THE MYSTIC'S VISION
MY MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
(last revised: 2-5-24)
This is an excerpt from my first book, The Supreme Self, in which I describe the holy experience which revealed to me my own Divinity.
MY MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE
(Excerpted from The Supreme Self by Swami Abhayananda, 1984
Published 3-12-18 in the Public Domain
(last revised: 2-5-24)
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1. THE AWAKENING
Everyone has a spiritual awakening somewhere along the way. For me, it was sudden and unexpected. It was 1966; I was twenty-eight, and it was a very special time in my world. Laura and I had moved from San Francisco to Los Gatos, California, in the mountains south of San Jose. We had rented a beautiful house with a knotty-pine interior and a huge porch overlooking a bubbling brook. I worked nearby at the Post Office on a split-shift that gave me time in the afternoons to sit on my beautiful private porch and drink coffee and read or work on the great American novel I was writing.
In June of 1966, I was fascinated with the symbology of myths, and was reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, both of whom were speaking repeatedly about “Vedanta,” the mysterious philosophy of India. And so, when I saw in a local bookstore a copy of a book called Vedanta For The Western World, I bought a copy. This book, edited by Christopher Isherwood, consisted of a series of articles by such figures as Swami Prabhavananda and Aldous Huxley, and spelled out in very easy-to-understand terms the philosophy of Vedanta.
Vedanta, I soon learned, refers to the philosophy expressed in the Upanishads, considered to be the final appendages to the Vedas. It is a nondualist philosophy; that is to say, a monistic one. It admits to an apparent duality between God and the world, between Consciousness and matter, but this duality, says Vedanta, is apparent only. In the “mystical vision” they are experienced as one.
According to Vedanta, when a person becomes enlightened—in other words, when he realizes the ultimate Truth, or God, in mystical vision—he experiences an absolute Unity, wherein everything is seen to be a manifestation of one universal Self. He knows for certain: “I and the Father are one.” This is not a mere aberration of consciousness, nor an illusory “union” of the soul and God; it is a glimpse into the nature of the underlying Reality of one’s existence. It is the revelation of one’s true and eternal Self. This, says Vedanta, is the perennial teaching of all the sages and saints of all times. For the experience of Unity, whether called samadhi, satori, or “union with God,” is the same for all, and is the basis for all the various religions.
Reading of this, I suddenly understood what the religious mystics had been talking about. The teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, and all the saints of all religions were seen to be based upon this same experiential knowledge. Everything I had ever puzzled over became clear; everything fell into place. I had scarcely finished with the Introduction to this book, and I knew that I had acquired a new and profound vision, which brought everything together for me and answered all my questions forever. I knew my life would never be the same. I knew I had found the key to an extraordinary wealth of understanding about myself and the nature of reality.
It was as though a veil that I had previously been unaware of had suddenly been drawn away, revealing a world I had heretofore been looking at as through a hazy fog. It was not so much an intellectual revelation as a spiritual one, for suddenly I saw everything bathed in light, and from deep within me there welled up a happiness, a clear, bright joyfulness, that testified to its truth, its rightness, more convincingly than any reason or merely intellectual conviction could do.
As I continued reading this amazing book, I was introduced to the 19th century mystic, Sri Ramakrishna, who was mad with fervor for “the vision of God” from an early age, and who became so one-pointed in mind through devotional love that he became entirely lost to the world of forms, aware only of the all-pervasive Reality. Reading of the life of Sri Ramakrishna and other such saints, I felt I had entered into an elite society of delirious madmen, madmen who called themselves, “the lovers Of God,” who, turning away from the normal transitory pursuits of man, sought to become intimate with the very fountainhead of the universe. Somehow, I had never understood before that such a thing was really possible.
Reading the inspiring words of Sri Ramakrishna, who had clearly known the unitive Reality, I experienced a wave of such happiness that I could scarcely bear it. Sitting on my porch, becoming aware of these things for the first time, I experienced a shower of golden light pouring down upon me, as though raining on the back of my neck, and awaking a deep and delicious chill in my body that ran up my spine and caused my scalp to tingle.
For the first time, I understood what drew men to religion. I had previously attributed it to weakness of mind. How much grander was the heritage of man than I had supposed. I had viewed all this talk of “God” through the ages as the superstitious babbling of fools. But I had been the fool. There was a God—but it was not what I had supposed men meant by the term. “God” meant not some ethereal being with a white beard, etc.; God was Being itself—the eternal substratum of Existence. And the proof of it was that God could be experienced, actually realized, seen with the inner eye of unleashed awareness. For the first time, I could fathom it; I understood the method in the madness of the saints. My mind was dazzled, ecstatic.
I was really extraordinarily happy. Of course, all my friends thought I had suddenly gone mad. Their faces betrayed their uneasiness when I began talking about God and the mystics who had known Him. I began to realize that I had touched on something that not everyone could, or was willing to, understand. I read about “Grace,” the amazing descent of Grace; and it seemed to me that just such a thing was happening to me. By some process of awakening, to which I was an unwitting spectator, I was seeing with an entirely new and different pair of eyes. My old friends were unable to understand or to share in any way the intensity of my fervor, my excitement; and I realized that I would have to go on this journey alone.
I had read, in one of the chapters of Vedanta For the Western World, a story of a man whose wife told him that their neighbor had decided to renounce the world of petty distractions to focus on the realization of God. When the man asked his wife how the neighbor was going about this renunciation, she said, “Well, he’s renouncing a few things today, and then tomorrow he’ll renounce a few more things, and so on, until he’s entirely free to meditate solely on God.” The man said, “That’s not the way to renounce the world!” And the wife retorted, “Well, how then would you do it?” And the man, by way of answering her, tore the shirt from his body, turned around and walked out the door of his home, never to return.
Impressed with the stark simplicity and decisiveness of this approach to the renunciation of all restricting conditions, I decided to follow the example of the man in the story. Within only a few days, my life took a startling and unalterable turn. I sent a note to my employer stating that I would not be in on Monday “...for reasons beyond my control”; I then gave what I owned to Laura, and went off into the mountains of Santa Cruz, into solitude, to give my life to the quest for knowledge of God.
Walking along a tree-shrouded mountain road, I came across an empty cabin nestled down in the woods a little off the road, and, exploring it, I discovered that it had been long uninhabited, except for the mice who had left abundant evidence of their assumed occupancy. I decided to take shelter there until I could talk to the owners, and so I cleaned the place up, and then went into Santa Cruz to look up the owner at the County Records office. I wrote to the two men who were the present owners and awaited their contact while I made myself at home in the rustic cabin.
The building had been left unfinished and was really just a shell with a concrete floor and a kitchen sink that drained directly out onto the ground outside. There was no running water, but a beautiful pure stream of water flowed just a few feet from the back door of the cabin in the form of a babbling spring-fed brook. There was a large picnic-type table in the main room and a mattressless cot in one of the two adjoining bedrooms. In the kitchen was an old unconnected refrigerator for storing food, a cast-iron cooking stove, and next to it a canvas director’s chair, along with a fold-up card table. That was the extent of the furniture.
There was no electricity, but just out back, a previous tenant had stacked a good cord of seasoned oak to warm me through the winter and provide me with cooking heat as well. Candles did the job of providing me with light. Out front, just beyond the old, dilapidated garage, was a wooden outhouse, and so, although I lacked what some might consider the necessities of modern life, I truly lacked for nothing, and I came to love the simple life my situation required.
The two men who owned the property showed up one day, and after I explained my intentions and my willingness to safeguard their property against hunters and trespassers, they readily agreed to let me stay in the unused cabin. In fact, we became good friends, and they frequently came to the woods on weekends with their chainsaws to cut some live oak trees for their own firewood and for me as well. They owned about 300 acres of beautiful redwood groves, green meadows, rocky cliffs and scenic plateaus; this was surrounded by another 1000 acres of similar woodland owned and preserved as wilderness by the University of California. And, for the next nearly five years, all this magnificent country was my own private garden of meditation.
How romantic it was! I felt that I was a Francis of Assisi. I was Rumi, the Sufi poet. I was Basho, the Zen hermit. Walking on the country roads in the early morning with my freshly baked honey-bread in my brown canvas bag on my shoulder, I’d walk the long winding mountain road to town to sell my loaves to the owner of a coffee shop. And on the way, I’d sit myself down in the grass by the roadside and write Zen poems to the poppies in the fields, or to the cottontails that went suddenly hopping through the dewy morning grass. Walking along, I would see the curving road suddenly turn and open wide a breathtaking expanse of sky and green slopes and blue ocean rising up to meet the sky—and a tearful joy would well up in me and drown me in a rapturous sweetness I’d never before known.
There were places where the dense pine and redwood forests formed a canopy over the narrow twisting mountain roads, and the light would stream in green sprays and twinkling raindrops of beauty through the trees; and I’d stoop by the bubbling stream to sink my cupped palm into the pebbly cold water and drink. And again, that sensation of chill that caused the hairs of my neck to rise, and the sweet delirious bliss of dissolving into an all-pervading light!
I was just a poor hermit of the woods, singing the name of God. I had learned that, in the Indian tradition, one of the names for God was “Hari,” meaning ‘the stealer of hearts.’ It was that name I called: “Hari! Hari! Hari!” as I walked along in my clumsy rags. I was a sweet, bearded monk of the forest and the world was in my eyes the beauteously glorious form of the Divine; all about me the playful sport of God.
2. THE COMMON VISION
I had come into the mountains to realize God, to know Him as Sri Ramakrishna and others had done. But I also had an insatiable hunger to know about those saints of the past who had succeeded in their attempt to know Him, and to know how they had lived and how they had spoken.
