Over the years of writing this newsletter, I have had several people ask me: “Russell since you help people awaken to their true nature how about you tell us one of your awakening experiences?”
I’ve never really wanted to toot my on horn on this until once again someone asked me the other day, “You know Russell maybe by sharing what you have experienced others may be helped in recognizing that they too, have similiar experiences and they are not alone?”
So I have decided to share an experience with you.
I was a participant on a self-inquiry retreat near San Francisco many years ago and on the third day I was out on a walking contemplation contemplating the question “What is another?” I was deeply intent on experiencing what other individuals actually were. I had experienced the nature of myself in another retreat and I was wondering: “Are others the same as me in their essence or different?”
It was apparent that the world was full of people that were unique in their presentation but was there something that was the same?
I walked up to the top of a hill overlooking the Bay. My attention was drawn to a large boulder and suddenly as I put my attention on it I felt the sense of myself in it. I thought to myself, “What am I doing over there?”.
I put my attention back on myself and the same sense of self was there. Then I put my attention on a tree and my sense of self was in it too. I asked myself; “This is very weird, how is it possible that I am over there?” My mind intervened and said this is not logical. It can’t be true.
Then I put my attention on the panorama before me: the sky, the bay, the sea, the landscape, the houses and I felt myself implode. It was as if I went crazy for a nano-second and suddenly went completely sane. Suddenly all my thoughts vanished and my mind got totally clear. The sense of myself was everywhere.
There was no difference between the inside and outside. There was no separate self. All there was, was one self: the self of all and it was me. Everything that I thought was on the outside was in fact in me. It was me…and I was everything.
When I say “me” I don’t mean an ego, a personality or a individual…all that was gone. I could best describe it as a universal self. There was a perfect sense of happiness, wholeness, contentment and completeness about the realization like I had finally come home.
There was a normalcy about it: this was the fact of existence and dwelling in any other sense of separateness was an illusion or abnormal. Then I walked back to the workshop room and met my fellow participants.
I saw that they too were that universal self but they were unaware of the wonderful magnificence within them. I instantly fell in love with them all and at the same laughed at the absurdity of how we were already fulfilled yet desperately searching for happiness outside when it was already inside.
They were in me and I was in them, in this cosmic eternal dance of consciousness becoming conscious of itself.
I understood the value of individuation…that consciousness needed to take on the illusion of individuality…for as we each related to another individual, the whole became more conscious of itself while each individual was paradoxically the whole. I understood that the whole of the universe was in a grand relationship like a mobius strip ceaselessly revealing itself to itself.
Ever since then I am constantly reminded that every kind of relationship and every act of communication has an element of sacredness to it. The universe is our relationship and we are all, one to another, unfolding in it.
The remarkable thing about this experience is that these kind of realizations are now available to everyone who has a sincere desire to inquire into the nature of self, life and others and who want live from a deeper place in themselves.
I am just an ordinary bloak just like every other person, but each ordinary person can have these special experiences.
It doesn’t have to take years or a lifetime.
Just as technology has advanced, so too have methods of awakening. The technique as practiced on the Coming Home Retreat is one such method.
Check it out here and then get back to me if you want to further explore the self-inquiry technique that I teach on the retreat. Coming Home Retreat