From experience, the process of spiritual awakening can commence in one of two ways:

1) You are suffering emotionally and/or physically and perhaps when everything and everyone you learned from, believed in, and have, no longer serve you.

A manifestation of such may be when your "world" starts shutting down on you and your mind can no longer understand what is happening.

2) There is nothing significantly wrong in your life but you are simply and unconditionally drawn to a knowing of there being something more to life.

A manifestation of such may be where you have everything and everyone you ever desired but you know something is missing, or at the other end of the spectrum of life, you have desires and ambitions but something in you knows there is more to life.

Even though the two paths seem quite apart in polarity, the commonality is that something deep within yourself that knows there is something missing or more to life than you have experienced and, in both instances, you KNOW that you know nothing matters and there is some level of yearning.

Most humans to date have not taken the step to awakening as they believe what they think they know is all that there is to KNOW and either die a “natural” death with either or both emotional and physical pain, or at the other extreme, as the pain and suffering become too much to bear they take their own lives in a form of suicide. In both such extremes, people probably do not die of human form in peace.

When a concious decision has been made to take the step to awakening, the teaching(s) and path(s) arrive, and from experience, once the step has been taken, there seems to be no turning back, nor the desire to do so.

Below is an extract from the movie "The Matrix" as an audio and visual pointer to the above.

Appreciation:

Warner Bros : For The Matrix Movie