The University of California was only a few miles away, and the University library was very complete. So, nearly every morning, I’d pack some bread in my sack and set out for the University, where I’d read for the whole day, or bring home some books to study. Though I was already familiar with many philosophers, both ancient and modern, I voraciously read or reread every major philosopher and every saint in the Religion & Philosophy section of the University library, from the Greeks and early Christian Fathers to the Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Taoist and Buddhist saints and sages. I read of Catholic monastic disciplines and Christian Science; I poured over the classics of medieval Indian and Sufi literature; I burrowed into the remote past through the long-lost writings of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Gnostic apocryphal books; I re-examined Heraclitus, Epictetus, Philo and Plotinus; and discovered the writings of Swami Vivekananda, al-Ghazali, Vidyaranya, Rumi and Shankara. It was a glorious time of wild excitement and uncontainable exhilaration.
The Upanishads were a revelation to me. These scriptures of the ancient Hindus were as old as the Jewish scriptures, but their conception of God was quite different from the jealous tyrant the Jews had invented. He was knowable as the one all-inclusive Reality, the one Self of the universe. I could not help feeling that there had been a tacit conspiracy in the Western world by the church, the state, and academia to conceal from me the fact that God could be “seen” and known. But, of course, the truth of the matter is that the knowledge was always there; only I was simply not ready to grasp these ideas until this moment, and it was only now that I was able to comprehend what the Upanishads had to tell:
He is beyond time and space, and yet He is the God of infinite forms who dwells in our inmost thoughts, and who is seen by those who love Him.1
He cannot be seen by the eye, and words cannot reveal Him. He cannot be reached by the senses, or by austerity or sacred actions. By the grace of wisdom and purity of mind, He can be seen indivisible in the silence of contemplation. 2
He is the Eternal among things that pass away, pure
Consciousness of conscious beings, the One who fulfills the prayers of many. Only the wise who see Him in their souls attain the peace eternal. 3
Reading through the collection of writings known as the Upanishads, I had a sense of recognition, a recollection of truths I had known before. “Of course, of course,” I kept repeating as I devoured the words of the sages. Nothing in the Western cultural tradition came close to the penetrating subtlety and clarity of the writings of these ancient Indian seers who had penned these immortal scriptures.
But the West did have its seers—though they do not appear as early or as abundantly as their Eastern counterparts. In the West, the experience of Unity, “the vision of God,” is only vaguely implied by the early Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates (by way of Plato). The later Stoics and Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century C.E. also refer only vaguely to such an experience, without any real attempt to offer a convincing account. In fact, it is not until Plotinus (204-270 C.E.) that an explicit and unequivocal account of “the vision of God” is offered in the West. Here is Plotinus’ description of his own experience in an extensive passage from his Enneads:
"The soul naturally loves God and yearns to be one with Him, just as a noble daughter naturally loves her noble father... And suddenly, [she] is uplifted and sees, without ever knowing how; ... the Supreme has come to her, or rather has revealed Its presence. She has turned away from everything around her and has readied herself, having made herself as beautiful as possible and fashioned herself in likeness with the Divine by those preparations and adornments which come unsought to those who grow ready for the vision. And she has seen that Divine presence suddenly manifesting within herself, for now there is nothing between herself and the Divine. There is now no longer a duality, but a two-in-one; for, so long as that presence continues, all distinction between them is dissolved. The longing of a lover to unite with his [human] beloved is a longing for a mere imitation of that Divine and perfect union.
". . . In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer a relationship between a subject and an object; the vision itself is the one continuous Being, so that seeing and seen are one thing; the object and the act of vision have become identical.
". . . It is a knowing of the Self restored to its original purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help speaking in terms of duality, such as “the seer” and “the seen,” instead of asserting boldly that it is the attainment of absolute Unity. In this seeing, we neither regard an object nor perceive distinctions; for there are not two. The man is altered, no longer himself nor belonging to himself; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into It, one with It. …Duality exists only in separation; by our holding ourselves apart from It, the Supreme is set outside of us. This is why the vision cannot be described; we cannot separate the Supreme from ourselves to speak of It, for if we have seen something separate and distinct, we have fallen short of the Supreme, which can be known only as one with oneself.
". . . [In this vision] there are not two; beholder is one with the beheld ... The man who has experienced this mingling with the Supreme must—if he but recalls It —carry the memory of Divinity impressed upon his soul. He is become the Unity, and nothing within him or without can create any diversity. Nor is there any movement now, or passion, or outreaching desire, once this ascent is attained. Reasoning is suspended and all intellection as well, and even—to dare the word—the very self is gone. Filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation, aloneness.
". . . This is the life of the gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, …the passing of the alone to the Alone."4
After Plotinus, perhaps the most lucid and explicit description of the experience of Unity comes from the 13th century German mystic, the Dominican Prior of Erfurt, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327). Eckhart’s Sermons and other writings were “condemned” by the Catholic Church in 1329; nonetheless, his writings have carried the torch of mystical experience over the centuries by which the way of many later mystics has been lighted. Speaking of his own experience of Unity, Meister Eckhart declares:
"In this breaking through [of consciousness], I find that God and I are both the same. Then I am what I [always] was; I neither wax nor wane, for I am the motionless Cause that is moving all things. 5
"I am converted into Him in such a way that He makes me one being with Himself—not a similar being. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction. 6
"The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same—one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving. 7
"Here, one cannot speak of the soul anymore, for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. There, she is no longer called soul, but is called immeasurable Being. 8
"I found in me all things forgotten, my own self forgotten and awareness of Thee, alone, O God. ... I found myself with Thee, being Thy being and speaking the Word and breathing the spirit." 9
Here and there, I found other seers scattered along the shores of time, from legendary eras to the present: early Greek philosophers, sages from the Vedic period of India, Moslem Sufis, Christians, Chinese Taoists and Buddhists; each telling the experience of Unity in terms that reflect the time and tradition in which he or she wrote. The women, in most cases, tended to color their accounts with emotion and allegory, but it was clear that the experience had occurred in them, and obviously showed no sexual bias. In fact, it appeared that all sorts of people had experienced the vision of Unity; not only those who could express it in philosophical or poetical terms, but also simple good-hearted people who have left us no record of their experience.
Of those who wrote, who recorded for posterity some of the insights gained in that vision of truth, were many who said little or nothing of the experience itself but confined themselves to presenting a systematic philosophy based on that experience; others, like the prophets of early Judaism, wrote or spoke as “holy” men, feeling that they were chosen to be spokesmen for God. And some, like the Buddha and the yogis, in an effort to stem a tide of futile intellectual speculation, declined to speak at all of the traditional notions of God, soul, and the nature of reality, but stressed instead the need to practice those disciplines which would lead to the direct experience of Truth, wherein all doubts and speculations would be resolved.
Naturally, each of these great beings spoke in his own language, his own restricted terminology, and the consequence is that today we regard each of these efforts to reveal the nature of reality as disparate and unrelated “philosophies” or “religions.” But the experience of Reality is the same for all, of course; and in all the declarations of the many prophets and Messiahs one can hear the attempt to convey a common knowledge based on that common vision.
It was thus I passed my days in the forest, devouring the writings of the sages and saints of the world in whose company I found great comfort and happiness. During the day I read, and in the evenings, I sat quietly, happily, in the presence of God. The growing clarity of my understanding seemed to open my heart to His ever-present reality, and little by little, I grew more aware of and filled by His Love. My intellectual curiosity had been satisfied; and now there remained only the simple directing of all my attention, all my thought, to the God whom I desired with all my heart.
3. ENLIGHTENMENT
My little cabin in the redwoods was cool in the summer, but damp in the winter, as I discovered that first winter in ‘66. The little babbling brook swelled to a cascading Colorado river in my backyard, and I had to catch water coming down the slope from the road in little waterfalls to get clear water for drinking or cooking. Each night I sat close to the cast-iron cooking stove, with the little side door open so I could watch the dancing blue and gold flames sizzle the oak logs and turn them to glowing ash.
Day and night, during the California winter, the rain drizzled outside the window in a steady, gray, time-dissolving continuum. In the mornings, I’d prepare oatmeal and a bath by the stove; I’d pour hot water from a pitcher over my body onto the concrete floor, and then sweep it outside. The rain would stop sometimes during the day, and then I would go out and walk the once dusty logging roads through the woods and up through the meadows in the high ground. “Hari! Hari! Hari!” was my continual call.
The dark skies kept my energies subdued, and my mind indrawn. My days passed uneventfully. It was in the night that the embers of my heart began to glow keenly as I sat in the dark, watching the fire contained in the stove. A stillness—sharp-edged and intense—filled my cabin and I spoke very closely, very intimately, with the God who had drawn me there. And He would sometimes speak to me in the stillness of the night, while I wrote down His words.
Hari became my only thought, my only love. And while the days and nights became endless stretches of grayness, wetness, my mind became brighter and brighter with an intense light that displayed every wandering thought that arose as a compelling drama in bold Technicolor and Panavision; and then I would pull my mind back with “Hari!” I had realized that I could have or become whatever I settled for in my mind; and I was determined to refuse every inspiration that was not God Himself. I was steadfastly resolved to refuse all visualizations, all mental wanderings, holding my mind in continual remembrance and longing for Hari alone.
In the evening twilight, I’d sing to Him, to the tune of Danny Boy:
O Adonai, at last the day is dying.
My heart is stilled as darkness floods the land.
I’ve tried and tried, but now I’m through with tryin’.
It’s You, it’s You, must take me by the hand,
And lead me home where all my tears and laughter
Fade into bliss on Freedom’s boundless shore.
And I’ll be dead and gone forever after.
O Adonai, just You, just You alone, forevermore. 1
Or, sometimes, I’d sing this song, to the tune of Across The Wide Missouri:
O Adonai, I long to see you!
All the day, my heart is achin’.
