Waking up Slow

Samadhi is the state beyond all altered states of mind, and the state deep within all normal states of mind. It is the background silence between thoughts, between ideas. It cannot be written or spoken about, for it is the voiceless Word (logos) that comes before words can even begin to form in mind.

Meditation cannot really be understood intellectually, for the intellect is not the creator of meditation, nor the faculty that experiences meditation. Awakening is not rational, for it is a transcendence of rationality. From the peak of Samadhi, one can see both the rational and the irrational, flowing together into one river.

A small child is pre-rational. A mystic poet is post-rational.

They speak a similar language, but the elder child now carries a formless treasure. He carries a knowledge of great value – the journey through the dark valley of mind-identification, and out the other side of mind.

The mystic laughs like a child on an adventure, and cries like a world-weary adult, all in the space of one breath. He clings to neither emotion. He holds the electric polarity in his soul, and it sets him quietly ablaze. His fire burns inwardly, and few can see the light, few know the intensity. Outwardly, there is nothing special about any mystic. He has disappeared, and nobody noticed the disappearance.

Words are always poor substitutes for experience, and in this case, they fail hopelessly. I have tried many times to describe it, and will probably do so again, though the compulsion to do so has all but faded. For many years, I did not try to write about it at all, but focused instead on the insights that arose afterwards. Something within me keeps inspiring me to write, to share, and to explore.

The forest cannot prevent the season from its timely work of transformation, because the forest and the season are one. A leaf will fall on the day it falls, and not a day before. This is how it happened for me, at least. One day, the leaf fell…

I was 36 years old at the time, and on that happy day, I died alive.

I continued to die alive for at least another 10 days, in great, overpowering, almost orgasmic intensity, and then in further waves, less intense, but more enlightening, for another eighteen months at least. The process has continued to change and evolve for almost 15 years now.

The turbulent, exulting emotions have long since settled into a peaceful and abiding undercurrent. I have forgotten most of what I knew then, and almost all of what I have read over the years, but nuggets of knowing seem to pop up at just the right time.

Not knowing seems the most honest, and the most enjoyable, yet I cannot truthfully say that I do not know. Something here cares nothing for knowing or not knowing, in terms of facts and theories, but instead, it watches the slow gyrating dance of the trees.

At the peak of the series of awakening waves, the emotional-spiritual energy became so intensely beautiful that I actually suspected that I was going to die, physically, of happiness. I felt like I was going to melt in sheer wonder and rapture. Fear and exultation became indistinguishable, and above that turmoil was a floating sense of forever. The world was clearly ending. It just didn’t matter.

Looking back now, with more language available to me, I can say that what died was my attachment to my own small sense of self, my own thoughts, my beliefs, my confusion, which some ‘spiritual’ people call the ego. As I type this, I know that ‘ego’ is just a word, and probably not a very good one, considering the way the world mind works. This is just a hint, to give you a feeling for what happened.

Another way to express it would be to say that a fake caricature of me died that day, revealing a more honest, more real version. Another way is to say that the video game ended, or paused at least, revealing the true nature of the player. I died in the game, but that only revealed the fact that the game was unreal to begin with. That too is incomplete, but I will leave it there for now.

As it peaked, I sensed that the experience was taking a toll on my nervous system. Powerful currents of energy surged through my body, my head, my eyes and hands. I thought – “This is the end, then.”

I remember that I begged, in that moment, to delay my passing for just a few more years, because I had somehow come to feel, in two or three days’ time, that physical life on earth was just the most interesting, uplifting and incredible thing any being could ever know. I sensed, “This is why the whole dam cosmos exists – it’s bloody glorious, and infinitely interesting, and benevolent, and we all know it, though we keep forgetting all about it, or we try to explain it away. It’s the best game for light years in any direction!”

Before that, I assure you, I felt something like the opposite of that feeling, it was a dark, murky, gloomy time, but in that moment – I didn’t want the music to end. I didn’t want the dance to be over just yet.

I wish only that I could find better words to describe it, and a small part of me might even be tempted to regret begging to stay, that day, but not really.

I have thought about that part of it quite often. Was it the fake self that was clinging to life? Was it the real life clinging to life? I’m not sure I can answer that yet, nor am I sure that I want to answer that question anymore. I have become the autumn. I am the fall of colour. I am the rustling of the leaves, slowly turning to mulch. I am the rhizome network, the bee, and the sap.

