Awake: An Inner Autobiography by J - HTML preview
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THE AWAKENING
Like love – true love – it comes totally unexpected.
Suddenly, when one has given up hope, moved on, it comes.
Of course, it never comes at the right time, it never does.
It does not care about your schedule, your plans and hopes for the future, the right situation, the right location, the right time of your life.
It is the most impersonal of forces, yet also the most personal.
That force that struck me like a billion thunderbolts.
That awakening.
That grace.
If I had a say in the matter it would have happened while sitting under a tree, meditating in some ascetic cave, or struck down on a road to somewhere.
But it happened during the most mundane and insignificant rounds of an insignificant and mundane existence, so ordinary that the set doesn't even merit detailing.
Though that in itself, is perfect.
There was no ecstasy.
Only fear. Terror.
As reality turned immaterial, dematerialized.
I thought I was going to die.
Here. Now.
So this is how it all ends. Collapsed in the street like a vagrant. A dog.
I don't want to die.
Not yet.
Fear and terror turned to panic.
I have to get out of here.
Maybe I'm having a stroke. Maybe it's the heat.
I somehow manage with trembling hands to buy some water. Sit down on a bench and drink it, hoping it's just dehydration, heat stroke.
I have to get home. Where someone can find me if I collapse.
Walking home my body feels weighed down and leaden. Drained.
I lay down on the couch. Electric currents of hot and cold alternate through my body.
What the fuck is happening to me?
Over the next few days the fear, terror and panic subsided a bit, but not completely. I felt vertiginous as I tried to go about my mundane and insignificant daily rounds, having to hold onto a traffic pole to balance myself as I waited for the light to change. Reading and researching for some clue as to what the hell was going on, my vision zooming in and out, making it nearly impossible to read.
Did I finally go mad? Possibly. My whole life people had thought I was crazy. Maybe they were right. Thought I did not want to be officially inscribed with that narrative, that destiny. No. Not yet. Maybe things would get better somehow.
Thought at the time I was not really working, but somehow keeping this biological vehicle alive, despite all the stresses and anxieties that such a meager situation can engender, in retrospect it was a blessing, a grace, predestined, as there was no way I could have went through the motions of work in that confusing and bewildering state.
As the days progressed the vertigo was not subsiding so I began to consider, began to think about accepting my fate as an official crazy person, being processed through the bureaucracy of insanity, officially re-contextualized as mad, not the madness of genius, the madness of creative and intellectual ecstasy, considered mad by the mob because of ascensions to unknown heights they can barely fix within their gaze let alone comprehend, but the madness of hospital scrubs, the madness of looks of fear and sympathy, the madness of being trapped within the walls of a hospital room sterile or on the street within the walls of medications blank, that no mind the diabolical inverse of the no mind of awakening.
More days passed.
More fragmented delirious research.
Maybe I had was having some kind of panic attack? Though what was happening to me really didn't fit that diagnosis either, I decided to meditate like I used to during the period of The Search and try and calm myself down. If it was anxiety maybe some meditation could help. It couldn't hurt.
All my attempts at meditation previous tended to be more of a struggle with my restless mind and tense contracted body. Never had any great breakthroughs or experiences, at best only felt a little more relaxed afterwards.
But this time after a few breaths I immediately fell into a very deep trance state.
It was such a relief from the distress, I continued.
To go further down.
While before I would watch the clock anxiously, now I did not want to stop, did not want it to end.
I continued with that peaceful grace.
Outside wandering.
The fear terror and panic dematerialized, that vertiginous swirling confusion subsided, surrendered.
Then it unfolded.
Flowered.
All forms that passed by my wandering gaze radiated overflowed with a gorgeous luminosity.
Gentle summer breeze on my skin an almost unbearable ecstasy.
Inside.
Complete peace with no object.
Complete love with no object.
Everywhere I looked I saw divine harmony.
So this is what happened to me.
With that understanding, peace washed its healing waters through my body, my mind, myself.
That is what happened.
This is it.
Wanting to erase the final traces of that fear terror and panic I continued to meditate.
So I further surrendered.
Went further down.
-
In the deepest of trances.
