Three Glimpses, as written in, “What’s Awakening Really Like?”

In the summer of 2013, a friend introduced me to sun-gazing. With this process, I would wake early, stare into the rising sun for 10 seconds with bare feet on bare earth, then meditate. I would add 10 seconds each successive day. By the end of June of 2014, one year later, I was gazing into the rising sun for 36 minutes and my practice had evolved to chanting before sunrise for an hour, chanting during the sun-gazing and meditating after the gazing for at least an hour, usually more, with a contemplative practice thrown in as well. By this time, there had been quite a few insights and experiences, but I was to a point of desperation. In my daily contemplation, I found myself making the heart-felt declaration “I would give ANYTHING to know the Truth of my Being!” Then I would see what would come up to say, “Yes, but ….” Yes, but, my daughter …. my husband …. my home …. my business …. One by one, with emotional release, I “let them all go” until I could declare without exception. Finally, I was willing to give my very life. I realized I couldn’t live this lie anymore. It was just too painful. It was seen that the basis of my life as it was being lived was a lie and that I had no idea what the antidote was.

This whole year of sadhana had been effortless in a way – it had taken no discipline – it was just happening. After this plea to the universe to reveal the truth or take my life, it all just stopped. I stopped waking up early. I started sleeping in. I stopped chanting. I had to try to meditate. The magic of the previous year had simply fallen out. I was oddly okay with this.

About a week later, the morning of July 2, 2014, I awoke, and a spontaneous inquiry arose directed towards the idea of self - who was I, really? Before my mind’s eye were arrayed all these selves I took myself to be -- higher self, lower self, ego, body, mind -- where was ‘I’ in all of this? About a week earlier, after re-reading Tolle’s “The Power of Now” I created a ‘witness self’ to assist in moments like this. I just wasn’t in a place to consider that I might actually be ‘THE Witness’ - so I made one. The mind is complex and myriad in its delusions! So, with this question that appeared as I awoke and even before I had opened my eyes, I decided to move into this ‘witness’ self I had created to sort it all out. As I was ‘moving’ toward this witness self, a new question arose. “Wait a minute .... How did I create this ‘witness’ and what am I moving FROM?” And I turned back to look. That was it. I watched as all these ‘selves’ became brittle armatures and I instantly knew them to be empty constructs. They were actually all NOTHING! So Empty! Just constructs! Then, as if not able to stand the pressure of truth, they all imploded -- shattered into dust. Then .... There was only shining black Aware Stillness. ‘I’ wasn’t ‘in’ stillness. It’s just that that’s all there was. Aware Stillness. For an eternal moment.

Then there was laughing. Then there was moving out of bed. Then there was staring out the window. Then a thought appeared. "This is IT. It’s been right here all along. This. Is. It. There's no place to go, nothing to do, no future magical state to be had. How silly was that thinking! This is It. It’s right here.” Two other things were also completely and irrevocably understood: “Everything is profoundly and eternally Okay.” For anything to not be okay is an impossibility. The third thought to arise was, “Now I get to start.” It was seen that all interpretation up to then was confused, complicated, fallacious pseudo-understanding.

Everything was different yet it was all the same. It was noticed that all tension had left me. Leading up to that time, no matter what I was doing, there was the sense that I should be doing something else and that whatever I was doing wasn’t right. Now there was only perfection, only peace. All of this understanding and underlying peace has remained an undercurrent since – even through the challenging first few years of intensive releasing of conditioning and subsequent re-arranging of my life.

There were a few glimpses to follow, most in that first year. On coming out of a particularly deep meditation, there was a glimpse of Beauty that sent my body into hours of convulsive grief. It was seen that the Beauty, the Magnificence We Are can never be expressed in form. For some reason, my body just couldn’t bear this. If all the beauty in all the worlds on all the planes of existence was somehow gathered up, it would seem as a grain of sand compared to the Beauty We Truly Are. And yet, the Totality tries, in a way … it tries and tries to express What We Are. Impossible. Not even a whisp of the Greatness We Are can ever be expressed in form. This was experienced as an exquisite tragedy.

Another glimpse was the classic ‘me awaring back at me’ …. I was watching a video of my teacher, Francis Lucille, and something just kind of ‘popped.’ Suddenly everything was me, Awareness, shining back at me. There were no things, there was just ‘me’ everywhere. I shot up off the couch and jetted out the door and walked and walked and walked. The trees were me, the mountains were me, every particle was me … all without a sense of there being trees, mountains or particles … or a ‘me’! All just Awareness shining back at Awareness. Something that was baffling and fun was that the words ‘behind me’ came to mind and I couldn’t conceive of what they could mean. I knew that I had been able to understand that concept in the past, but I just couldn’t grasp what ‘behind’ meant. Because it was all ‘me’ there couldn’t possibly be a ‘behind me’ – it was ‘me’ all the way to forever! Then, about 20 minutes in, I sat on a rock and watched as my mind reassembled a person with a perspective. I sat helpless, really. I knew if I fought it, this experience that I knew to be much more true than ordinary reality, would leave me sooner. I didn’t lament. I was glad for that 20 minutes of lived Reality. I now knew, at least, the potential of this body-mind to welcome Reality as it truly is, and was happy for it.