So there I was, having survived my first year of graduate school, having come to terms with the self-concocted nature of my own perceptions and the uncertainty of my certainties. And there I was as well, having long ago ceased questioning what had begun that January 4th, some seven years prior. I had let go of my fantasies about the perfect life it was to produce and how meditation would make it all better.
But the silence I feel in my shoulders and through the window this morning has an insistence to it I didn’t expect. It would have none of that doubting or wondering or forgetting or remembering. It was simply oblivious to my doubt and queries and, for that matter, my ignoring it. Silence just remained. Whether I noticed or cared or asked about it, it just kept on. Gentle, humble, present and real.
But by my second year in graduate school, 1979, the expansion had expanded quite a bit. What had begun as a thin strip across the back of my neck had thickened to now fill roughly the back half of my head. I was too busy with school and money worries and marriage and life to pay it much mind, but it was there, still, silent a faint and steady worm hole behind my ears to infinity.
So when I read in class after class endless accounts of life changing mystical transformations and of enlightenment, it was only natural to compare—even if only half consciously in the beginning—what these ancient texts were describing with what had been with me for nearly a decade.
In the a-systematic and serendipitous way discoveries like these always happen, I began to hear a strangely consistent but unexpected melody wafting out from between the lines of the classics of the spiritual life. And it was same deep thrum that had haunted and confused me for so many years.
The first religion I happened to study was Hinduism, in a course taught by the Professor Brereton whose remark on the Vedas had so unnerved me. I was sitting in the far end of the Columbia Library reading room, looking over the little book he had assigned, The Vivekachudamani, The Crest Jewel of Discrimination, by the famous 9th Century Hindu philosopher, Shankara, when I grunted right out loud:
The knower of the Atman does not identify himself with his body. He rests within it, as if within a carriage. … He bears no outward mark of a holy man.31
A “knower of Atman.” Strange phrase. He or she is someone who knows the quiet inward awareness, the sense of “I am,” within. Atman is sometimes translated as “soul,” but it is less personal than the western term. It’s more like awakeness or mere consciousness. And after the shifting, we come to know it, or rather be it. It somehow becomes our core sense of what we are.
Shankara was saying that one who knows Atman, this silent consciousness, experiences himself as resting within himself, “as if within a carriage.” One senses oneself to be something inside that is of a different kind and quality than anything of the outward body or thinking mind. One comes to sense oneself to be, says Shankara, as if “riding within” the body. To know Atman, in other words, is to sense oneself as within and separate from one’s thoughts and physical body.
This is what made me grunt out loud: “Oh my God,” I realized, “that’s just what happened to me!” Silent consciousness had indeed established itself inside. It had become the core of who or what I am. And it did seem to be as if “riding in” my body, and of a whole different kind or quality. What I am, that new sense of “me” that had dawned half a decade earlier, had become in some sense other. It, Atman, consciousness, was not “identified with” my body or personality, as he wrote, but more some unmoving sense of “I am,” a fullness within the body. In but not of. I would never have used such clumsy jargon (but of course I’m not a Hindu philosopher). Nonetheless using Shankara’s language, I seemed to have become a “knower of Atman,” and like a silent passenger in a carriage.
It was the second line that really got me though: the enlightened “bears no outward mark of a holy man.” I had vaguely expected from Maharishi and Yogananda and the hagiographies of the Buddha that an enlightened man would automatically give rise to the kind of belly-dropping awe that led us to stand up whenever Maharishi walked into a room.
But no, a knower of Atman “bears no external marks.” He or she won’t necessarily talk, walk or look the part. They won’t necessarily be happy or good at their father’s business. They might not be able to keep a relationship or a marriage going particularly well. And they won’t glow in the dark.
Could one even be anxious? Depressed? Even lonely? “No outward marks” could be anything, anyone. It’s nothing special. He’d be just a guy, like any other guy, who happens to know himself to be Atman inside. As if riding in a carriage.
After I read this I tracked back in history and soon stumbled across this passage from the earlier and much beloved Mundaka Upanishad:
Two birds,
Inseparable companions,
Perch on the same tree.
