I give a similar response to many questions, but it has been the past year or so for me and due to what would most commonly be described as a spiritual awakening.
It is a shift that has caused me to identify less with my personality or even personhood and more with my being as “pure” consciousness. It is a simple, but profound shift in attention from what exists only through attention and belief to what has always been even without the diminutive me being aware of it.
It came after a prolonged (as in years) period of disillusionment, fear, anxiety and stress, in my case over the state of the world and over suffering both personal and global. I understand now, though that this is part of the process. When we are comfortable and satisfied with life, there’s no need for transcendence. Our world has to crash first, and our desire to be alive has to crash—well, this isn’t universally true, I’m sure, but it is common. It is at this point that one is ready to hear a message that points in the opposite direction of the movie screen we think is life and towards the projector that is sending the light.
It is, I think, a continuum of awakening or change in awareness that is marked by a couple of milestone markers, which are better explained in a different context. Really all that’s needed is the first hint of awareness that there’s more to life than meets the eye. From there it’s simply a matter of earnestness on one’s part to observe the condition of the Self to identify and drop the many false beliefs about ourselves that we have always taken to be real.