O Adonai, my heart is achin’.
O where, O where are you?
Don’t leave me here forsaken.
O Adonai, the day is over.
Adonai, I’m tired and lonely.
My tears have dried, and I’m awaitin’
You; O Adonai,
You know I love you only.
Sometimes, to focus my mind on Him, to bring devotion to my sometimes dry and empty heart, I’d read from Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation Of Christ—a version which I had pared down from the original; and this had the invariable effect of lifting my heart to love of God, and brought me, as though by sympathetic resonance, to the same sweet simple devotion and purity of heart evidenced by that sweet monk of the 15th century. I felt so much kinship with him, so much identification with him, that I came to love his little book above all other works for its sweet effect on me.
Then, deep into the night, I’d sit in silent prayer; my wakefulness burning like a laser of intensely focused yearning, a penetrating, searching lighthouse of hope in the black interior of the cabin, as I witnessed the play of the flickering flames dying out in the stove’s interior. On one such night, filled with Divine love, the understanding came to me that it was just this Love that was drawing me to Itself within me. It was this Love that was the Soul of my soul, calling me to live in Its constant light. I lit a candle; a song was being written in my notebook, and I was understanding very clearly, very vividly, just what it was that I loved, what it was that I was pledging my life to:
Thou art Love, and I shall follow all Thy ways.
I shall have no care, for Love cares only to love.
I shall have no fear, for Love is fearless.
Nor shall I frighten any, for Love comes sweetly and meek.
I shall keep no violence within me,
Neither in thought nor in deed, for Love comes peacefully.
I shall bear no shield or sword,
For the defense of Love is love.
I shall seek Thee in the eyes of men,
For love seeks Thee always.
I shall keep silence before Thine enemies,
And lift to them Thy countenance,
For all are powerless before Thee.
I shall keep Thee in my heart with precious care,
Lest Thy light be extinguished by the winds.
For without Thy light, I am in darkness.
I shall go free in the world with Thee--
Free of all bondage to anything but Thee--
For Thou art my God, the sole Father of my being,
The sweet breath of Love that lives in my heart,
And I shall follow Thee, and live with Thee,
And lean on Thee till the end of my days.
November 18, 1966:
This was the night I was to experience God. This was the night I learned who I am eternally. All day long the rain had been dripping outside my cabin window. And now the silent night hovered around me. I sat motionless, watching the dying coals in the stove. “Hari!” my mind called in the wakeful silence of my interior. During the whole day, I had felt my piteous plight so sorrowfully, so maddeningly; “Dear Lord, all I want is to die in Thee,” I cried within myself. “I have nothing, no desire, no pleasure in this life—but in Thee. Won’t you come and take this worthless scrap, this feeble worm of a soul, back into Thyself!”
“O Father,” I cried, “listen to my prayer! I am Thine alone. Do come and take me into Thy heart. I have no other goal, but Thee and Thee alone.”
Then I became very quiet. I sat emptied, but very awake, listening to God’s silence. I balanced gingerly, quakingly, on the still clarity of nothingness. I became aware that I was scarcely breathing. My breath was very shallow, nearly imperceptible—close to the balance point, where it would become non-existent. And my eyes peered into the darkness with a wide-eyed intensity that amazed me. I knew my pupils must be very large. I felt on the brink of a meeting with absolute clearness of mind. I hovered there, waiting. And then, from somewhere in me, from a place deeper that I even knew existed, a prayer came forth that, I sensed, must have been installed in my heart at the moment of my soul-birth in the mind of God: “Dear God, let me be one with Thee, not that I might glory in Thy love, but that I might speak out in Thy praise and to Thy glory for the benefit of all Thy children.”
It was then, in that very moment, that the veil fell away. Something in me changed. Suddenly I knew; I experienced infinite Unity. And I thought, “Of course; it’s been me all the time! Who else could I possibly be!” I lit a candle, and by the light of the flickering flame, while seated at the card table in my little cabin, I transmitted to paper what I was experiencing in eternity. Here is the “Song” that was written during that experience (the commentaries in parentheses which follow each verse were added much later):
O my God, even this body is Thine own!
(Suddenly I knew that this entity which I call my body was God’s own, was not separate from God, but was part of the continuous ocean of Consciousness; and I exclaimed in my heart, “O my God, even this body is Thine own!” There was no longer any me distinct from that one Consciousness; for that illusion was now dispelled.)
Though I call to Thee and seek Thee amidst chaos,
Even I who seemed an unclean pitcher amidst Thy waters--
Even I am Thine own.
(Heretofore, I had called to God in the chaos of a multitude of thoughts, a multitude of voices and motions of mind—the very chaos of hell. And in my calling, I was as though standing apart from God; I felt myself to be an unclean pitcher immersed in the ocean of God, dividing the waters within from the water without. Though God was in me and God was without, there had still remained this illusion of ‘me’. But now the idea of a separating ‘ego’ was gone. And I was aware that I—this whole conglomerate of body, mind, consciousness, which I call “I”—am none else but that One, and belong to that One, besides whom there is nothing.)
Does a wave cease to be of the ocean?
(A wave is only a form that arises out of the ocean and is nothing but ocean. In the same way, my form was as a wave of pure Consciousness, of pure God. How had I imagined it to be something else? And yet it was that very ignorance that had previously prevented me from seeing the truth.)
Do the mountains and the gulfs cease to be of the earth?
(Mountains and valleys in relation to the earth, like waves in relation to the ocean, seem to have an independent existence, an independent identity; yet they are only irregularities, diverse forms, of the earth itself.)
Or does a pebble cease to be stone?
(A pebble is, of course, nothing but stone—just as I now realized in growing clarity that I was none else but the one ‘stuff’ of Existence. Even though I seemed to be a unique entity separate from the rest of the universe, I was really a piece of the universal Reality, as a pebble is really a piece of stone.)
How can I escape Thee?
Thou art even That which thinks of escape!
(Thought too is a wave on the ocean of God. The thought of separation—can that be anything but God? The very tiniest motion of the mind is like the leaping of the waves on the ocean of Consciousness, and the fear of leaping clear of the ocean is a vain one for the wave. That which thinks of separation is that very Consciousness from which there can never ever be any separation. That One contains everything within It. So, what else could I, the thinker, be?)
Even now, I speak the word, “Thou,” and create duality.
(Here, now, as I write, as I think of God and speak to Him as “Thou,” I am creating a duality between myself and God where no duality exists in truth. It is the creation of the mind. Having habituated itself to separation, the mind creates an “I” and a “Thou,” and thus experiences duality.)
I love and create hatred.
(Just as for every peak there’s a valley, so the thought of love that arises in the mind has, as its valley, as its opposite, hatred. The impulse of the one creates the other, as the creation of a north pole automatically creates a south pole, or as “beauty” necessitates “ugliness,” or as “up” brings along with it “down,” or as “ahead” gives birth to “behind.” The nature of the mind is such that it creates a world of duality where only the One actually is.)
I am in peace and am fashioning chaos.
(The very nature of God’s phenomenal creation is also dual; His cosmic creation alternates from dormant to dynamic, while He, Himself, remains forever unchanging. In the same way, while our consciousness remains unmoved, the mind is in constant alternation. For example, when it is stilled, it is like a spring compressed, representing potential dynamic release. The mind’s peace, therefore, is itself the very mother of its activity.)
Standing on the peak, I necessitate the depths.
(Just as the peak of the wave necessitates the trough of the wave [since you can’t have one without the other], wakefulness necessitates sleep, good necessitates its opposite. Exultation in joy is paid for with despair; they are an inseparable pair.)
But now, weeping and laughing are gone.
Night is become day.
(But now I am experiencing the transcendent “stillness” of the One, where this alternation, this duality, of which creation is made, is no more. It is a clear awareness that all opposites are derived from the same ONE and are therefore dissolved. Laughing and its opposite, weeping, are the peak and the trough which have become leveled in the stillness of the calmed ocean, the rippleless surface of the waters of Consciousness. Night and day have no meaning here: All is eternity.)
Music and silence are heard as one.
(Sound, silence—both are contained in the eternal Consciousness which cannot be called silent, which cannot be called sound; It produces all sounds, yet, as their source, It is silence. Both are united in the One of which they consist.)
My ears are all the universe.
(There is only Me. Even the listening is Me.)
All motion has ceased,
Everything continues.
(The activity of the universe does not exist for Me, yet everything is still in motion as before. It is only that I am beyond both motion and non-motion. For I am the Whole; all motion is contained in Me, yet I Myself am unmoving.)
Life and death no longer stand apart.
(From where I am, the life and death of individual beings is less than a dream—so swiftly generations rise and fall, rise and fall! Whole eons of creation pass like a dream in an instant. Where then are life and death? How do they differ? They too are but an artificial duality that is resolved in the One timeless Self.)
No I, no Thou;
No now, or then.
(There is no longer a reference “I” that refers to a separate individual entity; there is no longer anything separate to refer to as “Thou.” This one knowing Consciousness, which is I, is all that exists or ever existed. Likewise, there is no “now” or “then”, for time pertains only to the dream and has no meaning here beyond all manifestation.)
Unless I move, there is no stillness.
(Stillness, too, is but a part of duality, bringing into existence motion. Motion and stillness, the ever-recurring change, are the dream constituents in the dream of duality! Stillness without motion cannot be. Where I am, neither of these exists.)
Nothing to lament, nothing to vanquish.
(Lament? In the pure sky of infinity, who is there to lament? What is there to doubt? Where there is no other, but only this One, what error or obstacle could there be? What is there to stand in the way of infinity? What is there other than Me?)
Nothing to pride oneself on--
All is accomplished in an instant.
