Integral Alchemy: A Guidebook for Phoenixes
Chapter 2: Awakening Within the Dream
(ii). The Stages of Awakening
What I share with you is not a textbook narrative of awakening, but a personal mapping that came out of the insights of my own experience, as there can be no other barometer of truth. But I do not believe that it is a singular or unique experience, and I’ve witnessed it enough times in others to discern a clear pattern. You can think of these stages of awakening as the journey of one person in a single lifetime, but also as the stages defining a single, peak experience – many of my meditations, breathwork sessions, and ayahuasca journeys passed through these stages, one by one, like falling dominoes. And I believe that on a larger, macrocosmic level this is also the journey that humanity is on, collectively. It’s because this is the pattern of the evolution of consciousness, the way awareness naturally ascends on a scale of frequencies, so it is inevitably mirrored in many overlapping levels of experience. (more…)