What does it mean to be spiritually awake?  First of all, it is a choice; I would say it is an equal choice of both your soul and your conscious decision making.  Red pill or Blue pill?  To wake up is a double-edged sword.  Would you choose to wake up, to see reality as it is, even if it meant seeing the stark truth of life, a possible inconvenient and wholly unsettling truth, or even subject yourself to great suffering?  When you wake up you let go.  You let go of everything you think you were, for it is just a story, not your real identity.  Dark night of the soul perhaps.  You start looking at the world through spiritual eyes; you begin to feel things more deeply; everything touches your soul.  You may experience hypersensitivity and deep emotions.  You start to see your situation objectively; you see plain as day how you are being used; by corporations and other people.  You go beyond your role and may start that great project of re-creating yourself.  You recognize the power of yourself; the individual; you begin to have ultimate power over yourself; mind, body, and soul.  You begin to free your mind; no longer hopelessly enslaved; by your thoughts, your role, your situation.  You become a lion among sheep, and stop following the herd; you completely rid yourself of the herd mentality; you explore on your own and go down that solitary path.  You see the world as it is; a curse and a blessing.

So, would you choose to wake up if it meant a destruction of everything you think you knew?  One must have courage in order to wake up; to confront the unknown head on; to tread fearlessly in the face of the mystery itself.  The world is trying, relentlessly, to make you just like everyone else, and you opt-in to a glorious battle to assert yourself as an individual; to laugh in the face of all things belonging to conformity.  You may turn off organized religion, and start going down that spiritual path; something much more personal and intimate than merely attending church.  To wake up is to shake up; it will stir your soul and put things in their correct order; all things not needed will automatically fall away, even with some resistance, as it is natural to try to hold on.  You begin a process of letting go.  Attachments fall away as well; you stop clinging.  You feel emotions more deeply; you feel the energy of other people.  All things that do not resonate with you anymore are discarded from your life.  Waking up can possibly even be described as a rebirth of self; like a new baby being born.  Seeing the world with the eyes of a child; removing the filter of beliefs and inclinations and all things that muddied the water of your reality.  You see yourself as you actually are; a limitless human being who has the power to master their life.  The power of the individual is asserted in the process of waking up.  You may even want to wake up others, who are hopelessly asleep and enslaved; unfortunately they must wake up in their own place and time.  You may realize that you have been sleep-walking through your life until that point; just going through the motions, not actually very conscious and aware.  You start to see the big picture.  You begin to actually find your place in the world; your calling even.  To wake up is therefore integral to all those who choose to follow the spiritual path, it cannot really be told to others, you must see it for yourself.  Will you choose to wake up, or will you keep following your comfortable routines and supposed identity?  You can start today, “Who am I” is the beginning.