One eats the fruit,
The other looks on.
The first bird is our individual self,
Feeding on the pleasures and pains of this world;
The other is the universal Self,
Silently witnessing all.
Here it was again, absolute and relative. One who knows “the universal self” is like being two “birds” at once: one pecks noisily and flutters about, the other just looks on. Whatever this sort of person does or thinks, the first bird, active and noisy, is “silently witnessed” by that second bird, the quiet “Self.” That Atman bird, which I understood as mere consciousness, is simply aware of whatever that first bird does, thinks or feels. Nothing flashy, paranormal, awe inspiring or necessarily happy; the second bird witnesses pleasures and pains.
Well, I thought, that’s me too. The silence had indeed established itself in my skull and was “behind” — and witnessing — everything I did or said. The witnessing part was, like these, doing nothing, beholding everything, just conscious. Two birds indeed: an eating, feeling and whistling bird and I was a witnessing one. I was living the Upanishad’s existential duality!
Of course, I’d never use such a self-aggrandizing term as the “universal self.” But, I found myself thinking, if I put my attention solely on the silence inside, maybe it is in a way “universal.” Whatever I say, think or do is connected with me, Robert. But nothing about the inner silence is specifically Robert-ish. It’s more characterless, personality-less, like an “it.” In the sense that it’s not connected with me personally, I thought, I guess it is kind of “universal.”
Hardly the stuff of great mythology, but still…
Another passage a few pages later in the Upanishads struck me:
Yet when the mind becomes clear,
And the heart becomes pure,
Then can the Self be known
And those who know it enjoy eternity.32
I sure as hell wasn’t “enjoying eternity.” Yet if I put my attention only within the interior silence, this again was weirdly accurate. The interior vastness was, after all, utterly unchanging. What had dawned in 1972 was precisely the same spaciousness that was still with me in 1979, except it had now expanded into more of my cranium. In itself it was the same dizzying bottomlessness, utterly without movement. Consciousness itself was without movement or change. Perhaps I was “enjoying eternity.” Not quite the “joy, joy, joy” I had been after, and yet …
In other words, if I dropped the grandiosity of what I’d heard from Maharishi and other gurus, these ancient texts were describing quite accurately what had begun in me half a decade before. Consciousness was riding in the body, witnessing. I lived a twin-bird duality of consciousness and activity, seer and seen.
If Shankara was right and there are no outward marks to this sort of thing, then my earlier fantasies that that such a change would make me successful or happy or thin were all wet. These texts weren’t describing personality transplants. They weren’t chronicling a perfect life, joy in the everyday or smaller waistlines. They were describing a new structure. Drop the glorious exaltations, drop the flashy outward marks, and what I was encountering in text after text was humbler and more precise: a shift, a newly dualistic structure, in the relationship between consciousness and its content. Which was, strangely, just what I was experiencing.
The second religion I studied was Buddhism, in a course taught by the avuncular Fred Underwood. Professor Underwood was one of the best teachers I had at Columbia, but alas would soon be denied tenure (whether for his failure to publish or his outrageously droll sense of humor was a matter of hot debate).
The Buddhist word for enlightenment is probably the most famous of them all: Nirvana. It comes from the Sanskrit roots nir + √ vā, Underwood taught: to cease blowing, to blow out, to become extinguished.33 It is “the highest and ultimate goal of Buddhist aspirations, the end of all suffering and misery.”34
When I first heard this definition, “Nirvana” seemed to be denying the world. In it the world seemed to be “blown out.” But, I soon came to see, Buddhism defines all its key terms in an opposite way than did the Hindu teachers I had read and heard.
For example, Buddhism’s word for consciousness, vijnana, doesn’t point to some persistent awakeness or awareness, as Maharishi and Shankara had used such terms. Rather to be conscious, vijnana style, has to do with being aware of or connected with mental content. Being vijnana includes being involved with the window, the stove, these words. So when someone stops or “blows out” consciousness in Nirvana, he or she stops clinging to thoughts, sensations or the outward world in the old way. Awareness itself doesn’t stop in Nirvana; one doesn’t go entirely blank. One certainly doesn’t die! What gets blown out is the felt-connection with one’s thoughts, feelings, etc.
