You Aren’t Going to Find It There. Or There.
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When I was 21, I had a profound meditation experience that completely altered my perception of reality.
It brought what, at the time, I might have called “God” down to earth. It made the transcendent, immanent. The intangible, tangible. The unreal, real. From this point forward, the transcendent was no longer an abstraction or an idea, something or someone “out there.” I knew now that THIS, whatever this was, could be directly experienced—even by arguably the worst meditator on the planet (moi.)
THIS felt like such a blissful, powerful explosion of love, I didn’t want to come back. The sort of love that makes the type they serve up on The Bachelor laughable. (I do love me some Bachelor though.)
This is the gift of mountaintop experiences. In mere seconds the mountaintop can show us the entire mystery of life. Maybe it’s not meditation but a song that touches our soul, the birth of a child, the first bite into a slice of pizza.
Whenever so-called time, and the so-called mind, stop—we get a glimpse of the timeless, the formless—which, albeit briefly, reminds us of the timeless, formless essence that we are.
Yet, as I would come to learn, there’s a potential downside to these types of experiences. The temporary feeling they bring can easily be mistaken for the real thing, which can lead to an endless search for more of such experiences, which means we miss the peace, and freedom, that’s always here. As Alan Watts puts it, we become like the donkey with the carrot suspended from his own halter, forever seeking something we never seem to find.
That was me for years.
It’s so easy to confuse the feeling mountaintop experiences bring for the deeper realizations they point to. To confuse the “achievement” of temporary states of being for the permanence of BEING itself. For so long, I thought: how do I get back to “that place”? Why don’t I feel that ecstasy every time I meditate? What was I doing wrong? How do I make that joyful-loving feeling permanent in my life? Isn’t that what enlightenment is? Permanent joy?
Eventually I would come to realize that all searches, even spiritual ones, are a form of egoic longing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a search for enlightenment, happiness, success, peace, a new car, freedom, true love, whatever. Anytime fulfillment is put anywhere other than right here, right now, real fulfillment will be missed. Period. It’s that simple.
BRINGING IT ALL HOME
The mountaintop experiences may offer bliss. They may even change the trajectory of our lives and be wonderful, good, necessary, healthy, and forwarding. But the fulfillment, and wonder, that comes with the experience will only be temporary if we miss the point of the pointer, which is to see that what we are seeking is always here, no matter what life’s outer packaging happens to look like. Happiness, sadness, vacation, work, Covid-19, or a beautiful sunset, it’s all made of the same stuff.
BEING, the transcendent, consciousness, love, energy, awareness, source, creative intelligence, “God”—choose your label—THIS, is always herenow. And, tag, you are IT. All experiences that arise within consciousness are just experience experiencing itself. Awareness awaring itself. You you-ing you.
As Eckhart Tolle puts it: “There is no ‘you’ apart from the universe. You are the universe temporarily in the disguise of a person.”
Hee-haw,
KB
