My first awakening came from a university course called "understanding the self", and through engaging with the philosophical texts and writing my own thoughts I suddenly came to the realisation that consciousness was a spectrum and that everything was consciousness. Then I watched the movie Cloud Atlas and I was thinking about it, on a ferry and thinking about the lessons from the movie and mulling over how it connected to my philosophical readings, and suddenly I had a mystical experience. I saw how my life was connected to all other lives, that what I thought of as "me" was connected to everything that had ever existed and ever would exist, and that all my loved ones literally live on in me. And at that moment I lost my fear of death.

Of course that was only the start of my journey. There would be many subsequent awakenings too.