(Pride belongs only to man, that tiny doll, that figment of imagination who, engrossed in the challenge of conflict with other men, prides himself on his petty accomplishments. Here, whole universes are created in an instant and destroyed, and everything that is accomplished is accomplished by the One. Where, then, is pride?)
All may now be told without effort.
(Here am I, with a view to the Eternal, and my hand writing in the world of creation, in the world of men. What a wonderful opportunity to tell all to eager humanity! Everything is known without the least effort. Let me tell it, let me share it, let me reveal it!)
Where is there a question?
(But see! Where everything is very simply and obviously Myself, what question could there be? Here, the possibility of a question cannot arise. Who could imagine a more humorous situation?)
Where is the temple?
(What about explaining the secrets of the soul, and how it is encased in that temple of God called ‘the body?’ That secret does not exist; for, when all is seen and experienced as one Being, where is that which may be regarded as the receptacle, the temple?)
Which the Imperishable?
Which the abode?
(Which may I call the imperishable God, the Eternal? And which may I call the vessel in which God exists and lives? Consciousness does not perish. The Energy of which this body consists does not perish. All is eternal; there is no differentiation here.)
I am the pulse of the turtle.
I am the clanging bells of joy.
(I am everywhere! I am life! I am the very heartbeat of even the lowliest of creatures. It is I who surge in the heart as joy, as surging joy like the ecstatic abandonment of clanging bells.)
I bring the dust of blindness.
I am the fire of song.
(I am the cause of man’s ignorance of Me, yet it is I who leap in his breast as the exultation of song.)
I am in the clouds and I am in the gritty soil.
In pools of clear water my image is found.
(I am that billowing beauty in the sky; I play in all these forms! And the gritty soil which produces the verdure of the earth—I am that soil, that black dirt. I am every tiny pebble of grit, cool and moist. And when, as man, I lean over the water, I discover My image, and see Myself shining in My own eyes.
I am the dust on the feet of the wretched,
The toothless beggars of every land.
(I live in the dust that covers the calloused feet of those thin, ragged holy men who grin happily at you as you pass them by.)
I have given sweets that decay to those who crave them.
I have given my wealth unto the poor and lonely.
(Each of my manifestations, according to their understanding, receives whatever they wish of the transitory pleasures of the world; but the wealth of My peace, My freedom, My joy, I give to those who seek no other wealth, who seek no other joy, but Me.)
My hands are open—nothing is concealed.
(I have displayed all My wealth; according to his evolution, his wisdom, each person chooses what he will have in this life.)
All things move together of one accord.
Assent is given throughout the universe to every falling grain.
(All is one concerted whole; everything works together, down to the tiniest detail, in the flower-like unfoldment of this world. All is the doing of the One.)
The Sun stirs the waters of My heart,
And the vapor of My love flies to the four corners of the world.
(Like a thousand-rayed sunburst of joy, My love showers forth as the universe of stars and planets and men. And then, this day of manifestation gives way to the night of
dissolution ...)
The Moon stills Me, and the cold darkness is My bed.
(And the universe withdraws into My utter darkness of stillness and rest.)
I have but breathed, and everything is rearranged,
And set in order once again.
(The expansion and contraction of this entire universe is merely an out-breath and an in-breath; a mere sigh.)
A million worlds begin and end in every breath,
(And, flung out into the endless reaches of infinity, worlds upon worlds evolve, enact their tumultuous dramas, and then withdraw from the stage once more. This cycle repeats itself again and again; the universe explodes from a single mass, expands as gas, and elements form. Eventually they become living organisms, which evolve into intelligent creatures, culminating in man. And one by one each learns the secret that puts an end to their game. And again, the stars reach the fullness of their course; again, everything is drawn back to its source….)
And, in this breathing, all things are sustained.
* * *
After this, I collapsed in bed, exhausted by the sheer strain of holding my mind on so keen an edge. When I awoke, it was morning. Immediately, I recalled the experience of the night before, and arose. I went outside to the sunlight, dazed and disoriented. I bent, and took up a handful of gravel, letting it slip slowly through my fingers. “I am in this?” I asked dumbfoundedly.
I felt as though I had been thrust back into a dream from which I had no power to awaken. My only thought was to return to that state I had known the night before. I rushed up the twisted road and scrambled up the hill to the cliff on top of the world, above the forest and ocean, where I had often conversed with God; and I sat there, out of breath, praying, with tears running down my cheeks, for Him to take me back into Himself. Before long, a chill blanket of gray fog, which had risen up from the ocean below, swept over me, engulfing me in a misty cloud. And after a few moments, I reluctantly went back, down the mountain.
NOTES (added 2-5-24):
1. During the time of my intense prayers to God, I would sometimes sing to God a song to the tune of Danny Boy. One of the verses of the song was:
O Adonai, at last the day is dying.
My heart is stilled as darkness floods the land.
I’ve tried and tried, but now I’m through with tryin’.
It’s You, it’s You, must take me by the hand,
And lead me home where all my tears and laughter
Fade into bliss on Freedom’s boundless shore.
And I’ll be dead and gone forever after.
O Adonai, just You, just You alone, forevermore.
In my ignorance, I imagined that when there was no longer a ‘me,’ I would experience only Him. But in fact, when God’s revelation descended on me, when there was no longer any ‘me,‘ there was also no longer a ‘Him.’ In the Nondual experience, the duality that appears to exist between ourselves and God in the normal conscious state no longer exists. And that is why, when I experienced God’s revelation, I declared: “No I, no Thou, no now or then.” In that Nondual experience, such divisions do not exist; there, the one eternal all-inclusive I AM alone exists.
I acknowledge that, for the mystic, the Nondual experience wanes after some time, and the mystic goes on living as though he was a separate individual being. But in the depths of the mystic’s soul the clear awareness of his eternal identity is always retained.
4. THE KINGDOM OF GOD
That magical night, while sitting there before the fire in my dark cabin, I had entered into “the kingdom of God.” I had been privileged to see into the real nature of my Self and all existence. When the veil of ignorance, which constitutes the ego, was lifted, it was revealed that my true, underlying identity is, and had always been, the one all-pervading Consciousness that is the Source and substratum of all that exists.
When God reveals Himself, He is not seen as something or someone apart. The soul is lifted up to identity with God, so that there is no longer a soul, but God Himself is revealed as one’s own Self. That Self is eternal, beyond all manifestation, never affected by the ongoing drama of worldly experience. It masquerades as every being, all the while remaining purely Consciousness and perfect Bliss. When my mind reached the highest state of contemplation, all opposites disappeared, resolved into that one Existence. Weeping and laughing, night and day, sound and silence, motion and stillness, life and death, I and Thou, past and future—none of these exist in that Unity. Only the one eternal Consciousness, containing all, exists alone as the supreme Self of all.
This revelatory experience revealed that I am, and, by extension, everyone is, the one Soul of the universe. The slightest movement of the mind would initiate the recreation of duality; but, held singly on its concentrated focus, the mind remains immersed in the Eternal. Raised to that eternal Consciousness, I saw that all creation is one coordinated whole, that every movement of every tiny grain of sand is in perfect harmony with the coordinated unfolding of the universe. My physical existence was then seen to have no separate identity but was part of a unified continuum of creative energy.
The individualized soul, though it feels separate and disconnected from God, is never actually separated from its source and substratum any more than a wave is separate from the ocean. Nothing, not even thought, is other than God; for nothing exists outside of the One. This one eternal Consciousness, experienced as oneself, knows that It is the life pulsing in every creature; It is the joy of exhilaration; It is the urge to song, and It is the producer of the obscuration of ignorance. It exists as clouds, water, and earth, and It appears as every man, woman and child. It is the dust on the feet of the saints. It gives worldly rewards and pleasures to those who seek them; but It reveals Itself only to those who have no other desire but to know the Eternal, to those who, abandoning all, go deliberately and alone to the meeting with God. These are the two paths it openly presents before us.
The energy of the Sun stirs the mind and heart to activity; and, in the dark of night, the heart and mind are drawn to rest. For the Eternal, likewise, there is a period of creation, and a period of rest. Though, from the vantage point of man in time, the existence of the universe lasts for billions of earth years, from the vantage point of Eternity, the universal manifestation is seen to be created, sustained, and withdrawn in the short space of a breath. Like the exhalation and inhalation of a breath, this cyclic beginning and ending of time’s array goes on recurrently, while the eternal Consciousness remains blissfully unchanged.
At the highest level of consciousness, all is one existence; but the ego-mind, by its choices, creates the duality of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, good and bad, likes and dislikes. Only by learning to see everything as God, does one approach the true vision of Reality, and the state of equanimity. In this rare state, the ego is vanished, and it is seen that all is perfect. Neither pride, nor assertion, nor regret can arise, for all is seen to be accomplished by the One. No questions arise in that perfect clarity. There is no longer a distinction between the created body and the uncreated Consciousness; all existence is seen to be one undifferentiated continuum. Body and soul, matter and spirit, like ice and water, are made of the same substance.
I had seen clearly that I was the Life in all life, the one Existence manifest in all forms; and yet, that clarity had been all too brief, and I was now once again separate and isolated, no longer aware of my greater Self, but projected back into a world of time and space, a world of separable forms.
After some time, I adjusted to the fact that I would have to live out my life in this dream-like world and would need to learn to hold to the awareness of my eternal identity, my real Self, while living in this divinely projected body. I was as though born anew; I was free to live as I chose, without fear, without concern. And since that time, I have continued to live in a bright world glowing with nectarean light and shining with God’s beauty.
* * *
(This brief account is excerpted from my book, The Supreme Self, Fallsburg, N.Y., Atma Books, 1984. I encourage all to read this book in its entirety. The Supreme Self is freely downloadable along with many of my more recent books and articles at my website: www.themysticsvision.com.)
