A Story: The Three Phases of Awakening, The Three Recognitions, The Three Samāveśa's

She was once afraid of the world.  She tried to protect herself from it.  It was exhausting; always trying to find security, always trying to get Home. Decades of spiritual practice and apparent spiritual failure.  

Then one day, in one moment, a deep, eternal Silence moved in, which displaced all that she thought she was.   The remnant of her prior self had been completely dwarfed by the vastness of being that moved in, and was now a barely perceptible concept.  She stepped into herself and crossed over into the looking.  The hands...how odd...are they hers?  How absolutely beautiful.  The face in the mirror...how strange...who is that?  She now knew herself to be the wide-open and accepting space that she always was.  She understood that “accepting” spaciousness was her very nature.  She was vast and contained the world.  Fear dropped.  Peace.  Silence.  (ānava-samāveśa*)

She existed in the world, and the world appeared within her and to her.  Identity is Essence Nature and Witnessing Consciousness.

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Both over time and in an instant, “accepting” gave way to “embracing.”  The embracing was so tight, and so loving that the distinction between “that which was accepting” and “that which was accepted” dissolved.  The knower and the known, were both extinguished into pure knowing.  The lover and the beloved merged in the fire of the intense embrace, leaving only pure loving.  In the tightly weaved and entangled intimacy, there was no room for “other” or “two” or “I”.  All nouns dropped.  Time and space are seen as conceptual. Infinite and eternal effulgence.  Life at zero distance.  The center fell away.  No personal self.  All is Consciousness - All is Self.  The end of separation.  (shākta-samāveśa)

She existed in the world, and as the world.  Seeing non-dually.  Identity is Unity Consciousness.  The dream of separation has ended.

And no one ever awakened, and no one ever will.  

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In a moment, the world disappears.  Complete annihilation.  All is incinerated.  No Self.  Thrust into the Absolute, pure Potentiality, Radiant Nothingness, the Void, pure Bliss, pure Love, pure Being.  Absent time. Absent space.  No relation.  Both no-thing, and completely Full.  Prior  to Consciousness.  Absent experience.  Absent an experiencer.  Immersed in, and existing as, the no-thingness energetic fabric (from which manifestation appears), absent existence; death and deathlessness.  (shāmbhava-samāveśa*).  

Death at the Great Awakening into the Absolute.

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The Void blinks:   A world appears from no-thing; a world that does not exist.

One does not see the Totality of it until ones dies into it.  After that, it is understood that there is no primacy of experience.  The relative and the Absolute is the same.   The Void turns in on itself.  

The world is illusion

Brahmin alone is Real

The world is Brahmin

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This account maps closely to three phases of awakening as described by Christopher Wallis: 

ānava-samāveśa = immersion into one's essence-nature

shākta-samāveśa = immersion into the total field of Energy (Shakti)

shāmbhava-samāveśa = immersion into the Divine Absolute

This maps closely to the three primary phases of awakening as described by David Buckland in his book Our Natural Potential:  self-realization, unity consciousness, beyond consciousness

Adyashanti implied the three stages of awakening in the Epilogue of his book, "The Way of Liberation", pages 41-44

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The first phase could be described as a shift of conscious experiencing into soul-centered or heart-centered existence.  The second shift could be described as a shift of conscious experiencing into god-centered existence out of the dream of separation.  The third shift could be described as a shift into the god-head, prior to consciousness.

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"True, it is strange to live no longer on earth,

and to practice no longer customs scarcely acquired;

roses, and other expressly promising things,

not to give them the meaning of human future;

what in endlessly anxious hands one used to be,

to be this no more, and even one's own name

to lay aside, like a toy that is broken."  Rilke