There are many ways to wake up from your egoic self-perception, which is another way to refer to non-dual insight or non-dual awareness. Only in a highly exceptional case is such an ego awakening permanent. More commonly, those who have had a brief taste of that state of egoless consciousness begin a journey of integration after awakening – to root out all false beliefs and perhaps some emotional baggage that surfaces.

 

Indirect Path vs Direct Path

The more traditional paths, like Dzogchen, Taoism, and various Buddhist and Hindu sects, take a relatively gradual approach involving long waits before an awakening happens. These are often referred to as indirect paths and can include phases of psychological growth – reinforcing the ego in order for it to be able to see its own false nature. They make use of concepts even though the objective is to shift out of a belief of our conceptual perception of life and ourselves.

 

In contrast, teachers of the advaita vedanta school of non-duality aim to introduce an awakening in the students sooner in the process and without the use of concepts. This is therefore sometimes referred to as the royal path, since it never upholds functional lies that certain concepts are real.

​

Making clouds disappear

An example of a simple but often effective direct method is to spend some time on developing a direct experience. First of objects, then of people and ultimately of yourself. Direct experience means: without a thought of a name. For example, sit relaxed and concentrate your attention on a cloud in the sky. Usually the thought "cloud" appears, which makes the experience indirect, because we first conceptualize what we see. But if we remain concentrated, the experience can shift into a direct one. It's if our mind shifts into a different mode. With some practice, you can stay in that mode while you move your attention away from the cloud.

​

Paths in Hinduism

In Hinduism, traditionally, three paths have been described for achieving liberation from the ego and subsequent conditioning:

• Karma: the path of right action

• Bhakti: the path of selfless devotion

• Jnana: the path of knowledge

 

However, this categorization is not exclusive, and some systems also include the paths of raja yoga (with a focus on controlling energy and frequencies) or tantra (with a focus on bodily sensations). All hindu paths could be considered indirect paths with the exception of the path of knowledge. In most cases, people combine two or more paths or follow a different path in a different stage of their life. One could say that is also what Gautama Siddharta, better known as the Buddha (meaning "the awakened one"), did according to the stories in which he moved from phases of meditation and ascetecism to reflection and deep self-inquiry.

 

Remember that each tradition sprung as a response to the specific conditioning of its respective culture. The thought-patterns that form the ego are different in each environment as it is built up in reaction to other stimuli. If you then consider that a person today receives perhaps as much information in a day as someone a few hundred years ago might have received in a year, then we can consider the conceptual modality of the contemporary mind to be more trained – through continuous stimulation – than all its predecessors over its evolutionary history. This might explain why many modern teachings try to train the mind to work in the consistent direction of trying to grasp non-duality conceptually rather than trying to silence the mind. However, the endpoint of both paths is still the same.

 

Five types of meditation

Alan Watts once defined the ways the mind can be used for awakening:

1. One can use concentrated attention (meditation) on an object, problem, or aspect of consciousness, or simply observe in a relaxed and detached manner whatever surfaces to the conscious mind;

2. One may try to suppress all verbal thinking;

3. One may attempt to be directly aware of the perceiving Self, that is, turn consciousness back upon itself;

4. One may commit to directing the mind's attention relentlessly toward the question of why it wants liberation and for whom;

5. One may engage in a dialectic (or self-study) in which rigorous logical thinking is continued until it culminates in logical conclusions based on which one commits to act.

 

Non-duality can also be approached as a mindset change, about which we know from the field of neuroscience that it takes a few weeks of frequent repetition of the new mindset.

 

The non-dual mindset

The mindset – your mode of perception – you’d develop, is one where:

• You no longer take conceptual perception for real but rather as a convention

• Any circumstance is somehow the best possible one for you to wake up, as the universe makes no mistakes

• It feels right to surrender to your intuition and let it take you wherever it does – fulfill your purpose, so to say – even if it isn't always the most comfortable circumstance you see

• You feel happy from simply being authentic, even when you weren't capable yet of surrendering to your intuition

• You can notice who does and doesn't share your perception, why some behavior you might not find pleasant makes sense from their mode of perception and therefore no longer perceive it as personal (sometimes this is called compassion)

 

Such a process can executed without any help. However, the more optimal the circumstances you create, the more effective the process is. It helps to have little distracting mental stimulus, reflect on your real life experiences to spot misconceptions, repeat long and often enough to create new neural pathways, eat well, sleep well and most of all: take it as a game or challenge – have fun doing it, even when it's challenging, by remembering you're already authentic by doing this thing you intuitively feel inclined to do.

​​