I saw this clearly in the Diamond Sutra, one of the most revered Buddhist texts.35
In enlightenment, it says, one stops “allowing the mind to depend upon notions evoked by the sensible world (44-45).” That is to say, thoughts don’t cease. Rather one stops the vijnana process of “depending” on what one sees, smells touches. Thoughts or perceptions happen, but I don’t “depend on” or “cling to” (trsna) them. That leaves one separate from content.
Similarly, “the mind is kept independent of any thoughts which arise within it. (45)” One is independent of, disconnected from, unattached to whatever one thinks or sees. We have thoughts and yet somehow remain aloof from them, independent of our thinking. Dare I say witnessing?
Such people, the Diamond Sutra goes on to say, don’t cherish “the idea of an ego-entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality (31).” If some meditator student did hold onto the sense of a separate self, “he would necessarily partake of the idea of an ego-entity, a personality, a being, or a separated individuality.” If I sensed myself to be such a separate personal self, I’d be involved with, attached to, it. I’d depend on it. (35) So in Nirvana one gains “freedom from separate personal selfhood.” (62)
This is not to say that the enlightened being ends up without a personality. He or she will still be funny, thoughtful, foolish or stubborn. We don’t cease having characteristics, personalities.
What we can do, and this seems the point, is to stop “cherishing,” i.e. being caught up in, our personalities, our bodies, our egos. We can come to sense ourselves as separated from these, sense our bodies and personalities as “out there” as it were, or as “not connected with” that which we know ourselves to be (as if riding in a carriage). We can pull ourselves away from the fiction of “me,” in other words, and hold the personality and ego as unconnected with what we are inside. We come to be alone and quiet:
Who sees Me by form,
Who seeks Me in sound,
Perverted are his footsteps upon the Way. (65)
This “Me” we’re after is not found in form nor heard in sound. It is beyond them all.
In other words, what we have in enlightenment, Buddhist style, is a shift in the structure of the human being. The sense of ego, personality and sensations come to be encountered as unconnected with that non-form, non-thought quiescence that one senses inside. To blow out vijnana, to disconnect from the thoughts and activity on which I have depended, is to blow out (or separate ourselves from) the content of our minds. What we blow out is not awareness in itself, but the seemingly inevitable linkage with whatever we see or feel.
To describe the quiescence one encounters inside, Buddhism offers another famous term, “shunyata.” The enlightened one is said to be or know shunyata (emptiness). This is based on the image of something that’s “blown up,” like a balloon, and as if empty on the inside. Again shunyata at first seemed to be world-denying, pointing to some lack, some emptying out. But no. It’s describing what it is to be awake and un-attached inside. One becomes empty of content, empty of particulars: shunyata.
“Jeez-oo-wiz,” I realized, “it’s the same damn thing that Hinduism is describing as fullness.” Someone in the state of Nirvana knows that which is awake but removed from ego as shunyata. The Hindus call it fullness. But in the end are a contentless fullness and a full emptiness really that different?
The more comfortable I’ve become with Buddhist language, by the way, the more I’ve come to prefer the term shunyata, “emptiness” over “Brahman” or “Christ Consciousness” or even my vaguely Hindu term, “bottomlessness.” For the sense of spacious silence that whispers itself through my body, into the room and out through the windows, walls and hills outside is, in itself, empty of content. “Shunyata,” an emptiness, seems to catch this well. An empty fullness perhaps?
Ancient Buddhist texts like the Diamond Sutra are awfully grand. They’re great teaching tools. Yet the more I’ve read them, the more convinced I’ve become that the transformation they’re describing is much the same as the Upanishads’, Shankara’s and, yes, my own. Can we have been overblowing enlightenment to this extent? Can it be that a modest yet permanent shift in the structure of consciousness is pretty much what those wizened old sages were after, and that such shifts aren’t peculiar to any one religion or meditation program? Can it be this simple?
