Enlightenment, ascension, awakening, and self-realization all require releasing attachments that pull you out of your center, whether they tie you to the past or keep you clinging to hopes for the future.
When a person wakes up, they are waking up from old beliefs and outdated ways of living. It’s challenging to see your issues 
because what you experience in your life seems normal to you. But, in truth, it’s a lie, a fabrication of the ego’s identity constructed by parents, clergy, siblings, relatives, teachers, and the media. When a person becomes self-realized, self-aware, or ascended, they awaken past the ego’s identity and experience life differently. Their reality or perception of themselves becomes liberated.
How to Awaken
Step 1: The challenging part of awakening is turning the mind around to experience the truth of you (authentic self). It’s difficult because the fabric called “you” is ingrained in the mind. The fabric is grooved in the subconscious and has formed habits, beliefs, and attitudes. You live life on autopilot as your parents told you to, or friends or society has told you to do.
Being self-aware is the first step to living enlightened. By facing the pretend realities you have designed as being real and dismantling them. It is reconstructing the house called you, for you, instead of for mom or dad, or clergy (gurus) or teachers, partners, and society. It takes a conscious effort and courage to change.
Step 2: Notice and Listen
The key to change is to notice how the ego-mind stops forward progress and blocks you. All those under your breath comments are subconscious blocks, preventing you from getting what you want.
Step 3: Looping Mind
The commentary in mind is unresolved emotional issues. It’s made up of guilt, shame, fear, anger, hurt, jealousy, unworthiness, resistance, confusion, denial, rejection—depending on what has recently occurred. Holding on to that loop is not healthy. How to replace it? Think positive thoughts. Instead of thinking of how you screwed up last week, think about what a great job you did the week prior.
Step 4: Neutral Mind
Keep the mind from selecting sides—the good vs. bad idea. Keep the mind in neutral instead of driving when experiencing life. Work on not choosing sides. Keeping the mind neutral is a practice because we naturally take sides; it’s the dual nature of life.
Four Steps to Awakening
By following these four steps, you “dismantle the ego.” You can’t reach higher consciousness unless you go deeper. So, you have to do the work, either alone in meditation or work with me.