* * *
(Excerpted from The Supreme Self by Swami Abhayananda, 1984
Published 3-12-18 in the Public Domain
(last revised: 2-5-24)
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1. THE AWAKENING
Everyone has a spiritual awakening somewhere along the way. For me, it was sudden and unexpected. It was 1966; I was twenty-eight, and it was a very special time in my world. Laura and I had moved from San Francisco to Los Gatos, California, in the mountains south of San Jose. We had rented a beautiful house with a knotty-pine interior and a huge porch overlooking a bubbling brook. I worked nearby at the Post Office on a split-shift that gave me time in the afternoons to sit on my beautiful private porch and drink coffee and read or work on the great American novel I was writing.
In June of 1966, I was fascinated with the symbology of myths, and was reading Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, both of whom were speaking repeatedly about “Vedanta,” the mysterious philosophy of India. And so, when I saw in a local bookstore a copy of a book called Vedanta For The Western World, I bought a copy. This book, edited by Christopher Isherwood, consisted of a series of articles by such figures as Swami Prabhavananda and Aldous Huxley, and spelled out in very easy-to-understand terms the philosophy of Vedanta.
Vedanta, I soon learned, refers to the philosophy expressed in the Upanishads, considered to be the final appendages to the Vedas. It is a nondualist philosophy; that is to say, a monistic one. It admits to an apparent duality between God and the world, between Consciousness and matter, but this duality, says Vedanta, is apparent only. In the “mystical vision” they are experienced as one.
According to Vedanta, when a person becomes enlightened—in other words, when he realizes the ultimate Truth, or God, in mystical vision—he experiences an absolute Unity, wherein everything is seen to be a manifestation of one universal Self. He knows for certain: “I and the Father are one.” This is not a mere aberration of consciousness, nor an illusory “union” of the soul and God; it is a glimpse into the nature of the underlying Reality of one’s existence. It is the revelation of one’s true and eternal Self. This, says Vedanta, is the perennial teaching of all the sages and saints of all times. For the experience of Unity, whether called samadhi, satori, or “union with God,” is the same for all, and is the basis for all the various religions.
Reading of this, I suddenly understood what the religious mystics had been talking about. The teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, and all the saints of all religions were seen to be based upon this same experiential knowledge. Everything I had ever puzzled over became clear; everything fell into place. I had scarcely finished with the Introduction to this book, and I knew that I had acquired a new and profound vision, which brought everything together for me and answered all my questions forever. I knew my life would never be the same. I knew I had found the key to an extraordinary wealth of understanding about myself and the nature of reality.
It was as though a veil that I had previously been unaware of had suddenly been drawn away, revealing a world I had heretofore been looking at as through a hazy fog. It was not so much an intellectual revelation as a spiritual one, for suddenly I saw everything bathed in light, and from deep within me there welled up a happiness, a clear, bright joyfulness, that testified to its truth, its rightness, more convincingly than any reason or merely intellectual conviction could do.
As I continued reading this amazing book, I was introduced to the 19th century mystic, Sri Ramakrishna, who was mad with fervor for “the vision of God” from an early age, and who became so one-pointed in mind through devotional love that he became entirely lost to the world of forms, aware only of the all-pervasive Reality. Reading of the life of Sri Ramakrishna and other such saints, I felt I had entered into an elite society of delirious madmen, madmen who called themselves, “the lovers Of God,” who, turning away from the normal transitory pursuits of man, sought to become intimate with the very fountainhead of the universe. Somehow, I had never understood before that such a thing was really possible.
Reading the inspiring words of Sri Ramakrishna, who had clearly known the unitive Reality, I experienced a wave of such happiness that I could scarcely bear it. Sitting on my porch, becoming aware of these things for the first time, I experienced a shower of golden light pouring down upon me, as though raining on the back of my neck, and awaking a deep and delicious chill in my body that ran up my spine and caused my scalp to tingle.
For the first time, I understood what drew men to religion. I had previously attributed it to weakness of mind. How much grander was the heritage of man than I had supposed. I had viewed all this talk of “God” through the ages as the superstitious babbling of fools. But I had been the fool. There was a God—but it was not what I had supposed men meant by the term. “God” meant not some ethereal being with a white beard, etc.; God was Being itself—the eternal substratum of Existence. And the proof of it was that God could be experienced, actually realized, seen with the inner eye of unleashed awareness. For the first time, I could fathom it; I understood the method in the madness of the saints. My mind was dazzled, ecstatic.
I was really extraordinarily happy. Of course, all my friends thought I had suddenly gone mad. Their faces betrayed their uneasiness when I began talking about God and the mystics who had known Him. I began to realize that I had touched on something that not everyone could, or was willing to, understand. I read about “Grace,” the amazing descent of Grace; and it seemed to me that just such a thing was happening to me. By some process of awakening, to which I was an unwitting spectator, I was seeing with an entirely new and different pair of eyes. My old friends were unable to understand or to share in any way the intensity of my fervor, my excitement; and I realized that I would have to go on this journey alone.
I had read, in one of the chapters of Vedanta For the Western World, a story of a man whose wife told him that their neighbor had decided to renounce the world of petty distractions to focus on the realization of God. When the man asked his wife how the neighbor was going about this renunciation, she said, “Well, he’s renouncing a few things today, and then tomorrow he’ll renounce a few more things, and so on, until he’s entirely free to meditate solely on God.” The man said, “That’s not the way to renounce the world!” And the wife retorted, “Well, how then would you do it?” And the man, by way of answering her, tore the shirt from his body, turned around and walked out the door of his home, never to return.
Impressed with the stark simplicity and decisiveness of this approach to the renunciation of all restricting conditions, I decided to follow the example of the man in the story. Within only a few days, my life took a startling and unalterable turn. I sent a note to my employer stating that I would not be in on Monday “...for reasons beyond my control”; I then gave what I owned to Laura, and went off into the mountains of Santa Cruz, into solitude, to give my life to the quest for knowledge of God.
Walking along a tree-shrouded mountain road, I came across an empty cabin nestled down in the woods a little off the road, and, exploring it, I discovered that it had been long uninhabited, except for the mice who had left abundant evidence of their assumed occupancy. I decided to take shelter there until I could talk to the owners, and so I cleaned the place up, and then went into Santa Cruz to look up the owner at the County Records office. I wrote to the two men who were the present owners and awaited their contact while I made myself at home in the rustic cabin.
The building had been left unfinished and was really just a shell with a concrete floor and a kitchen sink that drained directly out onto the ground outside. There was no running water, but a beautiful pure stream of water flowed just a few feet from the back door of the cabin in the form of a babbling spring-fed brook. There was a large picnic-type table in the main room and a mattressless cot in one of the two adjoining bedrooms. In the kitchen was an old unconnected refrigerator for storing food, a cast-iron cooking stove, and next to it a canvas director’s chair, along with a fold-up card table. That was the extent of the furniture.
There was no electricity, but just out back, a previous tenant had stacked a good cord of seasoned oak to warm me through the winter and provide me with cooking heat as well. Candles did the job of providing me with light. Out front, just beyond the old, dilapidated garage, was a wooden outhouse, and so, although I lacked what some might consider the necessities of modern life, I truly lacked for nothing, and I came to love the simple life my situation required.
The two men who owned the property showed up one day, and after I explained my intentions and my willingness to safeguard their property against hunters and trespassers, they readily agreed to let me stay in the unused cabin. In fact, we became good friends, and they frequently came to the woods on weekends with their chainsaws to cut some live oak trees for their own firewood and for me as well. They owned about 300 acres of beautiful redwood groves, green meadows, rocky cliffs and scenic plateaus; this was surrounded by another 1000 acres of similar woodland owned and preserved as wilderness by the University of California. And, for the next nearly five years, all this magnificent country was my own private garden of meditation.
How romantic it was! I felt that I was a Francis of Assisi. I was Rumi, the Sufi poet. I was Basho, the Zen hermit. Walking on the country roads in the early morning with my freshly baked honey-bread in my brown canvas bag on my shoulder, I’d walk the long winding mountain road to town to sell my loaves to the owner of a coffee shop. And on the way, I’d sit myself down in the grass by the roadside and write Zen poems to the poppies in the fields, or to the cottontails that went suddenly hopping through the dewy morning grass. Walking along, I would see the curving road suddenly turn and open wide a breathtaking expanse of sky and green slopes and blue ocean rising up to meet the sky—and a tearful joy would well up in me and drown me in a rapturous sweetness I’d never before known.
There were places where the dense pine and redwood forests formed a canopy over the narrow twisting mountain roads, and the light would stream in green sprays and twinkling raindrops of beauty through the trees; and I’d stoop by the bubbling stream to sink my cupped palm into the pebbly cold water and drink. And again, that sensation of chill that caused the hairs of my neck to rise, and the sweet delirious bliss of dissolving into an all-pervading light!
I was just a poor hermit of the woods, singing the name of God. I had learned that, in the Indian tradition, one of the names for God was “Hari,” meaning ‘the stealer of hearts.’ It was that name I called: “Hari! Hari! Hari!” as I walked along in my clumsy rags. I was a sweet, bearded monk of the forest and the world was in my eyes the beauteously glorious form of the Divine; all about me the playful sport of God.
2. THE COMMON VISION
I had come into the mountains to realize God, to know Him as Sri Ramakrishna and others had done. But I also had an insatiable hunger to know about those saints of the past who had succeeded in their attempt to know Him, and to know how they had lived and how they had spoken.
