Dear K_______,
First, I need to know if you felt anything regarding me on Tuesday night 12/28. Do not read any further until you answer that for yourself.
Following is some of what I wrote that evening as well as this morning:
Something happened tonight. I received the Merrell-Wolff papers I was waiting for and immediately began reading them. One paper called “The Induction” is a transcription of a meeting in which Merrell-Wolff specifically tried to induce an experience in the participants. As I was nearing the end of the article, tears suddenly started pouring down my face. In one sense, I started crying before I knew what was happening, but in another I knew that God was in the room.
The tears just kept coming, then my head was gripped by a pain which got worse and worse until I finally curled up on the floor. The pain and the tears waxed and waned. Once or twice, I got to my chair, but then it would resume in intensity.
I saw Everything. I saw the end of opposites. There is not black or white. There IS. IT IS. Beyond the mind is Everything. My mind didn’t die, but it went to the edge of death and saw that it is not. It is not and that’s okay. Eternity is in us. Everything is here right now. The mind is not eternal.
It’s too much for the mind to remember. The experience somehow bypasses the mind. The pain must be from too much voltage passing through a thin wire. If it goes on too long, the wire burns out.
It is the End. It here right now, just below my thoughts like a current, a deep fast flowing tremendous river that will wash the mind away.
It’s like the God in me met the God in Merrell-Wolff’s paper. But that gives the wrong impression because there is nothing but God. It is utter density, an infinite weight, an infinitely deep ocean, IT IS, IT IS, and IT IS and a million times over until nothing else is there. It alone Is.
We cannot live in the Absolute. There is no functioning when there are no pairs of opposites. Incredibly, though, the mind forgets. I completely see how Rose could be as he is now. Forgetting doesn’t matter, though, because the mind isn’t real. We don’t take our personality with us. It is nothing compared to what Is. Maybe our personality is like a drop in the ocean, but who cares for that drop when we are really the Ocean.
I remember I wasn’t afraid, there was nothing to be afraid of, but I didn’t want to die because I felt I was supposed to tell others.
Again, I didn’t die, but somehow I saw the pairs of opposites and saw they were not. At one point I started reading the last book of The Three Books of the Absolute. I only made it to the part where he says “O eternal spaces, art thou black or white …” and I knew the answer. It knew it was No. And I knew that language could never convey what No really means. All I could do was shake my head as my mind answered no and no and no.
All along my path, I sensed that if I just kept at examining thought, that eventually the mind would give (and give is the right word, give as in break) and yield it’s secret. It’s a matter of finding ways to keep the mind looking within.
I wrote this at some point in the evening:
God is here. He rings in the death of all we know.
Rejoice, the end begins.
A new life. Nothing ever the same. We are everlasting.
Rejoice. I am free. Behind these words flows everlasting Light.
It’s back there. Doors open. Look inside.
This is my way. No plan. You cannot follow, but you must try.
God is here. God IS HERE now.
This morning, there is the memory, but the memory is not the experience. I have no desire to go through that pain again. My mind does not purposely want to go back to that experience. Even though my mind remembers it is not real, it does not want to dissolve. The pain was psychic/mental. Like working on a difficult math problem multiplied a thousand times in intensity. I see why Saul fell from his horse on the road to Damascus. I also understand John Davis when he said what’s important is that man goes into the abyss and comes out with something.
It is an abyss. Like someone jammed a pipe in my mind and that pipe led to the infinite blackness, but a living blackness. How can a blackness be alive? I can’t explain it. It’s not like in terms of the “I” being alive. It IS. Now, shout “IT IS!” while slamming your hands on the table. That’s the certainty.
And I want to get this in writing and get it to you because immediately, even during parts of the experience, I had the thought, “I’ve got to tell this. What if I die and no one knows what happened?” There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a Final Answer. There is an End to life, but it’s not oblivion. It is an alive Void. It is utter Completeness. It is There. I have no idea if it matters that the mind realizes this. No idea if there are other lives, bardos, or even an oblivion. All I know is that our particular hunger has an answer.
Now, rereading this paper, I see the Certainty is not expressed. If I could take a concrete block and slam it into your face, that might convey the feeling. It’s a crude image, but the only one I have at the moment.
Shawn