Sweet, yeah, the glimpses. Totally normal and peaceful, just like you said.
Sammy Angels wrote:It wasn't what I expected at all. The words I write now seem so trivial; the experience is totally different.
That's what cracks me up about this. Even though we may hear the words a thousand times beforehand and our experience-to-words conversion may be the same as the words we've heard before, it's NEVER what our mind/imagination expects.
Sammy Angels wrote:Emotions and thoughts seem to pass through more easily. The I seems to be lurking still, but not as prominent as before. It's now clearly an object. But still a stubborn one. Yet, the anxiety tied to it is more clearly seen, and often it evaporates, like a cool chill of relief running through this body.
What now, what comes next?
At this point it's literally just deeper and deeper surrender. Whether you have that same experience, another experience, or a totally unenlightened experience, it's all just surrendering to what is.
It's not so much "getting to enlightenment" as it is the progressive dissolution of the false self.
I'll admit that I don't feel totally enlightened right now, whatever that means. It's very ordinary. I'm letting go of the need to have any particular experience in order to feel successful. There's like this wavering between reality and illusion, simultaneously somehow feeling both, and just a progressive falling away of "me." It doesn't really matter what experience is being experienced in the moment because it's all a part of the larger context of the old stuff coming up to be let go of, while the reality is always here.
I just got an email today from a lady in the UK named Mandi and her experience describes this well. It mirrors my own as well and so I'm gonna share hers as I've been out hiking all day and am about to go crash...
In a way, there had been a death that day, but only of the apparent SELF – not of the body.
But this realisation or ‘seeing’ soon faded, just like the ‘waking up in the morning’ experience, described previously, and then there was a hankering after it for a while, followed by many more glimpses, such as turning over in bed and finding I was transparent – there was no substance to ‘me’. Or playing my piano and seeing that it was being played by no-one – there wasn’t an ‘I’ playing it, etc.
However, after these initial ‘glimpses ’, there was a gradual falling away of any interest in seeking after enlightenment and a seeing that all there is, IS awakeness – everywhere! And after, the seeking fell away, there was a continuing expansion of ‘aliveness’ taking place, until I saw that the perception of a ‘me’ at my centre, just wasn’t there any more, and I hadn’t even noticed. There was no further interest in reading non-duality books– just a simple enjoyment of whatever is going on at the time, whether it’s washing my hair, driving my car, watching TV, walking the dog, whatever! Just an easiness with whatever’s happening at the time and a real relief at seeing that there is no ‘I’ to make choices. Things simply arising and then disappearing again, like soap bubbles – just like an apparent ‘me’ writing this : it arose that this would get written, yet without any sense of a person choosing to do it, yet it effortlessly occurred anyway.
Although it appears that there was some sort of journey to a final destination here, this was not the case at all. It was simply that for me, when I read some books on 'Non-Duality' there felt a resonance, a relief , a sense of ‘coming home’. But all of this is only illustrating ‘my’ perspective, because there is no past and there is no future, this is just a construct of the mind,therefore there can be no method and no journey. All of that really is an illusion, a dream. There are plenty of people who have never walked a ‘Spiritual Path’ yet who have simply ‘woken’ up’ or had glimpses.
Source:
http://www.mandisolk.com/
