Opening To The Nondual Dimension Of Existence?

(Below is a description of one of the openings I experienced when I was younger. I share this experience not to confer any kind of status to myself about level of awakening and such, but because it was the inspiration for developing what I have developed today and serves as an experiential reference.)

I first experienced the nondual dimension of existence in my youth. Back in 1979, when I was 21 years old and while studying Jiddu Krishnamurti, a nondual spiritual teacher, I experienced a three-day period of awakening where all of a sudden, I realized I was not identified with my sense of self or conditioning to a large extent. I vaguely recall being really interested in what was there between one thought and the next thought as a contemplation. Other than that, there wasn’t anything in particular I did to evoke this experience; it just came spontaneously. I remember feeling connected to all of life and was awestruck with the unity and oneness in all life. I was this unified life. I recall there being an intelligence that flowed through me, something that I experienced as not my own. I spontaneously had understanding and clarity about things I never knew I knew. Things made perfect sense. My awareness was not confined to my body. There was the recognition of awareness being a few feet behind my body and even across the room. My energy was vibrant and perceptions vivid. I remember looking at a puddle of water in a parking lot when it was raining and was transfixed upon it for what seemed like an eternity. I became the puddle, as they say.

I viewed the world and myself in a different way. There was a calmness, a deep relaxation that pervaded my body as well as a lightness, as though my body was going to float away. I remember having this profound sense of contentment that deemed everything as perfect just the way it was. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to change. There was a spontaneous effortless engagement with life. I was in the flow of life. There emerged a profound sense of love for everything. The love was related to the unity of everything. There was a vague sense that this love upheld everything.

This experience was both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was the sense that I was able to have a taste of experiencing the nondual dimension of existence to a large degree. It gave me an experiential frame of reference to begin to understand nondual wisdom and awakening. Unfortunately, I did not have the internal structures in those days to help me abide in that open awareness. Too much ego there was and far too many unconscious core constructs that pulled me down into an identification with a conditioned life. I experienced a taste of the eternal love, but could no yet find the cup from which it came.

The awakened experience was a curse because, after it ended, I wanted to understand the “how’s” and “why’s” of what happened to me hoping to find a way to get back to that experience again. I thought about it as a state to be gained or lost. I remember being particularly haunted by those profound feelings of unconditioned love for myself and everyone else. I did what lots of seekers do — I zeroed in on a quality or attribute of the nondual opening and wanted to cultivate it to experience it again. However, this proved not to be effective because of the paradigm differences.

I view the awakening experience described above as residing on a spectrum of experience that is forever in flux. At one end of the living spectrum, the bodymind system can be lightly identified with egoic structures or conditioning, which engenders a certain quality of experience. Toward the other end of the living spectrum, the bodymind system is heavily identified with egoic structures or conditioning. That too, inspires a certain quality of experience in any given moment.