It is hypothesized that being mindfully aware is a spontaneous state of being. It is imbued with joy, peace and happiness. Such a state is periodically revealed during restful attentiveness or presence. It is also associated with spontaneous brain alpha activity of 8–13 Hz. In deep nonrapid eye movement sleep, there is synchronous delta activity at a coherent frequency of 0.1 Hz. Both of these brainwave ground states are spontaneous, calm and effortless. When any physical or mental effort is made, the alpha rhythm is desynchronized, and it is superposed by faster brain waves of beta (13–30 Hz) and gamma frequencies (30–150 Hz). This is associated with a stream of dualistic conscious experiences with contents. During deep sleep, delta activity is superposed by beta and gamma activity with microarousals resulting in dream experiences. During effortless, meditative awareness, the whole family of alpha rhythm is synchronized including (a) Occipital-parietal alpha with visual clarity, formless color, and the absence of visual imagery (b) Frontal eye-field alpha with relatively motionless eyes, and the absence of voluntary actions or plans to move the eyes in some direction, along with nonactive working memory, (c) Somatosensory alpha or Mu rhythm from the somatic motor-sensory cortex with the resultant stillness of the body including head, face, larynx, spine, hands and legs, (d) Mid-temporal auditory alpha with vocal quietness and internal verbal silence ( Maunam ) with a feeling of spontaneous silence and serenity, (e) Cingulate and precuneus alpha resulting in freedom from autobiographical memories and the sense of agency or ego. The insular cortex serves as a gatekeeper, a hierarchical controller to switch between conscious engagement or disengagement from the internal or the external world. It switches between the default mode network and the executive frontoparietal networks, between the sequential and the parallel modes of functioning. Mindful consciousness is local and dualistic, whereas mindful awareness is nonlocal and nondual.

This review article is about the spontaneous dawn of the transparent mind and the peaceful self. The article starts with my direct observations as documented in my recent journal entries. As a neurologist, I ask myself, “how can I understand and explain these experiences in terms of modern neuroscience?” We as human beings have been asking such fundamental questions for thousands of years. The often asked questions are: Who am I? What is self? What is I-Me-Mine? What is self-consciousness? What is reality? How can I be free and peaceful? I have tried to answer some of these questions based on my personal experience and the review of current neuroscience. Self-aware experience is singular, nonspecific, multimodal with deep roots in human life, self-development, and evolution. Human development depends on both exogenous signals and endogenous self-organization. It is nature-guided. The evolution of vertebrates including humans is complex and fascinating. Our sense of self has been described in terms of two aspects namely, the subjective and objective self. We are alive as embodied and embedded beings in nature. The wholeness of our spontaneous peaceful being is unique and hard to describe, but it can be joyously actualized. One can understand self better by the affective rather than the cognitive approach. The nuances of self-aware being, the Atman have been extensively described in Upanishads, Vedanta, Yoga, and Buddhism.