When we recognize the gap between our awakening and its expression in our life, we appreciate the importance of transformation. Awakening is the discovery of the truth of what we are and what reality is. Transformation means the clarification and development of the organ, the instrument, so that it has enough lenses, enough limbs, to express and live that realization. – The Alchemy of Freedom: The Philosophers’ Stone and the Secrets of Existence, Ch. 8
The soul informed by the ego is asleep. This is why enlightenment is called awakening—your soul wakes up to what is really here. Many people believe that this awakening happens automatically the moment you have an experience of Being. Some parts of your soul may wake up, but the soul is very deeply imprinted by the egoic sense of inferiority, and this depth of the soul does not awaken easily or rapidly. When your awakening does approach this level, the first thing you wake up to is this sense of inferiority. The most evident manifestation of the soul being asleep is one’s unshakable conviction in conventional or consensus reality, and in the content of one’s overall social conditioning. Regardless of what profound experiences of Being you may have had and how objectively you may have seen reality, when you get up off your meditation cushion or leave a meeting with your teacher, you act, feel, and behave as if reality is the world you learned from your mother. When you do this, you are expressing the asleepness of your soul. – A. H. Almaas, Facets of Unity: The Enneagram of Holy Ideas, pg. 222
This experience of awakening operates on two dimensions simultaneously. First is the psychological one. To be awake means you are literally awake—like having awakened from long sleep, or from illusions, from dreams, from all the sufferings of ignorance. This is the psychological awakening: Now you see the truth and wake up from the lies and the ignorance that you have been living in. It also means you wake up to your true nature: You now see what and who you are, instead of what you thought you were. The second sense of awakening is phenomenological. It is the sense of being awake, clear, and bright, as if you just woke up. Suddenly your head is above the clouds and you start seeing. So this awakening is not only a matter of awakening to some truth; it is a certain state of Being. It is being awake—you actually and literally experience yourself as a bright and brilliant presence. You have not only awakened, but you are the awakeness, you are the awake and brilliant presence. – A. H. Almaas, Brilliancy: The Essence of Intelligence, pg. 338