The University of California was only a few miles away, and the University library was very complete. So, nearly every morning, I’d pack some bread in my sack and set out for the University, where I’d read for the whole day, or bring home some books to study. Though I was already familiar with many philosophers, both ancient and modern, I voraciously read or reread every major philosopher and every saint in the Religion & Philosophy section of the University library, from the Greeks and early Christian Fathers to the Hindu, Sikh, Moslem, Taoist and Buddhist saints and sages. I read of Catholic monastic disciplines and Christian Science; I poured over the classics of medieval Indian and Sufi literature; I burrowed into the remote past through the long-lost writings of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Gnostic apocryphal books; I re-examined Heraclitus, Epictetus, Philo and Plotinus; and discovered the writings of Swami Vivekananda, al-Ghazali, Vidyaranya, Rumi and Shankara. It was a glorious time of wild excitement and uncontainable exhilaration.
The Upanishads were a revelation to me. These scriptures of the ancient Hindus were as old as the Jewish scriptures, but their conception of God was quite different from the jealous tyrant the Jews had invented. He was knowable as the one all-inclusive Reality, the one Self of the universe. I could not help feeling that there had been a tacit conspiracy in the Western world by the church, the state, and academia to conceal from me the fact that God could be “seen” and known. But, of course, the truth of the matter is that the knowledge was always there; only I was simply not ready to grasp these ideas until this moment, and it was only now that I was able to comprehend what the Upanishads had to tell:
He is beyond time and space, and yet He is the God of infinite forms who dwells in our inmost thoughts, and who is seen by those who love Him.1
He cannot be seen by the eye, and words cannot reveal Him. He cannot be reached by the senses, or by austerity or sacred actions. By the grace of wisdom and purity of mind, He can be seen indivisible in the silence of contemplation. 2
He is the Eternal among things that pass away, pure
Consciousness of conscious beings, the One who fulfills the prayers of many. Only the wise who see Him in their souls attain the peace eternal. 3
Reading through the collection of writings known as the Upanishads, I had a sense of recognition, a recollection of truths I had known before. “Of course, of course,” I kept repeating as I devoured the words of the sages. Nothing in the Western cultural tradition came close to the penetrating subtlety and clarity of the writings of these ancient Indian seers who had penned these immortal scriptures.
But the West did have its seers—though they do not appear as early or as abundantly as their Eastern counterparts. In the West, the experience of Unity, “the vision of God,” is only vaguely implied by the early Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Socrates (by way of Plato). The later Stoics and Philo of Alexandria in the 1st century C.E. also refer only vaguely to such an experience, without any real attempt to offer a convincing account. In fact, it is not until Plotinus (204-270 C.E.) that an explicit and unequivocal account of “the vision of God” is offered in the West. Here is Plotinus’ description of his own experience in an extensive passage from his Enneads:
"The soul naturally loves God and yearns to be one with Him, just as a noble daughter naturally loves her noble father... And suddenly, [she] is uplifted and sees, without ever knowing how; ... the Supreme has come to her, or rather has revealed Its presence. She has turned away from everything around her and has readied herself, having made herself as beautiful as possible and fashioned herself in likeness with the Divine by those preparations and adornments which come unsought to those who grow ready for the vision. And she has seen that Divine presence suddenly manifesting within herself, for now there is nothing between herself and the Divine. There is now no longer a duality, but a two-in-one; for, so long as that presence continues, all distinction between them is dissolved. The longing of a lover to unite with his [human] beloved is a longing for a mere imitation of that Divine and perfect union.
". . . In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer a relationship between a subject and an object; the vision itself is the one continuous Being, so that seeing and seen are one thing; the object and the act of vision have become identical.
". . . It is a knowing of the Self restored to its original purity. No doubt we should not speak of seeing; but we cannot help speaking in terms of duality, such as “the seer” and “the seen,” instead of asserting boldly that it is the attainment of absolute Unity. In this seeing, we neither regard an object nor perceive distinctions; for there are not two. The man is altered, no longer himself nor belonging to himself; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into It, one with It. …Duality exists only in separation; by our holding ourselves apart from It, the Supreme is set outside of us. This is why the vision cannot be described; we cannot separate the Supreme from ourselves to speak of It, for if we have seen something separate and distinct, we have fallen short of the Supreme, which can be known only as one with oneself.
". . . [In this vision] there are not two; beholder is one with the beheld ... The man who has experienced this mingling with the Supreme must—if he but recalls It —carry the memory of Divinity impressed upon his soul. He is become the Unity, and nothing within him or without can create any diversity. Nor is there any movement now, or passion, or outreaching desire, once this ascent is attained. Reasoning is suspended and all intellection as well, and even—to dare the word—the very self is gone. Filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation, aloneness.
". . . This is the life of the gods and of the godlike and blessed among men, …the passing of the alone to the Alone."4
After Plotinus, perhaps the most lucid and explicit description of the experience of Unity comes from the 13th century German mystic, the Dominican Prior of Erfurt, Meister Eckhart (1260-1327). Eckhart’s Sermons and other writings were “condemned” by the Catholic Church in 1329; nonetheless, his writings have carried the torch of mystical experience over the centuries by which the way of many later mystics has been lighted. Speaking of his own experience of Unity, Meister Eckhart declares:
"In this breaking through [of consciousness], I find that God and I are both the same. Then I am what I [always] was; I neither wax nor wane, for I am the motionless Cause that is moving all things. 5
"I am converted into Him in such a way that He makes me one being with Himself—not a similar being. By the living God, it is true that there is no distinction. 6
"The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same—one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving. 7
"Here, one cannot speak of the soul anymore, for she has lost her nature yonder in the oneness of divine essence. There, she is no longer called soul, but is called immeasurable Being. 8
"I found in me all things forgotten, my own self forgotten and awareness of Thee, alone, O God. ... I found myself with Thee, being Thy being and speaking the Word and breathing the spirit." 9
Here and there, I found other seers scattered along the shores of time, from legendary eras to the present: early Greek philosophers, sages from the Vedic period of India, Moslem Sufis, Christians, Chinese Taoists and Buddhists; each telling the experience of Unity in terms that reflect the time and tradition in which he or she wrote. The women, in most cases, tended to color their accounts with emotion and allegory, but it was clear that the experience had occurred in them, and obviously showed no sexual bias. In fact, it appeared that all sorts of people had experienced the vision of Unity; not only those who could express it in philosophical or poetical terms, but also simple good-hearted people who have left us no record of their experience.
Of those who wrote, who recorded for posterity some of the insights gained in that vision of truth, were many who said little or nothing of the experience itself but confined themselves to presenting a systematic philosophy based on that experience; others, like the prophets of early Judaism, wrote or spoke as “holy” men, feeling that they were chosen to be spokesmen for God. And some, like the Buddha and the yogis, in an effort to stem a tide of futile intellectual speculation, declined to speak at all of the traditional notions of God, soul, and the nature of reality, but stressed instead the need to practice those disciplines which would lead to the direct experience of Truth, wherein all doubts and speculations would be resolved.
Naturally, each of these great beings spoke in his own language, his own restricted terminology, and the consequence is that today we regard each of these efforts to reveal the nature of reality as disparate and unrelated “philosophies” or “religions.” But the experience of Reality is the same for all, of course; and in all the declarations of the many prophets and Messiahs one can hear the attempt to convey a common knowledge based on that common vision.
It was thus I passed my days in the forest, devouring the writings of the sages and saints of the world in whose company I found great comfort and happiness. During the day I read, and in the evenings, I sat quietly, happily, in the presence of God. The growing clarity of my understanding seemed to open my heart to His ever-present reality, and little by little, I grew more aware of and filled by His Love. My intellectual curiosity had been satisfied; and now there remained only the simple directing of all my attention, all my thought, to the God whom I desired with all my heart.
3. ENLIGHTENMENT
My little cabin in the redwoods was cool in the summer, but damp in the winter, as I discovered that first winter in ‘66. The little babbling brook swelled to a cascading Colorado river in my backyard, and I had to catch water coming down the slope from the road in little waterfalls to get clear water for drinking or cooking. Each night I sat close to the cast-iron cooking stove, with the little side door open so I could watch the dancing blue and gold flames sizzle the oak logs and turn them to glowing ash.
Day and night, during the California winter, the rain drizzled outside the window in a steady, gray, time-dissolving continuum. In the mornings, I’d prepare oatmeal and a bath by the stove; I’d pour hot water from a pitcher over my body onto the concrete floor, and then sweep it outside. The rain would stop sometimes during the day, and then I would go out and walk the once dusty logging roads through the woods and up through the meadows in the high ground. “Hari! Hari! Hari!” was my continual call.
The dark skies kept my energies subdued, and my mind indrawn. My days passed uneventfully. It was in the night that the embers of my heart began to glow keenly as I sat in the dark, watching the fire contained in the stove. A stillness—sharp-edged and intense—filled my cabin and I spoke very closely, very intimately, with the God who had drawn me there. And He would sometimes speak to me in the stillness of the night, while I wrote down His words.
Hari became my only thought, my only love. And while the days and nights became endless stretches of grayness, wetness, my mind became brighter and brighter with an intense light that displayed every wandering thought that arose as a compelling drama in bold Technicolor and Panavision; and then I would pull my mind back with “Hari!” I had realized that I could have or become whatever I settled for in my mind; and I was determined to refuse every inspiration that was not God Himself. I was steadfastly resolved to refuse all visualizations, all mental wanderings, holding my mind in continual remembrance and longing for Hari alone.
In the evening twilight, I’d sing to Him, to the tune of Danny Boy:
O Adonai, at last the day is dying.
My heart is stilled as darkness floods the land.
I’ve tried and tried, but now I’m through with tryin’.
It’s You, it’s You, must take me by the hand,
And lead me home where all my tears and laughter
Fade into bliss on Freedom’s boundless shore.
And I’ll be dead and gone forever after.
O Adonai, just You, just You alone, forevermore. 1
Or, sometimes, I’d sing this song, to the tune of Across The Wide Missouri:
O Adonai, I long to see you!
