Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. I stopped and read a line or
two. I flipped the page and read another. Three or four pages into
it I had a meltdown. Tears streamed down my face. The knot in
my solar plexus (that had been there for so long without even
being noticed) unclenched. I suddenly, irrevocably realized I was
not a separate individual with a personal consciousness that
“belonged” to me (residing between my ears) but rather, an
underlying awareness that was now somehow perceivable. I had
been blessed by grace with an awakening I was not even looking
for. In that moment there was joy, grief and relief. I realized that
eternity is here and Now; a deathless reality. What joy! But to
experience that Truth, I had died to myself as a “real” i.e.
“separate” person that should be taken seriously. All of my prior
striving for happiness, primarily through my relationships with
women, I realized had been completely unnecessary. And with
that realization, a huge burden was lifted. There was nothing I
needed to do, learn or gain. I had come home to my Self. I
intuited or perhaps better said – had the “felt sense” of the
immense sanctuary that is nothingness.
As the tears of ecstasy flowed down my face, I could immediately
sense that a veil of illusion that kept me out of the flow of life was
lifted. For the first time, there was tacit realization that the seat of
awareness was not between my ears but rather infused my
physical form which merely borrowed its sentience from “that”
ocean of sentience. Simple Being was awareness itself – timeless,
formless and without beginning or end. I was, for lack of an even
more exuberant description (I would use if I had it), “God” itself,
an impersonal, nameless, eternal reality.
Curiously, tears of grief streamed down as well- as though I were
attending the funeral of my very best friend – and that friend was
me, Trip. That man who had tried so valiantly to always do the
right thing, who had suffered so much despite his noble intentions,
that beautiful man was mortally wounded. I would like to say
dead but that has taken some time. Crucially, in that very moment,
the arch of my life shifted from one of doing to one of Being. With
that paradigm shift has come a causeless, priceless joy that
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