A Sequence of Awakening
Awakening is, by definition, a conscious experience that is not conditioned by the activity of thought or feeling. It's when we begin to awaken from the mechanisms of personality. Some of us may awaken when we suddenly realize that most of our lives have been lived in the past, the future or in the service of an image. While others have had life-changing events that momentarily awakened them to the transformative power of the present moment: near-death, overwhelming visual or emotional experiences or being in dangerous, life-threatening circumstances. While awakening cannot be initiated consciously, we can support it once it begins. Although not cast in stone, the sequence described below is something that you may find useful.

Attention
We can begin each sitting by bringing our attention to the quality of those first moments and simply, be-ing with what we discover. Attention is a conscious, mental, and volitional act that we can either place on the body, on the breath and breathing or to thoughts. Your attention may also be taken to a place on your body, your breathing or to thoughts. Let it happen; follow it. But whether we apply our attention, or follow it, we do so again and again. This is being present; in the here and now. Or you may also simply bring your attention to your breathing throughout your entire sitting. Continue to bring your attention to changing physical sensations throughout the different parts of your body. Remain present with what is changing, and how it is changing. This is being attentive to the changing reality of each and every moment, ad infinitum. Attention is the genesis of awareness.

Awareness
is, in a sense, awakening, when conscious awareness of thought or feeling is happening -and you know it. In other words, awareness is a kind of extra sense perception that experiences thought and feeling but never identifies with it, as 'our' thought or as 'our' feeling. So, when we neither judge nor resist thoughts or feeling-nor claim them as 'ours' we open to door to awakening because we are present. Awareness is not only endless and infinite, it is also location-less. Meaning there are endlesss, unending spaces of awareness, without center. 
   Awareness is 'connection' because it is by nature that which is beyond ourselves, but to which we are a part of always and anyway, even though most of us have not experienced awareness in its much larger context. Everyone connects with awareness in their own way. Because it's only in the moment, awareness is what can reach out beyond our usually defined self-limits and reminds us of our human, self-conscious nature. Our own 'true north' is revealed. We feel it and begin to live and know ourselves as never before. How far this changes your life (without trying to change anything!) is beyond anything you could have possibly dreamed of. This is because the vast pool of awareness (some call it truth, the helping hands of your higher-self, potential -whatever) is happening through you: you feel connected. In extended periods of awareness people start to 'know things' what they know they need to do, or are already doing.
   Try to get more of a sense of the many ways that awareness can be accessed and experienced. It is a term that is full of all kinds of truths. One or more of these truths you will recognize as being your own truth. Thus, through greater awareness, you begin to respond to it as never before. You feel connected.
   Present moment awareness stands at the crossroads between continuing to condition the mechanisms of personality as opposed to giving them the freedom to drop away. Flashes or glimmers of awakeness may preceed constant 'notes' of awakeness, as presence. This happens as time and mind begin to lose their grip.  What is the genesis of presence? Whether we are conscious of it or not, we experience presence because surrender has already happened.

       Inner freedom is not guided by our efforts, it comes from seeing what is true.  -Buddha

Surrender
is the spiritual path. When we sit, what is surrenderd are the objects of perception that come and go 'within' the no-boundary of awareness. In terms of emotional states, we surrender to our confusion, non-peace, anxiety, pain, etc. We also surrender to thoughts, images, sounds and sensations. We let them be; we do nothing. Relative to your life-circumstances, if you cannot change it and you cannot leave, then you surrender. A key point however, is that we're not surrendering to anything or anyone 'out there.' You release all negativity or judgment by surrendering. In this condition, actions are far more effective. If it's the past in you that still lives on, you will not be able to truly surrender in the moment if you're still holding onto the people, circumstances or events that you see as the cause of your confusion, non-peace, anxiety, pain, etc., no matter what they did or how unconscious you think they were -or still are. This is where most of us are still stuck: We have not surrendered to any number of feelings; the most pervasive of which are blame, criticism and judgment. But the moment unconditional surrender happens all blame, criticism or judgment dissolve because there is no longer any place in a so-called 'you' where these feelings can attach to, or begin to have a life of their own. Sometimes, surrender is easy, given the circumstances. At other times however, it's the most difficult thing to do as you begin to live your life consciously, in full feeling and in the present.

Presence
is what we experience during or after surrender has happened. Surrender precedes presence because the egoic-mind can never achieve, be involved with, produce or develop any non-state. The main criterion by which you know that you are in the non-state of presence is that time is experienced very differently, if much at all. You now know that without question the present moment is all there ever is. Its transformative power is now, and only now. You have glimpsed awakening. The historical you -the sum total of your experiences as conditioning factors, are seen as irrelevant in contrast to presence. The non-state of presence is like present moment awareness on a ten scale, at ten. 'You're' more fully present than you've ever felt. And yet at the same time what's present is definitely not 'you' either. In the awakened non-state of presence off the cushion, any doing that happens is not really preceded by thinking about what needs doing, how to do the doing, or it's effect or result. The decision, the action, and result are not created beforehand; it all happens spontaneously. That process is experienced as vastly different than that of an ego that thinks about what it's going to do, the ego that does it and then wonders about its results. This is because the surrendered condition is already what's driving things. In presence, we know that there's more to us than what dies at death; the essential begins to be separated from the relative. Extended periods of time in presence pretty much changes everything. And yet no circumstances themselves may have changed; they are not seen as needing to.

Being
Something in 'you' is complete, whole and perfect 'as it is' and so that's the way things will appear. There's nothing to do, become, think or feel that could ever add to Being.

Stillness
The non-state of Stillness is not just not-thinking. It's not merely a mind/body experience that happens by not-moving or by being physically motionless, either. We don't enter Stillness, nor do we achieve it. It doesn't even emerge out of nowhere. The natural survival response of the ego, when Stillness is felt/sensed, is to run like hell. It's the transcendent, pregnant moment that never began, yet has always, and always will, precede everything.