A course in Christian mysticism came next, taught at Barnard College by a diminutive but energetic Professor Parham. She was pinch hitting that semester, and was hardly an expert. But she introduced me to several wonderful figures, one of whom I soon wrote a book about: Meister Eckhart, Mystic as Theologian (if you can forgive the plug).36
I certainly had never expected to see enlightenment described so well by some westerner, much less a medieval Christian friar.37 Nonetheless despite Meister Eckhart’s antique imagery, I found myself swimming once again in familiar waters:
The soul has two eyes, one inward and one outward. The soul’s inner eye is that which sees into being … The soul’s outer eye is that which is turned towards all creatures…through the powers.38
“The soul has two eyes.” One of them points outside. With this outward orientation we see, touch, move around, etc. Sometimes Eckhart calls this worldly side our “outer man” or “outer powers.” The other “eye” “sees into being.” Turned inwards, this one beholds what we are at our depths.
Sound like the Upanishad’s two birds to you too? “Something” inside—he sometimes calls it a spark of the infinite—witnesses all our activities and perception. Something unchanging is separate from and attentive to that which is changing.
Eckhart describes such a state as analogous to a “door and a hinge.” Think of some thick medieval wooden door swinging open and shut. That’s like out outer man; we move and talk and swing around. But the hinge pin holds the door to the wall. Like our “inward man,” it doesn’t move. It “remains immovable.” Like the Upanishad’s second bird, something active is held by something still and detached. Here’s the whole passage:
However much our Lady [The Virgin Mary] lamented and whatever other things she said, she was always in her inmost heart in immovable detachment. Let us take an analogy of this. A door opens and shuts on a hinge. Now if I compare the outer boards of the door with the outward man, I can compare the hinge with the inward man. When the door opens or closes the outer boards move to and fro, but the hinge remains immovable in one place and it is not changed at all as a result.39
Here again is a revered thinker depicting a significantly different structure of awareness. He calls such a transformed life “the geburt (birth) of the son in the soul.” An active, worldly man is outside, as it were, alongside something silent, unmoving and inner. This inwardness is the “son in the soul.” Here again is the the very dualism that had confounded me for so long.
I found hints of something similar in The Cloud of Unknowing and St. Theresa’s Interior Castle. But the book that sealed the deal was the last we read that term: Bernadette Roberts’s The Experience of No Self.40 Perhaps because she shares my modern sense of autobiography, or maybe because she didn’t spin it much, her memoir was the piece de resistance.
Bernadette was an ex- Christian nun, a mother and a housewife. She had regularly gone to a local chapel to meditate. On previous occasions, she wrote,
. . . I had come upon a pervasive silence of the faculties so total as to give rise to subtle apprehensions of fear. It was a fear of being engulfed forever, of being lost, annihilated or blacking out and, possibly, never returning. . . .
But on one particular afternoon, as she was concluding a meditation,
once again there was a pervasive silence and once again I waited for the onset of fear to break it up. But this time the fear never came. . . . Within, all was still, silent and motionless. In the stillness, I was not aware of the moment when the fear and tension of waiting had left. Still I continued to wait for a movement not of myself and when no movement came, I simply remained in a great stillness. . . . Once outside, I fully expected to return to my ordinary energies and thinking mind, but this day I had a difficult time because I was continually falling back into the great silence.41
Bernadette had occasionally encountered moments of inner silence, she tells us. They had come and, as fear rose up, gone. But that day those old fears just didn’t bubble up and the silence simply remained. She waited, she thought, she stood up, and still the stillness persisted. She walked out of the chapel, “like a feather floats in the wind,“ and drove home, still in stillness. She’s remained in that silence ever since.
For weeks she tried to get a fix on this strange new state of affairs. She asked her teachers, read St. John of the Cross, went to the library. Nothing helped.42 (Imagine if she’d tried a decade of graduate school!) But coming home from the library,
walking downhill with a panorama of valley and hills before me, I turned my gaze inward, and what I saw stopped me in my tracks. Instead of the usual unlocalized center of myself, there was nothing there; it was empty; and at the moment of seeing this there was a flood of quiet joy and I knew, finally I knew what was missing – it was my “self.”43
Her old, vague and “unlocalized” center, her sense of a discrete self, that unconscious but comforting sense we all have that we are a thing, a person with a name, an I — that had disappeared.
