Excerpt from Spiritual Enlightenment

I never fully believed in the far-fetched experiences that people claim to have. So easily it could be spun up for validity, for authority. However, I had been desperate to escape the existential dread that’s clung to me for all three decades of my existence. With nothing else left, I began a path towards a mysterious and potentially fictitious realm.

Early morning but after sunrise, I sat for my new ritualistic hour-long meditation. The past week I’d been feeling oddly in a state of more than serenity. It could only be called bliss. In the past, my hypochondriac side would have convinced me that it was somehow a tumor pressing against my brain in such a way that it was the only possible explanation for such a feeling. But these last few days I’d been feeling too blissful to hear that side of my mind. In fact, my mind itself was beginning to fade into nothingness.

It was the strangest week of my life, leading up to the strangest moment of my life. All week, animals were acting very strange to me as if I was now appearing in a dimension that only they could see. Birds landed on my lap, strange cats stared at me through my windows, squirrels ran up to my feet and glared at me in my own eyes. A school of hundreds of fish swam up to me within a foot of the shoreline, jumping and flipping themselves in the air in front of me.

For the whole week, I couldn’t dream. In fact, I wasn’t even certain that I was sleeping. In the moments that I fell asleep, a part of me was fully aware. Still awake. Falling asleep felt as though an inner self was slipping out of my body and doing a somersault above me while my body slept. It was spectacular but easily the most jarring experience of my life, until that day.

I sat in my usual chair, not anticipating anything anymore. I had been so happy that I forgot all about the experience of “enlightenment”. In fact, I was so blissful that I thought maybe it had already happened.

With my feet tucked beneath my legs, the pressure of my body against the chair began to disappear. Transforming from pressure to weightlessness. My eyes began to close, and in waking, as in sleep, a separation formed between myself and my body. However, now my body was not asleep. Every cell in my body felt very awake, while at the same time very distant.

Though distant from my body, it felt as if every small part of me was connected to every atom and molecule in existence. My body felt hollow as if I could feel the space between each one of my cells. I was no longer a solid object, just a gathering of particles that could blow away at any moment.

I remained floating in this feeling for ten minutes or maybe an hour, all the while feeling as if something were building. I began to notice that my breathing was becoming deeper and more pronounced. Slowly, the feeling of separation began to gather and pinpoint itself. I felt as though I was splitting off from myself at the point between both of my eyes. I realized that with this feeling, my heart was pounding. It began beating so violently that I felt it knocking hammering against the inside of my chest.

My breathing deepened and quickened, and it felt as though my head was being pushed backward through a force that was not my own. Without rebuttal, I allowed the heaviness to lean my head as far back as it would allow, all the while my heart beating faster.

If I could have felt fear at that moment, I would have been afraid that my heart would grip and cease under the pressure. My entire body became covered in a cold sweat, and my open hands shook with the rest of my body. There was no escaping the momentum, I had no control to stop the movement of what was happening in my body. And I didn’t wish to. My heart raced, my body convulsed, and I was panting for breath but deep within me I was observing, I was collected.

After some time, I felt a crescendo of pressure and finally a release from my brow. The weight of my head lifted and I began to lean forward. My hands shook still, but my heart began to settle down. I opened my eyes and could barely look at the sky. To see the world was too beautiful and I immediately began to cry. I was sobbing, and couldn’t begin to control myself. It was as if I could see the world for the very first time. Without a filter, without the veil of my mind shading the intensity. It was the veil I’d been wishing to lift for many years. Finally, I was face to face with reality.

I slunk to the floor, hands still shaking. After the last few days I wasn’t completely surprised at such a peculiar event however I realized that I couldn’t deny the intensity. It couldn’t be caused by anything else. Everything that has been said before, is real.