All the day, my heart is achin’.
O Adonai, my heart is achin’.
O where, O where are you?
Don’t leave me here forsaken.
O Adonai, the day is over.
Adonai, I’m tired and lonely.
My tears have dried, and I’m awaitin’
You; O Adonai,
You know I love you only.
Sometimes, to focus my mind on Him, to bring devotion to my sometimes dry and empty heart, I’d read from Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation Of Christ—a version which I had pared down from the original; and this had the invariable effect of lifting my heart to love of God, and brought me, as though by sympathetic resonance, to the same sweet simple devotion and purity of heart evidenced by that sweet monk of the 15th century. I felt so much kinship with him, so much identification with him, that I came to love his little book above all other works for its sweet effect on me.
Then, deep into the night, I’d sit in silent prayer; my wakefulness burning like a laser of intensely focused yearning, a penetrating, searching lighthouse of hope in the black interior of the cabin, as I witnessed the play of the flickering flames dying out in the stove’s interior. On one such night, filled with Divine love, the understanding came to me that it was just this Love that was drawing me to Itself within me. It was this Love that was the Soul of my soul, calling me to live in Its constant light. I lit a candle; a song was being written in my notebook, and I was understanding very clearly, very vividly, just what it was that I loved, what it was that I was pledging my life to:
Thou art Love, and I shall follow all Thy ways.
I shall have no care, for Love cares only to love.
I shall have no fear, for Love is fearless.
Nor shall I frighten any, for Love comes sweetly and meek.
I shall keep no violence within me,
Neither in thought nor in deed, for Love comes peacefully.
I shall bear no shield or sword,
For the defense of Love is love.
I shall seek Thee in the eyes of men,
For love seeks Thee always.
I shall keep silence before Thine enemies,
And lift to them Thy countenance,
For all are powerless before Thee.
I shall keep Thee in my heart with precious care,
Lest Thy light be extinguished by the winds.
For without Thy light, I am in darkness.
I shall go free in the world with Thee--
Free of all bondage to anything but Thee--
For Thou art my God, the sole Father of my being,
The sweet breath of Love that lives in my heart,
And I shall follow Thee, and live with Thee,
And lean on Thee till the end of my days.
November 18, 1966:
This was the night I was to experience God. This was the night I learned who I am eternally. All day long the rain had been dripping outside my cabin window. And now the silent night hovered around me. I sat motionless, watching the dying coals in the stove. “Hari!” my mind called in the wakeful silence of my interior. During the whole day, I had felt my piteous plight so sorrowfully, so maddeningly; “Dear Lord, all I want is to die in Thee,” I cried within myself. “I have nothing, no desire, no pleasure in this life—but in Thee. Won’t you come and take this worthless scrap, this feeble worm of a soul, back into Thyself!”
“O Father,” I cried, “listen to my prayer! I am Thine alone. Do come and take me into Thy heart. I have no other goal, but Thee and Thee alone.”
Then I became very quiet. I sat emptied, but very awake, listening to God’s silence. I balanced gingerly, quakingly, on the still clarity of nothingness. I became aware that I was scarcely breathing. My breath was very shallow, nearly imperceptible—close to the balance point, where it would become non-existent. And my eyes peered into the darkness with a wide-eyed intensity that amazed me. I knew my pupils must be very large. I felt on the brink of a meeting with absolute clearness of mind. I hovered there, waiting. And then, from somewhere in me, from a place deeper that I even knew existed, a prayer came forth that, I sensed, must have been installed in my heart at the moment of my soul-birth in the mind of God: “Dear God, let me be one with Thee, not that I might glory in Thy love, but that I might speak out in Thy praise and to Thy glory for the benefit of all Thy children.”
It was then, in that very moment, that the veil fell away. Something in me changed. Suddenly I knew; I experienced infinite Unity. And I thought, “Of course; it’s been me all the time! Who else could I possibly be!” I lit a candle, and by the light of the flickering flame, while seated at the card table in my little cabin, I transmitted to paper what I was experiencing in eternity. Here is the “Song” that was written during that experience (the commentaries in parentheses which follow each verse were added much later):
O my God, even this body is Thine own!
(Suddenly I knew that this entity which I call my body was God’s own, was not separate from God, but was part of the continuous ocean of Consciousness; and I exclaimed in my heart, “O my God, even this body is Thine own!” There was no longer any me distinct from that one Consciousness; for that illusion was now dispelled.)
Though I call to Thee and seek Thee amidst chaos,
Even I who seemed an unclean pitcher amidst Thy waters--
Even I am Thine own.
(Heretofore, I had called to God in the chaos of a multitude of thoughts, a multitude of voices and motions of mind—the very chaos of hell. And in my calling, I was as though standing apart from God; I felt myself to be an unclean pitcher immersed in the ocean of God, dividing the waters within from the water without. Though God was in me and God was without, there had still remained this illusion of ‘me’. But now the idea of a separating ‘ego’ was gone. And I was aware that I—this whole conglomerate of body, mind, consciousness, which I call “I”—am none else but that One, and belong to that One, besides whom there is nothing.)
Does a wave cease to be of the ocean?
(A wave is only a form that arises out of the ocean and is nothing but ocean. In the same way, my form was as a wave of pure Consciousness, of pure God. How had I imagined it to be something else? And yet it was that very ignorance that had previously prevented me from seeing the truth.)
Do the mountains and the gulfs cease to be of the earth?
(Mountains and valleys in relation to the earth, like waves in relation to the ocean, seem to have an independent existence, an independent identity; yet they are only irregularities, diverse forms, of the earth itself.)
Or does a pebble cease to be stone?
(A pebble is, of course, nothing but stone—just as I now realized in growing clarity that I was none else but the one ‘stuff’ of Existence. Even though I seemed to be a unique entity separate from the rest of the universe, I was really a piece of the universal Reality, as a pebble is really a piece of stone.)
How can I escape Thee?
Thou art even That which thinks of escape!
(Thought too is a wave on the ocean of God. The thought of separation—can that be anything but God? The very tiniest motion of the mind is like the leaping of the waves on the ocean of Consciousness, and the fear of leaping clear of the ocean is a vain one for the wave. That which thinks of separation is that very Consciousness from which there can never ever be any separation. That One contains everything within It. So, what else could I, the thinker, be?)
Even now, I speak the word, “Thou,” and create duality.
(Here, now, as I write, as I think of God and speak to Him as “Thou,” I am creating a duality between myself and God where no duality exists in truth. It is the creation of the mind. Having habituated itself to separation, the mind creates an “I” and a “Thou,” and thus experiences duality.)
I love and create hatred.
(Just as for every peak there’s a valley, so the thought of love that arises in the mind has, as its valley, as its opposite, hatred. The impulse of the one creates the other, as the creation of a north pole automatically creates a south pole, or as “beauty” necessitates “ugliness,” or as “up” brings along with it “down,” or as “ahead” gives birth to “behind.” The nature of the mind is such that it creates a world of duality where only the One actually is.)
I am in peace and am fashioning chaos.
(The very nature of God’s phenomenal creation is also dual; His cosmic creation alternates from dormant to dynamic, while He, Himself, remains forever unchanging. In the same way, while our consciousness remains unmoved, the mind is in constant alternation. For example, when it is stilled, it is like a spring compressed, representing potential dynamic release. The mind’s peace, therefore, is itself the very mother of its activity.)
Standing on the peak, I necessitate the depths.
(Just as the peak of the wave necessitates the trough of the wave [since you can’t have one without the other], wakefulness necessitates sleep, good necessitates its opposite. Exultation in joy is paid for with despair; they are an inseparable pair.)
But now, weeping and laughing are gone.
Night is become day.
(But now I am experiencing the transcendent “stillness” of the One, where this alternation, this duality, of which creation is made, is no more. It is a clear awareness that all opposites are derived from the same ONE and are therefore dissolved. Laughing and its opposite, weeping, are the peak and the trough which have become leveled in the stillness of the calmed ocean, the rippleless surface of the waters of Consciousness. Night and day have no meaning here: All is eternity.)
Music and silence are heard as one.
(Sound, silence—both are contained in the eternal Consciousness which cannot be called silent, which cannot be called sound; It produces all sounds, yet, as their source, It is silence. Both are united in the One of which they consist.)
My ears are all the universe.
(There is only Me. Even the listening is Me.)
All motion has ceased,
Everything continues.
(The activity of the universe does not exist for Me, yet everything is still in motion as before. It is only that I am beyond both motion and non-motion. For I am the Whole; all motion is contained in Me, yet I Myself am unmoving.)
Life and death no longer stand apart.
(From where I am, the life and death of individual beings is less than a dream—so swiftly generations rise and fall, rise and fall! Whole eons of creation pass like a dream in an instant. Where then are life and death? How do they differ? They too are but an artificial duality that is resolved in the One timeless Self.)
No I, no Thou;
No now, or then.
(There is no longer a reference “I” that refers to a separate individual entity; there is no longer anything separate to refer to as “Thou.” This one knowing Consciousness, which is I, is all that exists or ever existed. Likewise, there is no “now” or “then”, for time pertains only to the dream and has no meaning here beyond all manifestation.)
Unless I move, there is no stillness.
(Stillness, too, is but a part of duality, bringing into existence motion. Motion and stillness, the ever-recurring change, are the dream constituents in the dream of duality! Stillness without motion cannot be. Where I am, neither of these exists.)
Nothing to lament, nothing to vanquish.
(Lament? In the pure sky of infinity, who is there to lament? What is there to doubt? Where there is no other, but only this One, what error or obstacle could there be? What is there to stand in the way of infinity? What is there other than Me?)
Nothing to pride oneself on--
All is accomplished in an instant.
