Netatmana

Realization

Not a guru. Not a therapist. Not a faith. Not a role. Not an idea. Not a name.

A negation of everything untrue.

In youth there was a first touch of Something; words from the Tibetan Book of the Dead — to die before you die — rang in the mind. I set out on a road, a long and much-suffering one, built on the false — through thorns to the stars: austerities, meditations, breathwork. Philosophy, psychological work. Bodywork, neuro-linguistic programming. Sport to exhaustion, sleep deprivation, fasting to depletion. Mystical visions of deities and beings, telepathic phenomena, the wish to leave worldly life altogether and go to a cave.

Meanwhile this life ran at full speed: building, achieving, accumulating, running, fearing, losing, suffering, sleeping. Learning. Destruction. Surrendering. It searched for gold and oil on every continent. It was stirred by ideas. It trembled in the wind like a dry leaf, steeped in experience to the marrow.

At some point absolute darkness swallowed the whole being. Strength ran out; it took blow after blow and was left without a single bearing. Events turned viscous as tar and barely moved; something simply stopped, as in a slowed freeze-frame, and would not like to unfold. One moment, sitting at a table in a restaurant after training in the pool, the heart spoke — stunned, I jerked off the chair, dropped the spoon into the soup and splashed myself all over at such a surprise. I froze, waiting for my heart’s last beat. What the hell is that?! I calmed myself, made sure that I could move, and hurried home on foot through the old town and the park. That night, and every day and night after it, for several weeks running I did not sleep again.

After the long fasts the body had already grown hypersensitive to every kind of matter, but this was something else: I began to feel everything with overwhelming intensity: fields, light, sounds — some of them simply terrible and unbearable. Car exhaust made me choke outright. Water from the tap turned into a dreadful substance. Unable to bear the city any longer, I moved to the country. Mostly I could only lie down. In that state there was nothing left to do: at times I would go fully into the borderlands between sleep and waking, contemplating the body, watching with bare attention the organs down to the smallest structures of the organism. Thought, and the sense of the body, would sometimes vanish; waking and not-waking merged like soft tides on a warm windless day at sea. Inner and outer would sometimes dissolve in those days. I ate little, without appetite — food made it worse. Speech came hard, and the wish to speak was gone. Every part of my body hummed and rang horribly; my head rang at such a pitch that at times I could barely make out what was being said to me. All of it was run through by beats of the heart that made me flinch. The situation was turning apocalyptic; doctors refused to treat me and found nothing wrong. Used to strain of every kind, and knowing my body’s resources well, I thought: a little more and this would be the end. A dreadful anguish came down on me, and I jumped into the abyss of the current.

Spending another day laid up in bed, I picked up a book — one of those I had set aside. By then, not long before all this, I had firmly decided never to return to spiritual search, nor to the literature on the subject, of which I had accumulated plenty: I was disappointed by the fruits I had tasted, having never arrived at satisfaction. I opened the book at random, in the middle, and read literally a few lines — when all at once, in the blink of an eye, total silence reigned. The moment of realization is like a whole life, a totality; it cannot be overvalued, and it is even more impossible to grasp by intellect alone. It is the way dawn comes: gradually, then all at once — one searing flash which, taking its throne, darkens everything. The mind disappeared and left an empty shell. What was seen is more precious than anything ever searched for. There is nothing to acquire. No words truly carry this. They can point the way.

What astonishes is how near THAT is, and how simple. I even allowed that it might be a temporary phenomenon, a flare-up of my condition: it would vanish as everything before it had vanished — a fading impression, a dull memory. On the contrary: everything changes, and this stands unmoving. For a time I simply remained in it, silent. There is no difference between I and THAT; these are only figures of speech. Speech was lost for several weeks; a radiant smile — I am bliss. Gradually the functioning of the organism returned. The nervous system is stunned by the realization, and the shock is carried differently: in some it is so intense that the integration of the experience ends there. It happened that I can pass this on. This page is for you.

The seeing is yours the moment it happens — it comes with its own authority and needs no one’s confirmation.