

How To Subtly Steer to Stay on the Tightrope

When you start to discover this very delicate razor’s edge of inner freedom, then you can begin to engage in a subtle kind of steering. You’re aware of what’s happening, and you’re ever so slightly steering your practice to stay on that tightrope. Doing a little bit of steering in these moments is totally valuable and important. There is a time and a place for steering your meditation. Once something’s been revealed, you can subtly hold that delicate consciousness without falling back into the identification and fixation of the mind.

But while there’s a place for that subtle steering, the reason I don’t emphasize it is that it only applies after something has already been realized and discovered. And at that point, this dynamic is self-apparent. I’m sure many of you can relate to this: at some point in meditation, some profound and subtle consciousness opens up, and in that moment, you know exactly what you have to do to stay with it. It’s very subtle, and it feels very delicate. You almost feel like you can’t breathe or you might lose it. It’s like a little candle flame has started to burn, and you don’t want to blow it out. My point is that it’s self-revealing, and what you need to do to maintain it is self-apparent. Any steering you need to do to stay on the razor’s edge reveals itself to you naturally, as a product of awakening in that moment.

That’s a very different orientation from sitting down to try to pay attention to awareness and then constantly asking, “Is this it? Is that it? Am I there yet? How do I know if I’m doing it right?” In that situation, the mind is very involved in measuring, weighing, evaluating, and trying to determine and control. That’s really our tendency. That’s how we live most of our lives. We’re always trying to predict outcomes and move toward objectives. We’re consciously trying to avoid obstacles and stay in control.

Come to the Practice With a Beginner’s Mind

So because that’s our normal tendency, when we sit down to meditate, it’s better just to drop all of it altogether. We should just leave all that aside and come to the practice with a beginner’s mind—with a kind of open innocence. We just give ourselves to the practice as it’s described to us. We work with it and just keep trying to do it, no matter what. Our mode should really be more of an innocent exploration of consciousness.

A big part of the practice is not knowing whether any particular experience of awareness is it. The moment you’re saying, “Ah, this is awareness”, it’s probably not. It might have been for a second, but now it’s something you’re thinking about, holding in your mind, looking at, and it’s an object again. So, this practice requires us to really free ourselves from a tightness and narrowness of focus, and into a kind of spacious, open, fluid, free consciousness that is exploring itself.

Of course, you might suddenly find during your practice that you’re experiencing a different kind of non-local consciousness, but you don’t want to grab on to it. Try to avoid thinking “Oh, this is it, I got it.” It’ll be gone in a second. So when the question pops up, “Is this it? Is this what we’re aiming for?”, just don’t answer it. Don’t get involved. Tell yourself, “I don’t know. I don’t need to know.” You really don’t need to know. That’s the whole point. You don’t need to know whether you’re doing it exactly right or not. Isn’t that freeing? I encourage you to just try this approach and see what it brings. Different practices will bring different things on different days. The key is to just keep the exploration going so it deepens and deepens.

Can You Be Awake Without Knowing It?

In this next segment, Craig answers a question about how we know if we’re awake—and whether it’s possible to be awake without even realizing it.

David says: I have a longing and a passion for awakening. My question is, how can I know I’m awake? Or differently stated, can I be awake without knowing it? I value and trust your repeated guidance not to seek any particular experience in meditation. Yet at the same time, you encourage awareness of depth, vastness, and the infinite expanse of consciousness. I’m able to be aware of awareness and to be present to presence. In this, I experience freedom, but not so much depth and vastness. I also trust that awakening is always here. I admit to wanting a more ecstatic experience at least once in a while in meditation. Any thoughts?

David, this is a cool question. There are a lot of pieces to it. It’s almost like two opposing parts, if I’m getting it right.

On one hand, you’re acknowledging that awakening is not some particular special experience. And that’s good, because it isn’t a specific kind of experience.

Then you’re saying, “Well, if that’s true, could I be awake without knowing it? Because how would I know it other than by some special experience?”

This is a deep, multi-layered teaching. I’ll try not to go too far into it.

How Awakening Reduces Self-Monitoring

From one point of view, yes—you can be awake without knowing it. Awakening is a deconstruction of self-consciousness. The more awake we are, the less self-conscious we are. There’s a falling away of that self-monitoring function in the psyche—the part that’s always watching and asking, “How am I doing? Am I doing it right? Is this it?”

That self-monitoring starts to fall away. The whole measuring of how I’m doing, even the interest in myself, begins to dissolve as we open to something much more vast and subtle.

