It’s 4 am. I’m awake and I’m torn between going back to sleep and writing this down. Something tells me I should bite the bullet and write it down.
If I were to summarize how I feel after having briefly experienced the Self, I’d say I feel freer, freed up, released.
Freer in every respect. And that includes freer in certain capacities. The capacity to feel happiness is an example. I never had that capacity before. I was “headed off at the pass” by the vasanas (core issues).
Another example is calmness. I used to say, “I feel calm now.” That implied that there was a state in which I felt calm and one where I did not and I went in and out of them.
But at this moment, I’m not going in and out of anything (knock on wood). Calmness has become, for the moment, a background condition, not even noticeable any more because it lacks differentiation. There is only calmness. I didn’t notice that until just now.
Swami Brahmananda said something once that I didn’t really understand at the time.
“The sins of many births are wiped out in a moment by one glance from the gracious eye of God.” (1)
If I were to put that now in my own vocabulary, I’d say: Many vasanas, including some pretty persistent ones, seem to be released as the result of one brief encounter with the Self, “the eye of God.” A more direct connection with the Self is created and many vasanas seem to lose their grip as a result.
I like these newly-encountered states of confidence, buoyancy, and hopefulness. But I also recall another thing Brahmananda said:
“When through japam [saying the name] and meditation a little awakening comes, do not imagine you have achieved the end. Light! More Light! Onward! Onward! Attain God! Gain his vision! Talk to him!” (2)
Yes, more Light! Don’t stop here.
Now that you have my attention, now that I’ve test-driven the car, I like it. How can I buy it?
How do I “work” my process? I work it in two ways. The first way is by noticing. I maintain constant self-awareness as an important agreement with myself. I monitor my breath, bodily sensations, feelings, and thoughts as often and as continuously as I can.
When I get together with other people, my chief delight is in sharing our noticings and “comparing notes.”
The second way I’ve called on other occasions “dawning awareness.” Where the awareness comes from, I don’t know. All I know is that answers arise in me if I remain quiet and get out of the way. I just allow them to come up as insights, “Aha!” moments, intuitive knowing, etc.
With my writing, after I choose the topic, I still don’t know what I’ll write before I write it. The process works by allowing writing to happen by itself.
Finally, I’m beginning to dimly discern where this process is going. Given how much of me became accessible after the heart opening and now this encounter with the Self, I can extrapolate into the future.
It doesn’t become so difficult now to accept the statement that we are already masters who’ve consented to forget. More experiences like this – what the Mother called “jumps” (3) – and I can imagine that untapped areas of myself will become accessible and come into play again.
There. I did it. The work of seeing how this altered constitution works is on-going, even at night.
Now can I go back to sleep?
Footnotes
(1) Swami Brahmanananda in Swami Prabhavananda, The Eternal Companion. Brahmananda. Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1970; c1944, 60-1.
(2) Ibid., 61. Going from the vision of God to talking with God represents further and further stages of enlightenment.
(3) Steve: When does Sahaja Samadhi occur?
Divine Mother: It occurs with a more gradual awakening and lifting up. So there is the abrupt “I am not the same,” then there is the working and the anchoring, the integration, then there is another jump, and another jump, and another jump. And you don’t know it — well, some of you do — but you are leap-frogging. And then you will be there. (“The Divine Mother: We are Creating a New Species of Humans,” channeled by Linda Dillon, July 10, 2014, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2014/07/12/the-divine-mother-we-are-creating-a-new-species-of-humans/.)