I've noticed certain patterns within people as they go through the Awakening process. Mainstream society offers little to no help in the endeavor, and this is to be expected of course, as when mainstream society actually does encourage Awakening, there won't be that collective illusion called "mainstream society" anymore. Not only does mainstream society not help with the Awakening process, often it actively tries to prevent it from occurring.
The most pervasive societal illusion is the denial that people are living in any illusion at all. For many people their jobs, the TV news, their 401k, corporations, professional sports, their house, their car, their bank account, all that stuff is the "real world". Those things are actually all built upon mental structures that have no physical or spiritual reality, yet people will spend all day focused upon those things. If you grew up in society, you were trained to focus upon a repetitive stream of thoughts about all sorts of things that have no bearing upon the Present Moment. These illusions keep people so distracted that real Presence becomes difficult, and even frustrating to acheive.