Spontaneous Awakening

1996 or 1997. I had met my teacher, Gangaji, earlier in the year – grace led me mysteriously to her doorstep (that is another story) and although her invitation to “call off the search” resonated deeply, although there was a strong “yes” vibrating through me as I heard her invitation, I was still suffering. I was still seeking outside of myself for something to satisfy me, complete me, make me feel whole, ok, worthy, and safe. I was still comparing myself to others – especially others in the sangha who seemed to have something I did not have. What was wrong with me? Yet, I knew I was in the right place even though I often felt trapped in the swirling muck of my fear and doubt. I came to every event Gangaji offered – weekly Satsang, weekend retreats. I volunteered for the events, stayed as close as I could, hoping to finally understand the teaching, gain the right insight, become more spiritual. Grasping for something to ease my suffering.

One Friday night, the eve of the opening gathering of a weekend long retreat held at Stinson Beach, all of this was about to change. I was eating dinner alone in a small restaurant along the beach waiting for the retreat to begin. At another table in the restaurant sat a few members of the sangha – others who were volunteers in the close-knit community. As I watched them eat together, laugh together, seemingly be at ease with each other, I felt the familiar ache of being left out, a desire to be in included that was uncomfortably intense. I could feel an ocean of separation between my table and the table where the others were gathered that seemed to hold the longing of my entire lifetime, and it felt unbearable. Longing for connection, union. Longing for belonging, longing for love. Longing for the sharp pain of separation to cease. Longing to dissolve and disappear, longing for annihilation. But in that moment, it felt like this longing was a longing to sit at their table and laugh. And I could have pulled up a chair and done just that, but I didn't.

Instead I paid for my meal, gathered my journal in which I had written of the pain of this longing, the pain of a lifetime of feeling isolated and excluded, and stood to leave. And everything changed.

As I turned to walk out of the restaurant, all form disappeared for an instant. There was no wall nor roof, no table of other people, no ocean, no sky, no me. The veil of form had pulled back to reveal what is within all form, beyond all form, what all form gives the illusion of obscuring – vast, endless, spacious silence. Is-ness, presence, peace.....all words are too much, too small and yet are This. What a moment of grace, pure grace. No doer, no doing. Nothing at all and everything – empty and full.

There was no time, and yet a moment later form reappeared. The restaurant had a roof and walls, the table of others was there just off to my left, and there was a “me” with a body and a left side. There was ground and ocean and sky. Everything just as it had been, but nothing was the same. Not ever again.

I walked out of the restaurant and drove to the Community Center for the first Satsang of the retreat, and although there was enough sense of someoneness to drive, to walk into the hall and take my place on the cushion, there was no one. Spaciousness moving through spaciousness, silence driving silence through silence. I felt on fire like the sun, shining, radiating, alive. As Gangaji invited reports, my hand went up, and I sat next to her sharing this experience, holding her hand – light meeting light.

To this day, I remember the words she spoke in that moment - “This, give your life to This, not to the doubt that will arise.” “Yes!, Yes! Yes!” arose joyously from my whole being. And since that night this life has been given to This. Doubt may arise, but it can no longer be believed, a sense of separation may arise, but no longer believed. Instead it is experienced as the Divine play of emptiness expressing itself as apparent form, never not emptiness, never not silence, never not This. What Grace.

Now don't think that awakening is the end. Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of a life lived from your true nature.

~Adyashanti