(Pride belongs only to man, that tiny doll, that figment of imagination who, engrossed in the challenge of conflict with other men, prides himself on his petty accomplishments. Here, whole universes are created in an instant and destroyed, and everything that is accomplished is accomplished by the One. Where, then, is pride?)
All may now be told without effort.
(Here am I, with a view to the Eternal, and my hand writing in the world of creation, in the world of men. What a wonderful opportunity to tell all to eager humanity! Everything is known without the least effort. Let me tell it, let me share it, let me reveal it!)
Where is there a question?
(But see! Where everything is very simply and obviously Myself, what question could there be? Here, the possibility of a question cannot arise. Who could imagine a more humorous situation?)
Where is the temple?
(What about explaining the secrets of the soul, and how it is encased in that temple of God called ‘the body?’ That secret does not exist; for, when all is seen and experienced as one Being, where is that which may be regarded as the receptacle, the temple?)
Which the Imperishable?
Which the abode?
(Which may I call the imperishable God, the Eternal? And which may I call the vessel in which God exists and lives? Consciousness does not perish. The Energy of which this body consists does not perish. All is eternal; there is no differentiation here.)
I am the pulse of the turtle.
I am the clanging bells of joy.
(I am everywhere! I am life! I am the very heartbeat of even the lowliest of creatures. It is I who surge in the heart as joy, as surging joy like the ecstatic abandonment of clanging bells.)
I bring the dust of blindness.
I am the fire of song.
(I am the cause of man’s ignorance of Me, yet it is I who leap in his breast as the exultation of song.)
I am in the clouds and I am in the gritty soil.
In pools of clear water my image is found.
(I am that billowing beauty in the sky; I play in all these forms! And the gritty soil which produces the verdure of the earth—I am that soil, that black dirt. I am every tiny pebble of grit, cool and moist. And when, as man, I lean over the water, I discover My image, and see Myself shining in My own eyes.
I am the dust on the feet of the wretched,
The toothless beggars of every land.
(I live in the dust that covers the calloused feet of those thin, ragged holy men who grin happily at you as you pass them by.)
I have given sweets that decay to those who crave them.
I have given my wealth unto the poor and lonely.
(Each of my manifestations, according to their understanding, receives whatever they wish of the transitory pleasures of the world; but the wealth of My peace, My freedom, My joy, I give to those who seek no other wealth, who seek no other joy, but Me.)
My hands are open—nothing is concealed.
(I have displayed all My wealth; according to his evolution, his wisdom, each person chooses what he will have in this life.)
All things move together of one accord.
Assent is given throughout the universe to every falling grain.
(All is one concerted whole; everything works together, down to the tiniest detail, in the flower-like unfoldment of this world. All is the doing of the One.)
The Sun stirs the waters of My heart,
And the vapor of My love flies to the four corners of the world.
(Like a thousand-rayed sunburst of joy, My love showers forth as the universe of stars and planets and men. And then, this day of manifestation gives way to the night of
dissolution ...)
The Moon stills Me, and the cold darkness is My bed.
(And the universe withdraws into My utter darkness of stillness and rest.)
I have but breathed, and everything is rearranged,
And set in order once again.
(The expansion and contraction of this entire universe is merely an out-breath and an in-breath; a mere sigh.)
A million worlds begin and end in every breath,
(And, flung out into the endless reaches of infinity, worlds upon worlds evolve, enact their tumultuous dramas, and then withdraw from the stage once more. This cycle repeats itself again and again; the universe explodes from a single mass, expands as gas, and elements form. Eventually they become living organisms, which evolve into intelligent creatures, culminating in man. And one by one each learns the secret that puts an end to their game. And again, the stars reach the fullness of their course; again, everything is drawn back to its source….)
And, in this breathing, all things are sustained.
* * *
After this, I collapsed in bed, exhausted by the sheer strain of holding my mind on so keen an edge. When I awoke, it was morning. Immediately, I recalled the experience of the night before, and arose. I went outside to the sunlight, dazed and disoriented. I bent, and took up a handful of gravel, letting it slip slowly through my fingers. “I am in this?” I asked dumbfoundedly.
I felt as though I had been thrust back into a dream from which I had no power to awaken. My only thought was to return to that state I had known the night before. I rushed up the twisted road and scrambled up the hill to the cliff on top of the world, above the forest and ocean, where I had often conversed with God; and I sat there, out of breath, praying, with tears running down my cheeks, for Him to take me back into Himself. Before long, a chill blanket of gray fog, which had risen up from the ocean below, swept over me, engulfing me in a misty cloud. And after a few moments, I reluctantly went back, down the mountain.
NOTES (added 2-5-24):
1. During the time of my intense prayers to God, I would sometimes sing to God a song to the tune of Danny Boy. One of the verses of the song was:
O Adonai, at last the day is dying.
My heart is stilled as darkness floods the land.
I’ve tried and tried, but now I’m through with tryin’.
It’s You, it’s You, must take me by the hand,
And lead me home where all my tears and laughter
Fade into bliss on Freedom’s boundless shore.
And I’ll be dead and gone forever after.
O Adonai, just You, just You alone, forevermore.
In my ignorance, I imagined that when there was no longer a ‘me,’ I would experience only Him. But in fact, when God’s revelation descended on me, when there was no longer any ‘me,‘ there was also no longer a ‘Him.’ In the Nondual experience, the duality that appears to exist between ourselves and God in the normal conscious state no longer exists. And that is why, when I experienced God’s revelation, I declared: “No I, no Thou, no now or then.” In that Nondual experience, such divisions do not exist; there, the one eternal all-inclusive I AM alone exists.
I acknowledge that, for the mystic, the Nondual experience wanes after some time, and the mystic goes on living as though he was a separate individual being. But in the depths of the mystic’s soul the clear awareness of his eternal identity is always retained.
4. THE KINGDOM OF GOD
That magical night, while sitting there before the fire in my dark cabin, I had entered into “the kingdom of God.” I had been privileged to see into the real nature of my Self and all existence. When the veil of ignorance, which constitutes the ego, was lifted, it was revealed that my true, underlying identity is, and had always been, the one all-pervading Consciousness that is the Source and substratum of all that exists.
When God reveals Himself, He is not seen as something or someone apart. The soul is lifted up to identity with God, so that there is no longer a soul, but God Himself is revealed as one’s own Self. That Self is eternal, beyond all manifestation, never affected by the ongoing drama of worldly experience. It masquerades as every being, all the while remaining purely Consciousness and perfect Bliss. When my mind reached the highest state of contemplation, all opposites disappeared, resolved into that one Existence. Weeping and laughing, night and day, sound and silence, motion and stillness, life and death, I and Thou, past and future—none of these exist in that Unity. Only the one eternal Consciousness, containing all, exists alone as the supreme Self of all.
This revelatory experience revealed that I am, and, by extension, everyone is, the one Soul of the universe. The slightest movement of the mind would initiate the recreation of duality; but, held singly on its concentrated focus, the mind remains immersed in the Eternal. Raised to that eternal Consciousness, I saw that all creation is one coordinated whole, that every movement of every tiny grain of sand is in perfect harmony with the coordinated unfolding of the universe. My physical existence was then seen to have no separate identity but was part of a unified continuum of creative energy.
The individualized soul, though it feels separate and disconnected from God, is never actually separated from its source and substratum any more than a wave is separate from the ocean. Nothing, not even thought, is other than God; for nothing exists outside of the One. This one eternal Consciousness, experienced as oneself, knows that It is the life pulsing in every creature; It is the joy of exhilaration; It is the urge to song, and It is the producer of the obscuration of ignorance. It exists as clouds, water, and earth, and It appears as every man, woman and child. It is the dust on the feet of the saints. It gives worldly rewards and pleasures to those who seek them; but It reveals Itself only to those who have no other desire but to know the Eternal, to those who, abandoning all, go deliberately and alone to the meeting with God. These are the two paths it openly presents before us.
The energy of the Sun stirs the mind and heart to activity; and, in the dark of night, the heart and mind are drawn to rest. For the Eternal, likewise, there is a period of creation, and a period of rest. Though, from the vantage point of man in time, the existence of the universe lasts for billions of earth years, from the vantage point of Eternity, the universal manifestation is seen to be created, sustained, and withdrawn in the short space of a breath. Like the exhalation and inhalation of a breath, this cyclic beginning and ending of time’s array goes on recurrently, while the eternal Consciousness remains blissfully unchanged.
At the highest level of consciousness, all is one existence; but the ego-mind, by its choices, creates the duality of ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, good and bad, likes and dislikes. Only by learning to see everything as God, does one approach the true vision of Reality, and the state of equanimity. In this rare state, the ego is vanished, and it is seen that all is perfect. Neither pride, nor assertion, nor regret can arise, for all is seen to be accomplished by the One. No questions arise in that perfect clarity. There is no longer a distinction between the created body and the uncreated Consciousness; all existence is seen to be one undifferentiated continuum. Body and soul, matter and spirit, like ice and water, are made of the same substance.
I had seen clearly that I was the Life in all life, the one Existence manifest in all forms; and yet, that clarity had been all too brief, and I was now once again separate and isolated, no longer aware of my greater Self, but projected back into a world of time and space, a world of separable forms.
After some time, I adjusted to the fact that I would have to live out my life in this dream-like world and would need to learn to hold to the awareness of my eternal identity, my real Self, while living in this divinely projected body. I was as though born anew; I was free to live as I chose, without fear, without concern. And since that time, I have continued to live in a bright world glowing with nectarean light and shining with God’s beauty.
* * *
(This brief account is excerpted from my book, The Supreme Self, Fallsburg, N.Y., Atma Books, 1984. I encourage all to read this book in its entirety. The Supreme Self is freely downloadable along with many of my more recent books and articles at my website: www.themysticsvision.com.)
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