It happened on the morning of Saturday, January 14, 1995. I was thirty three years old. There were a few moments where I thought I had experienced bodily death. It was an illusion of physical death. I did not die physically. Instead, I was given a gift of higher consciousness, I was given a glimpse of real life.
I had dreamed that there was a voice from heaven and I did not know it at the time, but this voice was doing a version what we in Yoga circles call "self inquiry." The tonal quality of the voice was very resonant and relaxed. It was a divine voice in that it inspired bhakti in my heart. I was in complete awe. I only wanted to serve this higher being, my ishta. Here is what my ishta asked:
"Why am I
in this place
at this time?"
I am filled with joy and I feel tears welling in my eyes as I hear in recollection that sweet, sorrowful question again now as I write.
I looked for the being that was inquiring, but there was nobody visible against the night sky of my dream.
What happened next was both what I most longed for and what I most dreaded: my ishta saw me and became me in my mortal body.
Suddenly, I awoke from my dream with a naked awareness of mortality: this physical body is going to die. I was horrified. I felt completely separated from my ishta as if my ishta had died. I was also in a place of deep compassion for all humanity in mortal flesh. If un-enlightenment is over-identification with bodily form, then that moment was complete un-enlightenment, complete suffering.
I just wanted to get back to normal. I wanted to be shielded again from awareness of mortality, shielded by ordinary, natural wakefulness. To that end, I decided to take a deep breath, and that is when I realized I could not breathe.
My inability to breathe was a result of what psychologists call "sleep paralysis." It happens upon awakening suddenly from a dream such that the mind is awake, but the body is still in the paralysis of sleep, the paralysis that keeps us from acting out all our dreams. It is a normal function, and most people have conscious memories of sleep paralysis.
When I saw that I was in the paralysis that would not allow me to consciously take a deep breath, I recognized the condition and did what I had done before when that happened: I waited, trusting that soon my breath would naturally return. But while I was waiting, something happened that had never happened before.
Suddenly I felt a combination of inner light, inner sound, inner vibration and inner lightness of air. The light was overwhelmingly bright and it burst forth from the center of my body outward beyond my skin. The sound was like a rushing wind in my inner ears, and it was very loud. The vibration gave a sense that every cell in my body was being turned into energy. And there an inner sense of being levitated up physically.
My initial response was complete utter terror. Reflexively, I tried to cry out, and flail my arms, and sit up. But I was paralyzed. All that happened is that I felt my jaw go slack -- I believed in that moment that my ishta and I had merged, had become mysteriously one.
That is when I gave up resistance and surrendered and in that moment, terror turned to a pleasurable thrill that was so amazing, my thought was that it was better than the best pleasure I had ever felt -- It was "better than sex!" That was my thought, "This is better than sex."
Also, when I surrendered, there was a shift in the feeling of my body. Instead of a heavy physical body, it was a weightless body of light. I thought, "Oh, so this is my 'soul'"
I assumed I was "dead" physically. I had a passing thought of wondering what was happening to my physical body, but I was simply unable to perceive my physical body. And in that moment of bliss, I did not care whether my physical body was dead or alive. I did not care whether I had only a second of "I" consciousness left. That NOW moment was more than enough.
In the next moment, there was no longer a body of light, no longer a loud sound like wind; instead, there was something like a gentle whisper of breeze, and a peacful darkness, and along with a continued feeling of rising upward, there a mental clarity. I was never so wide awake mentally. It was an experience of my mental faculty separated from my senses, pure bliss consciousness without a body.
In the next moment what happened can only be described in retrospect. There was nothing. Remembering that nothing is kind of like remembering deep sleep. I love remembering that nothing. I love remembering what it was like to have no conscious "I" and no anything. I love remembering it because of what it felt like to come out of that nothing and resume form.
When I awoke from that nothing, the first thing seen was like shooting stars in the minds eye. Then my whole physical body was back, breathing naturally, and I was able to move my body at will. In that stillness, my physical body was together with my "soul" -- the body of luminous weightless energy -- and my faculty of thought was free of content -- pure bliss consciousness.
Oh the sheer stillness, oh the transformed embodiment, oh the memory that is not just memory because it is present.
Nothing is form, form is nothing.