I actually laughed out loud when I read this! I’m not sure if it was her astonishment, her confusion, or her honesty, but her response seemed so wonderfully believable. She had no idea what to make of it. She had no categories to make sense of this newness at the core of who she was, this silence. And her doubt, astonishment and discomfort all seemed so wonderfully human. But finally her discovery that what had shifted was her sense of self, the loss of that unlocalized center, was painfully familiar.
“Yippee,” I felt, “I am not alone! There’s a league of the transformationally confused!”
One more aspect of her experience was the clincher. At several points she described that she felt like she was wearing something like “3-D glasses.”44 In all my readings, by then in pretty much every major tradition and many minor ones, I’d never seen anyone mention of that odd 3-D sense that I’d first encountered in those clouds over the Mediterranean (p. 48 above). Maybe this aspect of the transformation wasn’t just my own private weirdness but somewhat more common and that whatever had happened to me wasn’t so damned idiosyncratic after all!
I found a last passage reassuring in another sense. Over the next few years, still with silence inside, she too had to wrestle with some pretty nasty emotional upheavals. On a walk in the mountains, for example,
I was aware that all life around me had come to a complete standstill. Everywhere I looked, instead of life, I saw a hideous nothingness invading and strangling the life out of every object and vista in sight. It was a world being choked to death by an insidious void, whereby every remaining movement was but the final throe of death. The sudden withdrawal of life, left in its wake a scene of death, dying and decay [that was] monstrous and terrible to look upon.45 [It was like the world was being overwhelmed by] “icy fingers of an unknown terror and dread”46
I personally have never faced this particular terror. Nonetheless I found this passage powerfully reassuring not for the particulars but for the fact that she too had nearly overwhelming and challenging emotions. I had felt so much initial confusion, I think, because I was both settled inside and still depressed, angry, anxious and afraid sometimes. To hear that she was enmeshed in a great silence yet also churning left me feeling less crazy. Silence isn’t necessarily cheery and it may not be “such a joy, such a joy.” One can live in a “supreme state” yet have a complex set of perceptions, confusions and emotions.
Thank God: someone else struggles!
There was no eureka moment, no single magic sentence. It was more like coming to hold a mountain aloft by a thousand sticks. In text after classical text, from East and West, in classics from Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and agnostics, from writers ancient and modern, it eventually became obvious.
“Enlightenment,” moks.a, Eckhart’s geburt (the birth of the son in the soul), nirvana, the “no self”— are all lionized in glorious and poetic prose. Moks.a is “perfection,” it is “absolute.” It is “eternal joy,” “the immovable,” “the end of all suffering” and “such a joy, joy, joy.” For the Christians it is to witness something of God is born in the soul. But once I had dug my way through the “glorious gloriousnesses” and the “resplendent resplendents,” enlightenment became not some perfect life, but rather a much more specific psycho-physiological transformation.
Enlightenment, as I was seeing it described in countless texts from every major tradition, is a shift in the relationship between consciousness and its objects. Enlightenment is the unmingling of a commingled reality.
Before the great unmingling, we know only the structure within which we all begin (at least I think we all do). We see objects, think thoughts, feel feelings, etc. and in the midst of it all we may be able to sense some vague or “unlocalized” sense of our selves, as Bernadette Roberts puts it. We all begin with consciousness and its objects co-mingled.
This is how it had always been for me until that January afternoon in the Hotel Karina. I suppose I would have pointed to it somewhere in my chest, but I couldn’t have picked out consciousness itself. Who or what I was was part of the jumble of experience, and in itself largely inaccessible.
Oh, in peak meditation experiences or in odd moments just before I’d fall asleep, perhaps, I could sense myself as nothing other than consciousness. But these were at best fleeting.
