Spiritual experiences of enlightenment and self-realization
First satori: temporary state of enlightenment
It was my sophomore year at Bennington College in Vermont. My sister had come to visit from Maine. The last day of her visit, she was very busy with classes and meetings with teachers.
A few things happened that morning.
One, I was waiting to meet my sculpture teacher, playing hackey-sack with a friend while I waited and heard a big CRASH behind me. my friend said
“Wasn’t that your sculpture, Kip?”
And sure enough, while I was there, my wooden sculpture – animal carvings attached like a mobile, a mobile that had been hanging for months from the ceiling suddenly broke into small pieces while I was standing there!
Then, as I was waiting to meet my sculpture teacher, I was late to see my Improv Tutor, who canceled classes because I missed the session. This was all my fault and I knew it.
My girlfriend was also accused that day of being a racist because she said that violence doesn’t have good results (they were talking about the Los Angeles riots in the early 90’s in her police class) And since many of our music teachers were African American, it stung for her, because she suddenly had to defend herself against everyone (we really idolized some of those teachers, she was anything but racist).
None of it was heartbreaking, but all of them together plus a couple other things left me pretty drained, like they were pushing me beyond my limits of what I could handle at once (I could be pretty anxious to begin with).
It was like things were falling apart around me. (including my sculpture!) I asked my sister if it was okay if I just meditated for half an hour and she said yes, I would go out into the sunny fields while putting my headphones on in my dark room, sit on the wooden floor and I closed my eyes…
There was an instant and complete acceptance and surrender to everything that was happening. I accepted it all and let it go. It’s not something I actually did, it just happened. And in that, this individual form completely dissolved and only darkness remained.
Back then, I knew very little about meditative states, so I had no idea what was going on.
I didn’t care, because in my absence, in the absence of mind or body, there was only darkness. The complete absence of any stress at any level. Coming slowly out of this blackness, there was such peace and bliss, so pleasurable yet so natural. It was like I was experiencing my natural state for the first time. Like everything before, this was not natural: it was a resistance to this state.
Nothing intense, just a soft sweet bliss moving through me. There was the feeling that this body was so small and meaningless and the universe so huge and vast. And at the same time, a deep connection with everything. The universe, everything and everything was not separate from me. I was a drop in the ocean. The drop is absolutely meaningless and the ocean gushes out unconditional love, peace and bliss.
I met my sister Kate, she was lying on the grass. She was laughing at me like a little child. She teased me and I laughed harder, there was no way she could explain my state so I didn’t really say anything. I just walked her to her car, had a cigarette, and said goodbye while she drove back to Maine.
My whole world had changed. Suddenly nothing mattered, everything was love, peace and bliss. That was the joke. Not a concept, but that was the truth, beyond words, beyond perception or understanding.
I walked to the dining room, grabbed my lunch, and found my roommate at a table. Before eating my veggie burger with cheese sauce, I tried to explain to him what had happened to me.
He was trying to explain that nothing mattered, that it was all love and peace and bliss. That this little me that we all care so much about was nonsense, it was small compared to the vastness of who we really are… And because we made this little thing important, we couldn’t experience the big picture: the huge vastness of everything that took care of everything. Which very nature was peace, bliss and love. Like a huge father radiating love. However, paradoxically, this little “I” was not separate from the Father.
My words fell on deaf ears. My roommate was suffering deeply from his crush on a beautiful woman (usually my suffering, not his!). In speaking to her, he had assumed that only by explaining the truth would he, too, experience it and come out of her suffering. But it was as if what she was saying bounced off him like rain off an umbrella.
At that moment I realized that I was alone in that room. That no one could hear what she was saying. It was quite an epiphany to realize that, and probably one of the factors why I emphasize CDs like The Calling can energetically put you in a state that I was in because words alone can be pretty useless.
Because everyone is in their own reality, trapped in their individual prison and unable to even realize that there is this vastness of consciousness that they are a part of. That this small reality that they consider so important is so unimportant. A great cosmic joke. Having said all this, words do not touch it. Knowing it intellectually is meaningless. But experiencing it, as truth, takes all the weight off your life, and then you are weightless. This is how I felt: weightless.
It was not me who changed my consciousness towards the truth, it was something that cannot be defined, call it grace. This is the great mystery. Because one moment you are preoccupied with your little life and the next, you are one with the vastness and alive in unconditional love and bliss. And there’s no way to really see how you got there.
My other epiphany sitting at the lunch table was that this newfound truth was unfortunately only temporary. And the combined stress of everyone around me on an energetic level was reducing this awareness, pushing me further and further into the individual self. I was watching this happen. However, there was acceptance and I ate my lunch. In a few hours, I gradually became this little me again.
I guess on some level, I thought this state would come back later, maybe in a few hours. But the hours turned into days, the days into weeks. Weeks to months…
It was some time later that I found in the school library a book called “Autobiography of a Yogi” by Paramahansa Yogananda. And in the book it talks about this thing called enlightenment. And I drank every word like a man dying of thirst takes a drink of water.
School no longer seemed so important. I was wondering if there were any of these people who were “enlightened” today, if they still existed. And I planned to fly to India after I graduated and just walk around and ask people if they knew anyone who had this “enlightenment” thing and where I could find it. It was totally new to me.
It was as if since puberty I was looking for something more, that there had to be something else. My high school psychiatrist said college was the answer. And even though college was better than high school, she still left me searching. But suddenly I found what I was looking for. I hadn’t found it, but at least I realized WHAT I was looking for! And this was a great relief.
I am not sure if I related my previous experience to what Paramahansa Yogananda talked about in his book or not. But everything was really beautiful, everything was opening up. That spring, while my girlfriend was frantically working on her thesis, I was lying on her bed smoking cigarettes and reading “Autobiography of a Yogi” reading parts out loud because I was so amazed that this enlightenment thing had existed at least somewhere. moment.