Espiritualidad
Awakening is not a destination: it is a change of state
Almost all of us imagine inner growth as a staircase: step by step, year after year, until we finally reach the top. But awakening belongs to another category. It is not a journey from point A to point B, but a change of state, and that is why no amount of time guarantees it. This article proposes looking at it from another place: less as a pending race and more as a door that opens where you already are.
By Pedro J. Pérez ·
Awakening is not a route with an arrival
We usually imagine inner work as a staircase: one step today, another tomorrow, and at some point the terrace with a view. Under that image we live measuring progress in courses, retreats, accumulated hours of meditation. And yet, awakening belongs to another category. It is not a journey between two points, but a change of state, and that difference transforms everything.
The proof lies in something so simple that it almost goes unnoticed: no one says, “I didn’t sleep enough, so I didn’t open my eyes.” Sleeping and being awake are not distinguished by quantity, but by nature. If you transfer that logic to your inner life, the question changes at its root. It is no longer how much you lack, but what state you inhabit in this moment, here, while you read.
Why time does not manufacture the timeless
There is a question that dissolves itself: how long does it take someone to become timeless? The formulation is absurd because time cannot produce what transcends it. Our daily life, by contrast, is woven of clocks, dated goals, a body that ages in a straight line. Hence the suspicion that total lucidity must be the last step of a very long race.
It is worth remembering that attention does not move: it opens. Imagine a dark room surrounded by distant lamps. You could spend years trying to get more light to come from outside, when it is enough to turn on the one hanging in the center. Useful effort does not consist in traveling farther, but in ceasing to postpone what is already within your reach.
The mind that built the prison can open it
What the mind has made, the mind can undo. And it has made much: years of inattention, beliefs received secondhand like someone inheriting another’s coat, lowered expectations, the persistent hum of worry. None of that is a personal fault; it is conditioning, and conditioning has the virtue of being able to be reviewed.
There is a very ancient image that explains it precisely: using a thorn to extract another. It is not about punishing yourself or adding one more layer of demand, but about using the edge of attention to remove what pricks. Awareness recognizes unawareness without violence, and in that recognition something loosens. There is no need to incorporate anything new: you have to stop holding on to what is superfluous.
The present as the only door
The past is memory and the future is projection; neither is a habitable place. Presence, by contrast, is the only territory where a change of state can happen. It would be absurd to try to open the door of your house from the hallway of a building that does not yet exist. Yet that is how we live a good part of the day: looking for the key in imaginary rooms.
Inhabiting the now is not a slogan to repeat on social media: it is a discipline of return. You lose the thread, you notice it, you return. You discover yourself arguing in your head over a conversation from three days ago, you notice it, you return. That repeated, almost humble return is what gradually turns a place of visit into a stable dwelling.
How the change of state is recognized
There is no universal thermometer or stopwatch for awakening. Each process has its own face, and often it looks very little like the photos of serenity circulating out there. It can arrive in silence, in the middle of an ordinary task, and not match at all the character you sustain in public. But there is one fairly reliable sign: the quality of your presence changes.
That sign shows in concrete details. The urgency to arrive diminishes; the need to defend an identity tooth and nail loosens; the capacity to be still without escaping toward a screen increases. The test is not feeling euphoria, but discovering that you are no longer absent from your own life. That realization, humble and sober, is the threshold.
A concrete practice to begin today
I propose something that fits any schedule: the three pauses. Choose three moments of the day—when you get up, mid-afternoon, before sleeping—and stop for sixty to ninety seconds. Let go of the phone, feel the weight of your feet on the floor, let the breath settle without correcting it. Silently name what you were chasing and ask yourself, without waiting for a verbal answer: who is here, now?
Do not seek spectacular effects or keep score of your progress as if it were a scoreboard. Write a single line a day in a notebook, with the date, nothing more. Over the weeks, what began as a practice will gradually become a way of inhabiting. Awakening is not manufactured by force of will: it is allowed, recognized, and thanked.
Reading and references
- A Joyful Journey: The Promise of Awakening — Deepak Chopra