Hinduism calls such short lived moments “samādhi.” Yogacara Buddhist texts speak of them as nirodha samapatti, the “cessation of perception and feeling.” Sufism calls them ‘fana, “the annihilation of thoughts.” Meister Eckhart uses the biblical term gezucket, rapture, or being without sensory content.47 In far too many academic books and articles I’ve called such moments “pure consciousness events.”48
In these brief moments, one is aware of no particular content for awareness, yet still remains awake inside. Not thinking of anything, aware of no feelings or perceptions, consciousness is left, very simply, alone. And because one is aware of no objects, we might describe the “structure” of experience at those moments as consciousness having no relationship between itself and its objects: consciousness alone, no content.
But the second structure is both more complex and more interesting. For this is the first permanent shift, the first stage of enlightenment. (There are others to follow, by the way.) Consciousness now perceives itself in itself, and as distinct from and witness to everything one sees and does.
To Buddhism this is Nirvana, the “blowing out” of the separate self. For Eckhart it is the geburt, the birth of the son in the soul. For Hinduism and Jainism it’s moks.a, release. Maharishi used the phrase “cosmic consciousness,” a term of painfully embarrassing hubris. For Ramana Maharshi it’s the more modest sahaja samadhi, “all time samadhi.”
In it there are two birds, separate and different in kind. One now knows oneself to be spacious, bottomless, open and empty of content. And this new vastness is sensed as separate from everything one sees or thinks. This expanded consciousness is that “for which” there are thoughts and objects. The knower is now steady, waveless, unchanging, and the silent witness to the full parade of life.
The mystic, for that is what one has now become, may not understand the great unmingling, even for many years. Bernadette didn’t. I didn’t. But a shift of this depth cannot be missed. It is that different.
Life doesn’t become perfect though. The great unmingling does not grant one eternal joy (except, perhaps, in a very narrow sense). Life as a whole does not become endless bliss. One’s marriage doesn’t become perfect. And it doesn’t cure baldness.
Expecting such a pot of gold was my mistake, and the mistake of many I suspect. A change in the structure of consciousness, no doubt has, in the long run, implications for how one feels, talks and acts. It may come to involve letting go of that which holds us psychologically, greater happiness or a new attitude towards one’s ego, which is how many spiritual modern self-help teachers tend to present it. But such psychological changes were not what I was seeing again and again in the classical texts or in my life. There is a difference between an insight that breaks through and a break through into a different experiential structure. The shift I was seeing in the classics was one of experiential or existential structure.
This a structural shift—modest, understated and peculiar—in what or who we are at heart, a shift in the fundamental way we encounter ourselves and the world is hardly the stuff of inspiring mythology. But it is an unexpected gift of grace. And not at all nothing. Held aright, such a gift makes possible a life well beyond anything we can beforehand imagine.
The last jigsaw piece slipped into place in the early 90s. I’m not sure if I want to tell you this in order to reassure myself, to create more confidence for what I have to say, or because I’ve promised to tell you the truth and this just happens to be a piece of the story.
About a decade after I had read all those accounts in graduate school, I was invited to several small gatherings of spiritual teachers at the fabulously wealthy Fetzer Institute, which was looking to develop its spiritual programs. I often found myself sitting next to Ram Dass, several years before his stroke. I came to admire him a lot during those weekends. Despite the beads and robes, he was about as humble and as reflective about his own craziness as anyone I’ve ever met. We were two monkish and neurotic Hin-Jew spiritual teachers, talking about spirituality in a ridiculously sumptuous setting, and we laughed a lot.
During a break I took him aside. I had never been able to talk to anybody about my experiences, I told him, and I wondered him if we could chat.
We sat, knee to knee, in front of a great bay window. I told him about what had begun two decades earlier. I told him about the planes of silence moving down my body. I described the pins and needles in my neck and the tubes unzipping into emptiness. I told him about the changes in my sleep and my vision. I narrated the expansion of silence and of several other shifts I’ll tell you about later. And I told him that since I’d left the TM world, I had never had anyone I could turn to for confirmation. He understood. He asked me about the pins and needles and about my meditations.
Finally he said, “Yes, this sounds like what we talk about.”
“This is what?”
And looking deep into my eyes with his bottomless gaze and a kindly smile of recognition, he said simply, “yeah, this is that.”
