lol, I would estimate about 15% of my waking life to date and a smaller portion of my dreaming has consisted of "spiritual experience," with maybe a dozen discrete "events," and only two I can think of involving any intoxicants (one was my "tapping the timewave" this NYE).
One of the most influential and spontaneous, which I never do justice in describing, came when I was fourteen. It was summer, and my stepbrother and I had camped out in sleeping bags on the lawn, out in the woods (two of our neighbors were hunting cabins). In one corner of the big lawn was a pine tree about 5 stories high, where flocks of starlings would gather numbering into the thousands, so the sky would go black if they took off.
That morning, probably around ten based on the sun, I woke up but didn't wake up. Awareness dawned in me without any thoughts or volition, without me present. My eyes remained closed, but the sensory information permeated my awareness: the cacophony of the starlings, the warmth and light of the sun, the smell of the grass and the pressure of the earth. Except it wasn't broken up into different inputs: just one awareness, without subject or object, and no boundaries.
No telling how long it lasted, but my stepbrother, who had been up a while, came over and lightly slapped both my cheeks, really waking me up. "Hey, you'll get sunburnt," he said, and I just sat propped up on my elbows, staring at him, putting the experience together and realizing how far it was from anything he could understand. It had been so direct. I, my sense of myself, was an illusion. Separateness, the very idea of things, was an illusion.
I somewhat have access to that view now, as a result of meditation and mindfulness training, but I don't know that it's ever been as clear and direct as that moment. At the time, it was easily the most beautiful thing I'd experienced in my life.
|
|
Bookmarks