Dismay / Credit: Kyl195, Deviant Art

I hadn’t been willing to share the subject of this article before because I just didn’t think anyone would be interested.

But in a moment of reflection (OK, in the shower) I suddenly realized, or was inspired to think, that it’s actually a very important matter.

I was also not sharing it because it’s involves turning up the awareness microscope and I fear people will think I’m crazy.

But I won’t give up pursuing my passion (the awareness path) because others will think I’m crazy. On the contrary, in a free world, let them seek nourishment elsewhere.

***

We’re all of us looking for proof of our gradual Ascension. The other day, a number of us were reporting unusual physical symptoms to each other.

I reported a shift in my experiencing.

To say what it was, I first have to digress, to contextualize it.

I’ve had two … I’d say, three experiences of deep peace. The last was not as deep as the first two. But I’ve had enough experience that, in the third one, I could even experiment with the space. (1)

Enough as well that I could detect in the background of my experience that peace was constantly there. So not just three experiences of it that then passed, but an experience of it as a constant element – albeit in muted form – of my background experience.

(I realize I’m looking at this rather minutely. But the detail is important.)

Peace hadn’t reached my surface consciousness, and it didn’t respond to me simply recognizing it, as bliss and love have done. Nevertheless, it was there, constantly.

How do you remain aware of something that’s constant? You don’t.

That which endures doesn’t get our attention; that which changes does. That which is constant recedes into the background of obviousness, to borrow a term from Werner Erhard.

One has to await the occurrence of a non-obvious, strange, and singular event to wake up again to the constant background. In this case, peace had to wait for something strange to happen, such as it being shattered or broken, before I’d notice it again.

***

What threatened to shatter the peace? A feeling of dismay came up.  We were discussing taking some time off and my “lazy-no-good” vasana went off. Thinking of not working raised dismay in me based in a fear of criticism as being lazy.

In previous times, if a feeling of dismay came up, it was put up at the inn, given a full hearing for as long as it wished, and welcomed into the family for as long as it wanted to stay. I would become that feeling.

But that did not happen the other day.

At a time when I was actually aware of the constant background of peace, I also became aware of a feeling of dismay.  These two events (awareness of peace as background and awareness of dismay in the foreground) happened simultaneously, for the first time ever.

It was as if dismay was knocking at the door of the inn, but this time nobody answered. Finally it went away.

Dismay just hung there in the space of my field of experience, radiating its feeling tones. I could feel it. And yet it could find no foothold in even the muted, background peace I was feeling at that moment.

The fact that dismay could find no foothold startled me. I usually took on all feelings that arose, without question.

***

We have many “I’s.” We’re a hall of mirrors in that respect, all of us looking for the real “I.”

In this situation, the ever-receding “I” of the witness (the real I) would not give its attention to the feeling of dismay. The witness was in deep peace. Well, the witness is deep peace. The obstacles to it being more fully manifested into this everyday dimension of conscious appear to be lifting.

Put another way, the feeling of dismay came in like a comet from space and threw many situations about the Earth (peace), that were simply accepted as self-evident, into question – or at least generated concern.

In the backlighting that occurred, I saw more about peace and more about the nature of the unpeaceful mind than I had before. I saw a great deal, none of it in words, all of it needing translation into them and me having less and less time for any one thing.

A part of me would like to just keep going along the awareness path and leave everything else behind.

But I won’t.

The fact that dismay could find no foothold in the muted, background peace that was now present was for me evidence of forward motion. It was an indication that things were actually happening, as humble an indication as it is.

So many of the changes that are happening are happening so gradually that we don’t notice them. Not till a metaphorical comet streaks by close to the Earth.

Footnotes

(1) I experimented with trying to raise sacred love while in the experience of deep peace and I could not. Not a whisper of it. That again is unusual because, even in everyday consciousness, I can raise sacred love in a mild degree by simply summoning it. I actually believe the Company of Heaven is truncating the experience so I’ll “hang around.”