Hinduism and Buddhism teach us that the goal of every human life is enlightenment, but the masters also use the word “awakening” a lot. Is there a difference between awakening and enlightenment? If there is one at all, it is that awakening to our Higher Self allows us to become enlightened. An intellectually-oriented philosopher might say that it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for enlightenment. In other words, to be enlightened we must first awaken, and then we must remain Awake for eternity.
But what is meant by “the Higher Self?” It is the Self that rises above and presides over all the incarnations a human being successively inhabits. Existing above the dualistic “illusion” of maya, the Higher Self represents our true nature in God, where we find union with God. We can also say that the Higher Self is Christ-consciousness, because Christ is the Consciousness that transcends all individual particularities and differences; differences that are apparent only on the Earth-plane of maya.
What then is preventing us from awakening to a higher consciousness, the Higher Self that is our immortal soul? In a word, it is our buzzing mind, regulated by a little buddy called the ego. The ego is a busy-body, a thinking machine acting like an umpire between the myriad thoughts that continually compete for our attention, forming a dense thicket of conflicting imagery. Have you ever noticed that whenever you have a thought, you immediately have the opposite and contrary thought? For example, I might think, “I’m going to spend money to go on vacation. I need one and I deserve one.” Immediately afterwards, I think, “I’m not going to spend money on vacation. I simply can’t afford one right now.” This illustration demonstrates clearly that thinking and thought are rooted firmly within the dualistic plane of maya, where no action exists without an equal and opposite reaction. That quasi-scientific formulation is also a clear demonstration of the law of karma: you reap what you sow. If any action one undertook was not in some way met by an equal and opposite counter-reaction, we would not recognize the world we live in.
Awakening is the process of stilling the buzzing mind and breaking through the polarities of both maya and her twin-sister, karma. The Tibetan Book of the Dead asks us to concentrate on the fields of blue sky that occasionally open momentarily between the fast-moving clouds of our thoughts. Meditation becomes the practice of elongating and enlarging the periods of blue sky between the dense thought-clouds. Similarly, Eckhart Tolle notes the temporal quality of thought, demanding that we concentrate always on the present (“The Power of Now” is the title of one of his books) because each of our thoughts has either just passed (and is therefore in the past) or is about-to-be (and is therefore in the future.)
However we do it, concentrating on the One at the expense of the Two is how we can break through the illusion of maya to the Light of God beyond. One of the greatest lessons Yogananda describes learning in his “Autobiography” is that he didn’t have to journey to a cave in the Himalays to find God. God was every bit as present in the crowded streets of Calcutta as in the distant mountains. Yogananda just needed to go inside himself, wherever he happened to be.
Bird of Spirit 
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