Presence is looking to sneak up on you. Enlightenment seems to show up on its own terms. Even as you do your spiritual practice, even as you put the pedal to the metal with your Tapas (and I do encourage that!), all along the road of growth, the Self might just come when you aren’t looking. You may very well find yourself living as the Self when you are distracted by the deepening Silence and the growing currents of Bliss and Wholeness that follow in its wake.
My own life has been peppered with these instances. The following are a couple memorable experiences. It was two days after I had arrived at the Ishaya monastery on the Oregon coast. I was an 18 year old spiritual zealot, so much so that I often went around with a look on my face that communicated crazy and focused. I felt that I really had to put my all into it, partially because I felt myself deficient in certain helpful dispositional traits, such as humility! People were always telling me, “hey Thomas, you know you can relax” and I would keep going on as before. Then, I began to have a dream in which I found myself in a birch forest, a 6-year old version of myself smiling at me. I was overtaken with the desire to meet my younger self, but the quicker I approached, the more elusive he would become. This went on for two nights, until I became semi-lucid in the dream, and decided to just be still. As soon as I did, my own inner child came right up to me, and reached for my hand. As soon as he grabbed my hand, I was sent into the deepest, clearest, and most expansive Silence I had to that point experienced.* My eyes opened to a very early morning and an experience that was completely saturated in the Silent Presence. Something was fundamentally different, although I didn’t know it.
Less than a year later while chopping onions in our café, I looked up from my cutting board full of onions, and realized that I was only this vast Silence. I seemed to be chopping onions. There were thoughts flowing here and there, there were mantras being thought in between those thoughts, but the whole world was tiny compared to the endless depth that was really running the show and chopping all of those onions.*
It should also be repeated that every step back into the Self is movement into something we already know deep inside. In those beautiful moments when I’ve seen someone consciously recognizing Samadhi for the first time, it’s never really been the first time. We all know that space. It has been with us for our whole lives, it just happens to be a much more subtle layer of experience than what we were conditioned to experience. This sense of rediscovery
Dive into your practice with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, embrace every moment, appreciate and accept everything, relax into it all. Grace is coming hard for you, for there is an active conspiracy for your own Awakening. Enlightenment has just been waiting for you to stumble back home.
*There is much wisdom and evolutionary potential to be found in lucid dreams.
*The facet of evolving consciousness known as Witnessing is a wonderful sign of progress. Resting back into the Witness is a doorway into rapid growth. Relaxing into the Witness while chopping onions may be doubly so.