In the subtle realms.
Visions of the Buddha as how he really was.
Jesus merged into me.
Ascending. My bodies were rapidly and microscopically worked upon by some kind of divine technology.
An angelic being pierced my heart with a spear – pierced the knot that was centered there – that knot of the terror of death – the terror of non-existence that had shaped controlled poisoned every action in my life up that point – and with the spear's exit a lifetime of hurt poured out like blood -
And when that wound was drained – purged -
My heart opened.
Flowered.
This time to never close again.
Healed by the miraculous grace of a hallucination.
I saw my life as a golden thread surrounded by flames and fire -
The thread was the constant series of mystical awakenings that weaved and threaded itself through my life.
My apparently chaotic and aimless life was really an orderly movement, a progression.
Forgotten experiences were recalled – how those previous temporary openings of consciousness and the heart had prefigured the permanent states of being now.
That golden thread forged in the fire wild of my raging activities and life –
The golden thread that gave the form, the purpose and structure to the book you are reading right now.
Over the next three weeks of that summer of enlightenment the true nature of reality was revealed.
Perception and awareness cleansed by the grace of awakening, this body, this locus of awareness wandered overwhelmed, overflowing, overjoyed through this paradise on earth, this heaven, which had always been in front of me, but I did not have the eyes to see.
That color.
That shape.
That light.
Like a light switch had been turned on. All forms of this once dead world, that dark reality, now constituted of light, a living light conscious, intelligent, radiant.
Overwhelmed, overflowing, overjoyed with gratitude and humility for this grace, this gift to a fallen life.
Were these houses always here?
Did they always look like this?
How come I never noticed how strange they looked before?
Seeing for the first time what was in front of me the whole time.
I became aware of a change in what is called the mind.
How it now went from moment to moment to moment.
Not forced or willed. Naturally. Spontaneously.
Not tortured or seeking relief in the fears or fantasies of the past or future.
Simply existing awareness in the eternity of the now.
Days spent wandering - summer days of perception and awareness moving through the body of the True Reality during that summer of enlightenment – through its flesh of green multihued splashes and drips of purples whites and browns – its blood of blue green water nature’s mirror reflecting rippling spiraling – all that shimmering complexity resolving unifying in its eternal drive northward – its gentle healing lover’s breath of wind on the back of my neck, my bare arms.
Returned to the innocent perception of childhood – unclouded, unhurt, undarkened -
My self - that invisible structure of concepts and history, of dark fears and burning desires - was pulled away like a specter and dropped –
The sudden realization of the illusion and impossibility of death - death just the product of the false sense of a separate self which is just an idea, a phantom. Nothing dies, everything just changes form, all that we think has passed is still with us –
A roar of some majestic beast erupted from my being out into the universe.
As the virtual reality of concepts and associations that I had mistaken for reality dissolved and separated itself from my being, the understanding that always remained elusive, always receding, in my new state became obvious, illuminated.
Time was just a concept, an intellectual construct, a thought.
Time had as much objective reality as the idea of God.
When that False Reality of concepts and associations within the bodymind was broken, so did that.
Leaving me timeless amongst its ruins.
Again sitting on this pile of rocks by the river. Overlooking, gazing, being.
I'm not going to describe my surroundings there. They had already been described before. You can go back and read them if you really want to know what I was seeing with my physical external eyes.
Instead I am going to transmit directly from my consciousness to yours – which despite the veils of the False Self is the same undifferentiated indivisible, bypassing the illusions of time and space - what I perceived with my subtle inner vision.
When that thunderbolt of peace.
Flooded. Heavy. Saturated. Every form of me from the surface to the subatomic.
A billion thunderbolts of ecstasy gently exploding out from some unknown mysterious center of my being. Over the water, into the sky, space.
The most absolute of peace.
Now I knew. Understood. Became. That.
This is how He felt.
Another afternoon of wandering in this new land.
When the chain of thought, that perpetual sequence that always moves through one’s head.
Broke.
Completely.
And I was moved into pure Consciousness.
Finally.
I walked down to the river.
And bathed in the radiant afterglow of the Death of the Mind.