TWO ACCOUNTS OF NONDUAL AWAKENING: WHICH IS MORE AUTHENTIC -- AND WHY?

 First Account:

    "I have no descriptive talent, I don't know the words to paint a picture; I can't tell you, so as to make you see it, how grand the sight was that was displayed before me as the day broke in its splendor. Those mountains with their deep jungle, the mist still entangled in the treetops, and the bottomless lake far below me. The sun caught the lake through a cleft in the heights and it shone like burnished steel. I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I'd never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. I was so happy that it was pain and I struggled to release myself from it, for I felt that if it lasted a moment longer I should die; and yet it was such rapture that I was ready to die rather than forgo it. How can I tell you what I felt? No words can tell the ecstacy of my bliss. When I cam to myself I was exhausted and trembling."

Second Account:

    [The teacher concludes his statement, during satsang, "Just for a moment, allow yourself to directly experience, who are you?"]

    "When he said these last words, the whole world stopped. It was just complete stillness. Then suddenly, the first sound I heard was the ocean crashing against the beach, and I knew immediately, 'I am this ocean out there! I am the ocean.' I looked at the room which was me as well. 'I am the people. I am the chairs. I am the microphone. I am this body.' I wanted to say, 'I'm everything.' As soon as I wanted to utter this, it sort of popped and gave way to limitless transparency, a transparent nothingness that could not be located specifically. Yet everything was made out of that. I couldn't speak anymore."

See the following post for the answer!

Embodying the Christian message

I heard something so deeply meaningful on the radio this morning that I haven't yet fully digested it.  But I want to share it while it is still fresh and perhaps gain some insight by doing so.

The man being interviewed was Jean Vanier who founded an organization called L'Arche Communities. (You can find it here: https://onbeing.org/series/. I greatly recommend these podcasts.) In L'Arche Communities, which now are numerous and all over the world, mentally "disabled" and "normal" people live together without being labeled the way I just did. The whole point is love and  movement beyond the separation that is born of ideas about who is better or worse.

I'm not saying it the way Vanier did. This man is full of compassion -- it's in his every word and in his tone of voice. And what he said gave me just a glimpse of what has always puzzled me about Christianity: what is this dying on the cross thing about?

Weakness, vulnerability, and the willingness to suffer are what it's about, according to Vanier. It's the opportunity to let in another's suffering and know it as our own that allows us to become truly human.

I am reminded of something that happened to me long ago: I encountered a beggar on the street. Whereas I usually moved away in fear, this time I felt for some reason I wanted to give him money. I actually went to have coffee while I pondered this! I didn't want to give out of pity or out of an idea of what I "should" do. In the end, I decided that if I felt moved, I should give him something, just a small coin. Maybe I would find out why I wanted to do this in the doing of it.

When I dropped the quarter in his can, the man said "thank you." But it didn't feel like the "thank you" came from "over there" -- our of his mouth. It was as though the bottom fell out my mind, as though I'd fallen down an infinite well of consciousness where there wasn't any "here" and "there." Over the years, as I've experienced this in other contexts, I've come to understand it as the mind opening to the reality that we are not separate, except to the extent that our minds build a "thought barrier" to the "other." In that moment, it was as though the "thank you" came from me, but a much larger "me" than the one I usually knew myself as.

Still, even as I came the experience itself became less mysterious over the years, I always wondered why it happened specifically with this one person, a street person whom I didn't even know. I wrote to my spiritual teacher at the time about it. He responded, "YOU are a beggar." I recall not really liking that response very much. Now I'm wondering if he didn't see more deeply than I was able to follow.  It seems to have been a moment when I myself became the "poorest of the poor." I was not giving out of pity but because something in me -- not my ego or my rational mind but something deeper and purer -- responded with the universal love that comes out of the humanity we all share. This is what I heard in Jean Vanier this morning.