You say that awakening and realization are events. Can you describe what happened to you?
Yes. The revelation, or awakening, took place during a moment of extreme emotional pain.
Attention suddenly moved from the pain into Consciousness itself. The realization was that there was no one suffering. It was Pure Consciousness and the suffering was there but no separate entity, or separation between the suffering and Consciousness, or between Consciousness and the witnessing of it all. No separation anywhere. Only one ocean of Awareness.
Despite the emotional pain there was a deep peace and freedom present. The pain did not go away. That is what matters about my telling you any of this.
The peculiar thing was that there was a prompting to look for “the truth of me”. And there was a response to that prompt. This is described in poetry in the poem called “My Clear Gaze” on page sixty of my book “Only You”. I wrote it minutes after the event. The poem is a literal description of what happened.
That is why I keep hammering on the notion that there is no separate entity, only Pure Consciousness and whatever appearance is present in the moment. Everything that I say here is my prompt to you.
An awakening, in my use of the term and based on what I am describing, is not the creation of something special in ourselves but the "remembrance" of what is most normal and natural in us.
After that awakening the sense of separation came back and suffering persisted for another fifteen years. The work continued and the personality matured and became strong mentally and many ideas and attitudes were eliminated, and negative emotions neutralized.
Then the removal of the sense of separation took place. Which I call Spiritual Realization. It was the most uneventful event there could possibly be. No fireworks or explosions, or the mind filling with light, or feeling of floating or falling, or visits from angels… Not even the awareness of it was provided.
I woke up one morning and the sense of separation was gone. Something happened during the night. The suffering and the seeking were gone.
After that, some residual suffering appeared a few times in the face of certain stimuli that would have created suffering in the past. But there was no involvement with it; it did not last or had any grip and Total Acceptance and Tranquility took over.
That is the state of a little child. That is the meaning of: “to enter the kingdom of heaven you must become like a little child”. However, the child’s mind was weak and was overrun by the forces surrounding it and became involved in the drama of duality, and all of its ignorance and suffering imitated from unbalanced adults.
In Spiritual Realization in a mature adult however, there can be psychological strength to manifest the simple Truth of Who We Are, and wisdom and compassion for all that we once believed ourselves to be.
Life and death, and all beings subject to them, are a dream. And there is nothing wrong.
