PREVIEW:
SPIRITUALITY HAPPENS
Four Major Turning Points In A Rather Eccentric Spiritual Journey: Some Brief Synopses
by Dennis L. Trunk
Part 4:
A Sudden Transformation
or
Doing Quantum Leaps on Mount San Jacinto
In 1974 I visited Palm Springs for a day along with a friend. Toward late afternoon we ascended to the top of Mount San Jacinto by aerial tramway, and after enjoying the view and the cool air, we went inside a lodge to sit down and sip Irish coffee.
We had been seated for only a few minutes and were in the midst of a casual conversation when I noticed that my friend bore a remarkable resemblance to my brother. But just as I was about to mention it, I caught up with the weirdness of the perception. In fact, I didn't have "a" brother; I had several. He resembled none of them, and what I was seeing had nothing to do with them.
Before I could sort out the contradiction, his image wavered and my perceptions underwent a profound transition. In a rush of awareness, I remembered that he had died long ago. Now my mind boggled with astonishment that he was back again and actually sitting before me. That just wasn't possible. Even more strangely, I felt responsible for his death, and to see him alive again was both deeply confusing and a great relief.
Astonishment passed over me in waves, but again I had no chance to examine what was happening. In a quantum leap, my awareness soared to a new level. I began to be bathed inside and out, from head to toe, by paralyzing currents of energy which were alternately rising and descending, sometimes flowing smoothly and sometimes very roughly. I sat rooted to the chair, barely moving, able only to report to my friend each modification in the event as it occurred. The energy's hurricane gales felt so intense and boisterous that I thought everyone around me must be aware of them. But even in the midst of the wildest intensity of the experience, my friend said that he had never seen anyone so relaxed. He, too, felt the energy, but much more mildly.
It was an hour or more before the currents stabilized into a smooth unobstructed flow and I could stand up. By that time the effects of the experience had reached peak intensity. The room seemed transformed and glorified. Whatever I looked at sparkled with beauty and vitality. I felt blissful and ebullient with joy, uncontained and absolutely free, expanded and exuberant. All constrictions in consciousness had been blasted away and replaced by a fullness of being. I was open-ended consciousness, without borders or edges, without a center, relating uninhibitedly to everyone and everything in my surroundings. I felt able to function more freely and easily than at any other time in my life. It was self-evident that this state of awakening was normal and complete, and that the usual state of human consciousness was obsessive, painful, constricted, depleted and abnormal.
Another hour passed as the experience continued with full force. But it was getting late, and we had to leave. While we waited for a tram car, I observed the crowd of people we stood amidst, certain that they could feel, as my friend did, some degree of the deep peace I felt. It was night when we descended the mountain, and the city lights far below glittered like jewels. But although the tram was packed and swaying over a dark bottomless void, the crowd seemed extraordinarily tranquil and hushed, conversing in soft tones.
While driving back to Los Angeles, I felt the expanded state of awareness slowly subside and the usual state begin to piece itself back together, focusing particularly within my abdomen. Like watching film footage of a breaking window being run backwards in slow motion, I observed the fragments of the shattered center of anxiety and daily concerns being restored.
The center was clearly a process, an activity, an obsessive habit, a painful wringing sensation sitting in the middle of our daily lives, constantly demanding our attention and regulating the soap opera of our lives. It is the usual state of consciousness for most people, and because of that it seems normal. But there is nothing normal about it. Compared to what I had experienced, it is a form of madness. I understood more clearly than ever Henry David Thoreau's observation that most people lead lives of quiet desperation.
The center and the constricting activity in consciousness that causes it are what the spiritual teachers of the East call the ego. The ego cannot be enlightened. It is not a being. It cannot get rid of its pain, because its own activity is the source of the pain. It is like a terrible sore that won't heal and that stimulates a frantic effort to find relief. It is founded in fear, protected by fear, and all of its activity is motivated by fear. It is the source of the suffering and sense of separation that spiritual seekers are trying to overcome when they go searching for enlightenment.
The experience on the mount showed the innately blissful nature of consciousness when it is no longer obsessively attracted to or repulsed by the things and events that arise within itself - in other words, when it no longer identifies with and participates in the process of the ego. Consciousness is already enlightened. That is its nature. But it has forgotten its edenic state through ignorance brought on by attachment to what arises within itself. In the logic of the ego, events and things are separate from the ego and happen to it, and so it reacts. But in the logic of consciousness, events and things happen within its boundless self, not to it. Consciousness merely experiences whatever arises.
Nothing is added in enlightenment. The process of enlightenment is a negative one in which indulgence of and identity with the ego activity gradually or instantly ceases. What some call dying to oneself is just as accurately called waking to one's Self.
By the time I had returned to L.A. two hours later, the experience had almost completely faded into memory. Like most other spiritual experiences, it was transient and did not cause any permanent change. On that basis I would have dismissed it as just a passing entertainment. But unlike any other, it had shown me in a dramatic, full-blown manner what had often been shown to me so subtly in satsang with Franklin. I knew the fundamental truth of this experience - that consciousness is already complete in itself. It was a revelation of reality. What I needed was to make it the ordinary, everyday way of living.
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