Hope this is useful, by Leo Hartong (I liked his e-book
'Awakening to the Dream' a lot):
18
Blinded by the light
There is a story about a soldier who was sentenced to
death.
On the day of his execution, he is transported in an open
cart to the gallows. As he takes in his surroundings for
what he believes to be the last time, a great stillness
descends
upon him. The world appears in a clear and transparent
vision of unity and harmony. His fear of dying is
replaced with a deep sense of peace in which he and all of
creation are one in a mystical union with God. At the very
last moment, the king pardons the soldier. He regains his
freedom and life, but loses the vision of paradise. The rest
of his life is a hopeless quest to regain that vision. He
takes
to heavy drinking and dies years later as a lonely alcoholic.
For me the experience came when I was twenty-one.
For several reasons, I felt at the end of my rope, and as it
slipped through my fingers, my overwhelming sense of
desperation suddenly lifted. I’ve got a Feeling from the
Beatles’ album Let It Be was playing on the stereo, and it
touched something deep inside of me. A large space
opened up. It would be as true to say that I expanded to
encompass the whole of existence as it would be to say
that I had totally disappeared. Eternity, which I had
understood
as time without end, appeared as the absence of
time. Everything was infused with life, including what, up
until that moment, I had considered inanimate. All exist-
ence shared a common source and the first day of creation
and the final day of destruction were seen as equally
present. The Universe was neither big nor small. It revealed
itself as simply One beyond all relative attributes,
such as size, location, and time. While on the relative
level,
everything’s purpose was shown to serve everything else
in an intricate mosaic of perfect harmony, the totality of
creation showed itself beyond purpose. I saw that it simply
is as it is: Its own cause and fulfillment.
Things that really mattered before did not matter any
longer. The people I saw from my window all seemed to
be ‘in the know’ while pretending not to know who they
really were. As the experience was slowing down, I remember
thinking: How can I go on with my day-to-day life,
pretending to be this limited character? How can I go to work
and face the daily routine again? As it turned out, I was
perfectly
able to continue my life as before – but I was left
with a certainty that, even when I do not see it, all is as
it
should be.
What the soldier’s and my personal story have in
common is that they show a vision of the eternal recounted
as an experience with a beginning and an end. It has been
called a mystical, transcendental or peak experience, and
that is exactly what it is – an experience.
The content of such experiences seems to vary from
person to person, depending on one’s personality and
socio-cultural background; but in essence, all peak
experiences
are similar in that they all recount a unity of
man and God (or whatever name you’re comfortable
with), and they all transcend space and time. It is the
sort of experience that people who want enlightenment
are looking for; and many have confused it with
enlightenment,
as did I. What is generally overlooked, however,
is the silent background in which both the experience
and the ‘I’ that remembers and interprets it occur.
To this mirror-like Awareness, such an experience is
simply
another cloud drifting by.
Over the years, that experience has been a source of
both comfort and confusion to me. There was a clear
memory of a vision of universal oneness, even though it
was not always felt. My initial interpretation of the
experience
was that if all is One, then everybody and everything
is part of this oneness. Later, I realized that this was a
linguistic trap – that if all is truly One, there are no
parts
and there can be no you and me to be part of it. I saw that
the ‘I’ of this body/mind is the same ‘I’ living in and as
everybody else. Perhaps an apt analogy would be to say
we are all the same Self dressed in a variety of costumes.
At the same time, there persisted this contradictory
sense of being an individual entity responsible for my
actions.
Before I came to a simple and clear ‘This is it, I am
it, and that is that,’ this concept of being ‘part of it’
made
me work on myself to be a better part. In the Hsin Hsin
Ming, by Sengtan, the third Zen Patriarch, this working
on the mind with the mind to make the ‘good’ victorious
over the ‘bad’ is described, as follows:
If you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind.*
There was a continued interest in matters considered
spiritual,
as well as an interest in the parallels between the
mystical experience and subjects like the new physics, the
Gaia theory, and the ideas of an imminent evolutionary
leap for humankind.
More recently, a renewed attraction to the non-dual
teachings of Advaita, Taoism, and Zen emerged. It was
like a revival of sorts, and I reread books like the Tao
Te
Ching, the Ashtavakra Gita, and the Way of Zen, as well as
new books from Tony Parsons, Ramesh Balsekar, Nathan
Gill, and many others. The same old words seemed to speak
to me in a fresh and clear manner. It was like the missing
pieces of a puzzle fell into place, and at the same time, it
clearly showed that nothing could ever be out of place.
I met Wayne Liquorman during a seminar with his
teacher Ramesh Balsekar. I told him that I was attending
to experience the presence of people like him and
Ramesh and that there were no questions I could ask, as
I had a complete intellectual understanding of the material
that was discussed. He answered, ‘Yes but you still
say I understand.’ I did not respond much to this as I
took it to be semantics; but somehow it stayed with me.
It kept coming back to my mind, percolated down into
my heart, and finally said, ‘Actually there is no ‘I’ that
understands it. There is simply understanding.’