Even now, with the clarity of hindsight, and a maturing of insight, life is still unbelievably rich, despite, and perhaps because of life’s shortcomings. Just like all concepts, all judgements are also relative, and therefore empty in themselves. I know this now, not just theoretically, but in a living way.

I know that I am going back into that gold, one day, and that I won’t have to wait forever – in fact – I know that I never moved an inch from that magnificent place. It is me. Always was. Always will be. The ‘afterlife’ is really just an ‘ever-life.’ Nothing was really here to begin with. (The river is flow). Even now, I chuckle at the suggestion that it might not be so. How ridiculous – and now, as a bonus, I can see how I forgot all about it in the first place. I thought I was a noun, and I thought that I needed to be a better noun. Impossible!

I have wrestled with trying to bring those delicious waves back, and I have surrendered. The attempt itself is the seed of unhappiness. I let that go, too, completely. I am that I am, and it’s so much more than enough.

I have no desire to die. I have no fear of death, and no fear of living either. My life is a gas, and a challenging, ever changing game, and lovely, and important, and heavy, and difficult, and quite meaningless, and full of meaning, and not so serious, and a laugh. None of these value assessments hold true any longer. There is no one at home, all the church benches are empty, and there’s nobody left in here to believe in them.

There is also deep compassionate, shared sadness, when I look at the human beings living alongside me. I would love to share this feeling with all of them, and I know, painfully clearly, that most of them simply will not hear. I know that it must be so, and I begin to see why. Nothing that led to this point in time could have happened differently for humanity. The forgetting is just as sacred as the remembering.

I begin to see the danger of trying to convince another human being that what I see is the truth. It would shatter them, and leave them feeling lost. Why should I steal their cherished beliefs? Those beliefs are worthless to me, but they mean everything to those people.

Perhaps you, dear, reader, are not so imprisoned in the steel cage of mind. Perhaps something here will stir a nerve or two. Perhaps your heart is ready to hear, I cannot know that. I let it be as it is, and let these words fall where they may.

Little leaves, many colored, drifting down, settling on this blank page, all in a line. See them for what they are, friend and fellow mystery. Kick through them with your heavy shoes, if you like. Delight in their scattering. Let them caress your toes, if you prefer. They are nature’s gift for you, for me, so please allow me to continue my account.

I am still dying now, only to be reborn each moment, in the rippling wake of that wondrous aha!

It is quite a curious experience, as you might well imagine, and I invite you to join me in this leafy dance, if only vicariously, as we go together and listen to the drums of our heartbeats tell our stories.  

Obviously when I use the phrase ‘dying to be reborn,’ I am not speaking of the normal, literal meaning of death. Neither am I speaking about the purely Christian meaning of being reborn. Far from it. This is something else, from another book, written in another universe, in a language as yet undiscovered by beings of any kind. I’m not talking about a Near Death Experience either, although that is actually a part of the prequel to this story, some ten years before the special day in question.

I am not going to explore that NDE preamble in this piece, since I have written about it elsewhere, and will likely do that again. In this attempt, I will try to boil down the nuggets of insight into crisp, clear expressions, or poetic lines, which sometimes come closer to truth, accompanied by explorations for each point.

The scope of the insight is so far reaching, so oceanic, that this text can only skip over the surface of it, like a stone thrown by a happy child. In another sense, this insight is so blessedly simple that any child could understand.

During the last decade and a half, I have read widely, and listened to a great many different accounts relayed by people who seem to have experienced something similar to my own experience. I felt compelled to do this, for a few years at least, in great gusto, and I read and listened with acute energy, given the magnitude of the psychic shock that came in the wake of the event.

I read whatever I could find on the subject, sniffing out the truffles between the roots and dirt. Since the internet was still not a big resource for me at the time, I had to make do with whatever I could scratch out of dusty second-hand bookstores in Pretoria, not the most spiritual mecca on earth; gathering cryptic clues from other writers that pointed me towards new sources of information. I had to wait many years for some books to land in my lap. All of this reading made little difference.

My mind wanted to explain what had happened. My heart didn’t care a bit – it was all quite obvious already. Something in me wanted to learn how to express this better. Something still felt like a baby, wanting to grow. My deepest core went with the flow of both impulses, alternating from month to month, year to year, book to book, mystic to mystic, one experience at a time.

I walked alone. I had no guide, no guru, no teacher. Life itself was the guru. My own bones instructed me. The river took me in its flow.

This was chapter 4.

Read the next chapter: Walking Alone

Read from the start: Wordless Self Reflection

Chapter 2: The Trouble with Sense and Sensitivity

Chapter 3: The Disappearing River