Though many speak about awakening as if it is an event, there is neither a moment of awakening nor a process of waking up. You are not living in a dream or a fog or some less-than-truly awakened state. You are who you are, and you are living one life. All that you see, hear, or feel is in reality the awakened state. There is no other state of being. Even the most profound teachers are living the one life you are living.

There is no hierarchy of awakening. There is no beginning of awakening, nor is there an end to it. No one can tell you that you are at any level of an awakened or unawakened state, and you cannot label yourself or anyone else as awakened or unawakened either. Out of fear, out of a need to proclaim yourself as something other than what you believe you are, comes all the hierarchical concepts of the spiritual ladder and the climb to the so-called final state of true awakening. Believing that you must improve, that you must become something other than what you are, and striving to reach a goal of awakening might look on the surface to be appropriate motivations. From a one life perspective, however, nothing could be further from the truth. For living one life means knowing life just is as it is. Becoming fixated on self-improvement just keeps you stuck in self-evaluation. This evaluation gets projected onto others, and before you know it, you are spending most of your time evaluating, judging, and placing everyone in some kind of quantitative hierarchy of awakening.

You become more loving, kinder, and more forgiving, and you exhibit more traits of compassion and wisdom as you let go of the concepts of self-improvement and reveal more of who you are. Let go of the idea that there’s a moment when you wake up. There is no condition that necessitates assigning a point in time as a marker for your transition from unawakened to awakened. There are no deeds that clearly point out whether you are awakened or not. There is just living life. You take action purposefully, mindfully, revealing who you are, and every step you take gives you the opportunity to be everything you are in that very moment.