Every single one of us, / by birth, / has two forms of awareness: / Achieving awareness / and Awakened awareness. / And we need both, / and we need them in balance. / Achieving awareness / lets us strategize, its tactical thinking: / A plus B plus C. / Research it, / go after it, / get it done. / And to be effective / is important in our lives. / The achieving brain is in a relentless addiction to the next goal, / the next accomplishment. / So where we get in trouble / is when achieving awareness / sets our North Star. / This leads us into depression. / To find our North Star, / our deepest direction / and purpose in life, / we need another form of perception, / and that is our awakened awareness. / Awakened awareness / is when we don't ask, / "What do I want and how am I going to get it?" / But instead, / ask, "What is life showing me now? / Where am I finding guidance, direction?" / This can come from / synchronicity. / This can come from / a mystical experience, / an intuition, / someone showing up in our lives / pointing us in a direction / that we'd never thought of before. / The awakened brain allows us to perceive / that we are on a journey / — we are on a path. // So it turns out that every single one of us / are all born / with the neuro-docking station / for awakened awareness. / Together with my colleagues, / we looked at people / who recovered from depression / through an awakening. / We could see that people who suffered the most / really derived profound / support and even renewal / when connecting to their higher power: / to God, / the Universe, / whatever their word might be. / They were more likely to perceive / and reflect in a profoundly spiritual way. / And this tendency to see life on spiritual / bedrock / was mirrored / by a thickening of the cortex, / offering some evidence / that sustained spiritual life / is neuroprotective / against depression. / And in addition, / when we looked at the awakened brain, / what we saw is that universally, / we are drawn into an experience / in which we are loved and held, / guided, / and never alone. //