What does it mean to actually awaken? We frequently distinguish between practicing meditation to help us be healthy human beings and a whole way of being with ourselves and others that is supported by meditation that will enable awakening, but what is this ‘awakening’ exactly?
Well don’t hold your breath, I can’t really tell you because to do that I would have to know and even then words would inevitably fail me. However, I can tell you about several meetings I had with someone some years back which left me convinced that I was with someone who was deeply in the process of becoming awakened quite spontaneously. The person - let’s call her Jane for convenience - came to me because she needed to find a way of being with this utterly extraordinary experience that had happened to her. So let me just talk about me - sitting with her felt like being in the presence of something - not someone - enormously powerful, a mass of light condensed together that could be seen within a brown paper bag that was full of tears and was falling apart. The light was the awakening that was spilling out and the bag was the remnants of her personality. When she spoke on those first occasions it was the bag speaking - “I have had this thing happen to me.” And I too could feel it - that sense of something we talk about as spacious awareness happening in me, I guess I was picking it up, a kind of sympathetic distant echo of what Jane was experiencing. Then there was a gap when we did not see each other and then we met again.
Since that first meeting the process had continued and strengthened. The energy/light was still there but now it was far stronger. It was more like being in the face of some vast natural phenomena - being in the centre of an electrical storm, trying to keep ones footing in an earthquake, standing on a beach facing a tsunami - and the brown paper bag was now no more than shreds. And here comes the really important bit. When she spoke, it was no longer the bag speaking, it was the awakened nature speaking through what was left of the bag. Her locus of identity had shifted. Just like the Buddha said of himself when someone asked him whether he was a man or a god? he said I am neither, I am awakened.
As for the experience of sitting with her this time - this too is impossible to put into words. It was like someone had picked up my usual experience of resting in spacious awareness and super-charged it so that it felt like it was bursting out of itself. I have had only one other experience of something like this and it was when I was in my early twenties and experimenting with psychotropic drugs. Full of an ecstasy accessed through LSD I stood on top of a hill at dawn straining to go just that bit further and entirely shatter into joy and light. Sitting with Jane was not so extreme but it did clearly convey that whatever this thing, this natural phenomena, we call awakening is, it is not something that we achieve through changing our personality. It is something that comes from outside of the personality that happens to it. Being with Jane, the sense of the awakened nature in me was increased and intensified, everything felt extremely clear and intense. Not in anyway, weird, mystical or frightening. Not an altered state. I suppose it is what is called a ‘transmission’.
So feeling scared? Deciding here and now only to practice meditation to be a healthy human being. Wanting to keep the paper bag intact? Well certainly any normal paper bag would sense that its awakened nature spells disaster - that was what all the interviews in Why Can’t I Meditate? finally revealed. But on the other hand we all love the mystical poetry of those like the Persian Sufi Rumi who crave to be consumed by the fire of the divine. Why would this be if it did not speak of something we too feel? Either way we need not worry. Jane’s experience, sadly or not, is extremely rare - it probably will not be ours in the next couple of weeks. However, the good news is that while we cannot ‘make’ awakening happen by anything we do, we can create the environment in which awakening may occur and this involves all kinds of good things that will benefit others as well. Generosity, treating everyone and everything well, patience that is a kindness, not being disheartened, meditating and allowing a wisdom to unfold which finally may turn into the speechless immensity Jane gave me a minute and fleeting taste of.
NW. 23.5.24
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