Presently ‘I’ remains as ‘my address in life,’ as well as a
grammatical convention and convenience, which I will not
hesitate to use. There is, however, no objective ‘me’ that
can be identified or taken hold of. It is clear that my
earlier
mystical experience was not enlightenment. The idea
of an ‘I’ having this experience created the confusing
paradox
of an ‘I’ having a non-dual experience. Now, it is obvious
that the so-called mystical experience is as much an
experience as having a glass of wine, making love, doing
the shopping, or taking a walk in the rain. It is all just
happening as me – not to or by me. The silent background
in which experience appears and disappears had escaped
the attention of the ‘me’ that thought he ‘got it.’
Don’t get me wrong: It is not that I didn’t quite get it
before and now I do. It is now clear that there is no ‘I’ to
get it. The whole concept of someone getting enlightened
has lost its validity. Enlightenment appears as a goal that
one can reach only as long as there is the illusion of a
separate entity or ego. In Zen, it has been called the
gateless
gate. When one stands before it, the gate seems to be there.
When one passes through and looks back, it’s clear there
never was a gate, nor anyone to go through it.
The mystical experiences described above – both the
condemned soldier’s and mine – however attractive they
may sound, were in the end a ‘blinding by the light.’ There
is no need to have such experiences for understanding to
happen. True understanding will level the artificial
boundaries between the mystical and the mundane, the
extraordinary and the ordinary, the experience and the
one who experiences. It will reveal the splendor and the
simplicity, along with the freedom – even from the need
to be free – that lies beyond this apparent duality.
There is a freedom -
even from the need to be free
even from the need to try to be spiritual.
This is beyond the duality of awake and asleep,
enlightened, and unenlightened.
This is relaxation into the suchness of things
just the way things are.*
This text points to absolute instead of relative and
conditional
freedom. Absolute freedom’s inherent nature is such
that there cannot be any conditions that have to be met
before this freedom can be realized. There is no need for
a special experience to set you free. When you wait for
such an event, you feed the erroneous belief that there
really is a ‘you’ in need of liberation. Such an anticipated
event may be a transcendental experience; but even when
you do get such an experience, it can become a trap instead
of a liberation. The one having such an experience
may be overwhelmed and conclude that this should become
a permanent state.
There is a book by Suzanne Segal called Collision with
the Infinite. It tells the story of a woman who got shocked
by the sudden realization that there is no personal self.
She was not a seeker and had no interest in things like
yoga, Zen, and advaita. She thought she was losing her
mind and sought help from psychiatrists and psychologists;
but they were unable to help her. At some point, she
came in contact with the non-dual perspective; and from
that point on, her situation started to improve – so much
so that she started to hold meetings and began to help
people on their spiritual path.
By the end of the book, she gets sick and dies. In the
afterword her friend Stephan Bodian writes:
‘Yet toward the end of her life, we could only watch as the
realization slipped between her fingers like so much sand,
leaving
her frustrated and confused.’ *
Suzanne Segal was a unique case, and her situation involved
a brain tumor; but in general, when ‘the experience’
– like all experience – turns out to be impermanent,
one might mistakenly consider this as a personal failing.
Like the condemned soldier, one may end up chasing the
experience, which is missing the point completely, much
as one of the actors in the following story does:
Imagine watching a movie in which two men walk toward
you. The setting is a desert. The sun is blazing overhead,
and
a huge mountain range is visible in the distance.
One of the men stops and says to his companion, ‘Do you
realize
that this is all an illusion and we are just variations in
one
single light appearing as us, the sun, the sky, and the
whole
landscape?’ His friend looks puzzled as he continues. ‘ This
whole world we see is a flat screen, though it appears as if
there
is space all around us.’
Now his friend gets slightly worried. He thinks perhaps his
buddy has been affected by the heat, so he asks, ‘Are you
feeling
all right?’
‘Absolutely fine! It is just suddenly obvious that all this is
really
nothing but a very clever illusion appearing on a single
background.’
‘Really,’ says his friend getting slightly annoyed. ‘Please
show
me this background.’
‘Well look, here it is; right here touching us, carrying us.
It
contains everything we see.’ He turns and points to the
screen.
His friend follows his finger, but sees nothing but the far
off
mountains.
If transcendental experiences arise on ‘the screen’ of Pure
Awareness, so be it. If they do not, don’t worry about it.
There are people who have had such experiences and are
still seeking. There are also people who never had such
an experience and are clear on what they truly are. Human
experience is an ever-changing flow, but the clear
space of Pure Awareness in which this flow occurs does
not change. All there is is this presence, expressing itself
as the totality of manifestation, including everything, from
the most distant galaxy to smallest living creature, from
the illusion of space and time to the way you appear as a
character. This totality – both what arises and that in which
it arises – is your true identity. There is absolutely
nothing
you can or have to do, nor is there anything you have to
wait for to simply be what you already are.
Just
sit there right now.
Don’t do a thing. Just rest.
For your
separation from God
is the hardest work in the world.*