We begin to recognize that we can’t really know who we are in any fixed way. And we lose interest in trying to define something that is so vast, profound, and subtle. We start to let go of the tools we used to interpret reality, and we become more spontaneous, more fluid.

So in that sense, you could be showing up as a very awakened person and not be particularly aware of it, because you’re no longer looking at yourself in that way. That structure that keeps a coherent picture of “me” begins to dissolve.

Awakening Will Change You

At the same time, awakening involves profound shifts in consciousness. When those shifts occur, they can be very noticeable.

For example, the shift from being aware of objects to being aware of the subject—the experiencer. When that happens, it can feel completely different. You may realize, “I’m not who I thought I was. I can’t even find myself.” It can feel like everything has turned upside down, in a very good way.

So there are shifts that are unmistakable.

But as this deepens and becomes more integrated into life, you’re not necessarily paying attention to yourself in a way that tracks how awake you are.

Often, awakening becomes more visible in how others experience you. People may start to comment that something is different—that you seem more open, more present, more alive. And you may realize, “Oh, something really has shifted,” even if you weren’t focused on it yourself.

Why Awakening Shows Up in Your Actions

Another reason we can be awake without knowing it is that awakening doesn’t mean your neurosis disappears. It doesn’t mean your fears or conditioned patterns completely go away.

You might still feel insecurity, self-doubt, even arrogance at times. And because of that, you might assume, “I must not be very awake.”

But that’s not accurate.What matters is whether those patterns are being enacted. You might feel them arise, but not act on them at all. Nothing comes out in your words or behavior. In that sense, you’re awake. It’s showing up in your actions.

That’s where it counts.

It doesn’t matter so much whether certain mental or emotional patterns are still present. What matters is how you’re relating to them and whether they’re driving your behavior.

That’s another way we can be quite awake and not necessarily recognize it ourselves. There are many more layers to this, but I’ll stop there.

You also asked about wanting more ecstatic spiritual experiences.

It’s okay to want those. They can be profound when they happen. But you can’t make them happen, and wanting them will often get in the way.

It’s more about being open to whatever comes and recognizing that those experiences aren’t really what it’s about.

Is Being Awake the Same as Knowing It?

In our final segment, Craig responds to a fundamental question: Can we be awake without knowing it? He clarifies this subtle distinction and explores what it means to let go of the need to track or evaluate our awakening.

Several people are finding this challenging. Isn’t being awake the same thing as knowing you’re awake? I see a thread of that running through these questions. What do you mean, whether I know it or not?

From one point of view, it’s a fair question. What good is being awake if it’s not something we know?

We could also look at it this way. There is something significant about human beings knowing their true nature. There is such a thing as higher consciousness and lower consciousness. There is a sacred dimension of who you are, of reality itself, and there is ignorance—not knowing that.

Awakening is knowing that. Awakening is becoming cognizant of what’s really true, of who we ultimately are. That’s what we mean by being awake. And it’s important to clarify this, because otherwise it can start to sound nihilistic, like discovering it or knowing it doesn’t matter.

But awakening is awakening out of the dream of ignorance and delusion—out of this small self that is lost in a story of its own making, with all the misinterpretation and lack of clear seeing that comes with it.

We’re awakening out of that and into the discovery of what’s actually true—of who we really are—which is this extraordinary, sacred dimension of reality that we can begin to know, embody, and express.

That’s foundational.

Growing Beyond the Need to Know

And then, can you let go of the need to know whether or not you’re awake? The need to experience it? What Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called spiritual materialism—the need to have awakening for ourselves, to have a special experience we can point to as proof.

We’re so conditioned in that way. The need to see myself being awake. The need to know I’m awake. Can we give up needing any of that—anything we can hold onto or measure?

Can we be in the unknown in such a way that we don’t even know whether we’re awake, and it’s no longer our concern? “I’ve got it now, I’ve lost it now, it’s here, it’s gone.”

Living Beyond Spiritual Self-Measurement

We begin to move beyond that whole way of relating.

Our interest shifts. It moves to the unknown itself.

The story of “me” on a spiritual journey begins to fall away, and life is simply unfolding. Sometimes we discover how awake we are by how we respond—responding in ways that feel spontaneous, free, even surprising.

Awakening reveals itself, but not because we recognized it first.

We didn’t say, “I feel so awake,” and then confirm it afterward. It’s more that the one who was trying to track it, to have the experience, to tell the story—that part has fallen away.

And what remains is this mysterious event called life, unfolding.

Sometimes it feels extraordinary. Sometimes very ordinary.

But we’re no longer sitting there thinking, “I was awake then, I wasn’t awake then.”

We’ve gone beyond that entirely.