One simple sentence, “Yeah, this is that.” And all my self-doubts, all my wonderings and confusions and disillusionments simply vanished. “Yeah,” he said again, “this is that.”
I smiled and thanked him. Then I locked myself in a nearby bathroom and I wept. I just cried and cried. Finally I could stop asking the damn question! I didn’t have to wonder if I was imagining things. Finally I could be sure I wasn’t making all this up. “Yeah, this is that.” What a simple act of love his was.
Nothing inside changed that day. The silence was still silent, the expanse still expanded. But everything changed. Now when I thought about my life or about the silence that had by then grown well beyond my skull, I could now in good conscience compare it to what I was reading or hearing. When I talked with others or encountered new spiritual texts, I could now plausibly use my own experience as a touchstone. (Indeed I could now begin this book with a bit more confidence.) And I could stop the endless tumblings of self-doubt.
There was probably also a little ego in my weeping as well. I have to admit I liked (and still like) being able to think of myself in that heady light.
Sometimes I’m sorry that I didn’t buttonhole Maharishi back in the day and ask him if the shift of that January was the much ballyhooed “cosmic consciousness.” It sure would have saved me many years of wondering.
But no, on second thought I’m not sorry. Painful though it was, all my confusion and self-doubt led me into graduate school, into the philosophy of mysticism and into the academic debates in which I played some role, the so called Katz-Forman debates (see below). I did it all in part to resolve my life-perplexities. Had Maharishi looked at me and smiled, “Yes, dis is dat,” I would no doubt have stopped wondering. But then I wouldn’t have had the privilege of asking my questions, my way.
I became pretty cynical in that first decade after the great unmingling. When I was a young graduate student, I “knew” that enlightenment talk was just self-talk, just a way to gussy up hope.
But like the Buddha outside my window, emptiness has a way of persisting. It simply remained all those years, half-forgotten, patient, present. I dismissed it and I got all cynical about it and I reduced it to neuro-physiological quirks so that I would sound all smart and knowledgeable. It just waited, in the background, steady, constant, unobtrusive. And pulling ever so slightly. It drew me slowly out of my clever cynicism and out of my disillusionments.
It just remained as what it was, growing imperceptibly year by year, witnessing it all, whispering its quiet music into my life.
I was in real trouble in my twenties: desperate, half suicidal, anxious without letup. No wonder silence was not enough. It did not provide good mothering and it did not lead to happiness. It did not make my marriage work, my stocks go up, or my anxieties fade away. For anyone in real pain, I doubt it would have been enough.
Because it wasn’t what I had hoped for, I missed what it was. Breaking out of the endless layers of a chattering mind, untangling the self from its content, even in just a tiny sliver, was, I now realize, a gift of enormous value.
For permanent silence offers real access to That which is not us. Contact with the really real, perhaps even with God, is a rare privilege. It is warmth and strength and peace in a storm-tossed mind and a fragile world.
Over the nearly four decades it has now been at my core, I have come to rely on its presence. I count on its steadiness, lean on its good humored simplicity, occasionally enjoy its visual depth. But because I was looking for a cure for heartaches, I missed what it was.
So yeah, Ram Dass, this is it. This is the open consciousness. This is that which is other and divine. This is the infinite planted within as consciousness itself. And I just didn’t know. It was too ambiguous, too paradoxical. But its very ordinariness makes it that much more real.
I doubt there is a one size fits all here. I suspect that the great unmingling can come as a whole orchestra, when the stars and suns swirl into a unity with the soul. Some seem to become suddenly wise or clever or charismatic. Others of us, not so much. But the great unmingling, the separation of witness from object so final it remains even through the deepest sleep, is, I think, the same for everyone, no matter what the religion.
It would take many years for it to soak thoroughly into my body, years more to weave it into the rest of my life. That process is not yet complete; I doubt it will ever be. But the vastness that so transformed my life, seated comfortably on my couch in the Hotel Karina, is the same as I sense sitting here this evening in front of the dimming embers and warmth. And probably the same everywhere.
It was just a tiny opening, the merest kiss. But it was a kiss of the real.
And even a tiny candle-flame begins to light the darkness.