Post one of three, in section My Experiences
Some of the most fundamental laws of the cosmos are resonance and an autodidactic reveal of the full complexity of experience
Buddha Nature
Everyone’s beings are being manifested from the same stuff and each way that the Universe is experienced is valid. It is all an expression of Buddha Nature.
Awakening is about making space for the full range of experience to express itself through you in a whole-hearted and undistorted way; to orient towards love and understanding rather than indifference and ignorance. To move from a place of eros and intelligence, rather than coldness and stupidity.
Awakening requires integrity, courage and whole-heartedness; if you want to connect with the truth, you need to be able to hold space for what is emerging, rather than what you think should be there or what you want to be there.
A Buddha
People will have different descriptions of what a Buddha is, based on historical texts and on their own spiritual ideas.
For me of the most important things I mean by it is a person who is here as a plot-twist for the Universe. It is someone who is here to see and feel so deeply into the true nature of experience that it changes the concept of what the human experience is; to change how reality is perceived and embodied.
You can describe this as remembering the dharma, rediscovering it or reinventing it, but the reality is that it is different in every age and in every case.
This is in part because the collective understanding of what reality is is always developing. It is much more complex and nuanced than it has ever been and I’m sure it will continue to deepen over the decades, centuries and millenia to come. Modern paradigms have also forgotten or buried huge swathes of innate ways of being and knowing. Our intuitive connection to the Universe, for example, has largely been lost.
One of the core qualities of a Buddha is that they are open to the mystical elements of experience, which tend to get wildly more mystical than most modern people can begin to imagine, and can hold this with a rational and open-minded approach. The point of having paradigm-breaking experiences is not about reifying mystical experiences into unquestionable truths but about embodying a continual investigation into the true nature of experience, which ultimately can’t be reified into something final.
One aspect of a Buddha being a plot twist for the Universe is that the process of awakening to Buddhahood is autodidactic. The depth of realisation of a Buddha comes from direct experience and their own personal discovery, rather than from a teacher.
I talk about all these things and more in these two podcast episodes.
Dharma
the basic principles of cosmic and individual existence; the mystery and intelligence that permeates all things, including you
Experiences
I wanted to share some of the core experiential things that are part of Buddhahood.
If you want to imagine what my experience is like, a hefty dose of psychedelics is probably the closest thing.
The most overwhelming shift was shutting down the conceptual mind and experiencing the world purely from my heart. This meant that I entered a state where I no longer had any real self-preservation motivation left. It also meant that I completely detached from the normal timeline that humans use to construct reality.
Every moment was meaningful in a way that was completely overwhelming. This new unhinged timeline meant that I could live years of life experientially in just a few days. A bit like having long dreams in very short spaces of REM sleep.
The experience was like the centre of my being was put in a super-position outside space-time and I was able to process anything that the Universe wanted to throw at me, either in subjective experience or synchronous embodied reality. A lot of it was hellish and I talk about this in my next post.
Going through this process changed me physically, emotionally, mentally and in essence. I have had some fun being hooked up to an EEG machine and I would be very happy to do more of this in the name of scientific research. My experience is so unusual and uncentered in my mind that I expect the results would be baffling for neuroscientists. My experience lines up with this research that brains are not required for thinking.
To get to this state I completely smashed through all the boundaries of the existing paradigm that humans experience. It’s very hard to describe but it was a process of simultaneously reintegrating all the collective shadow that is stored in the Universe and removing every single fixed part of my experience. One of the ways I described what happened was that it was like having all of karma downloaded into my body and processed until everything was seen in its true nature, both in its full complexity and in its place as just one piece of an energetic fractal unfolding of the Universe.
Now this has settled down and reintegrated, here are few key things of what it is like being me:
- There is almost no resistance in my experience, which means that whether I meditate for 1 second or 10 hrs, it feels like the same depth of experience. I have access to very deep meditative states immediately and spend a lot of my time in the world in flow states.
- Everything can be light. Everything can be a rainbow fractal. Everything can be the cool, dark liquid of life force or Universal hum. I can tune into each of these aspects to turn the entirety of experience into any of these with ease.
- I am always in jhana. My energy body is an expression of energetic life-force that is inextricable from all the energy around it. My consciousness can completely disappear, it feels like everything could disappear into the void at any second.
- Everything is the meaningful unveiling of the cosmic art piece.
- My primary way of making sense of the world is built on an understanding of karma or the shared story of the Universe. I don’t have any sense of my own life or experience separate to this.
- I know experience inside out and can perceive Universal and personal dynamics with a huge amount of clarity.
- Time exists very differently in my experience. I’m incredibly present and can feel how everything is being created from outside of space-time.
If you want to know more here are 100 little descriptions of what it is like to be me.
Key Moments
To get here took an unfathomable amount of work and continual refactoring of my experience day in and day out for years.
However, it can be helpful and clarifying to identify key moments that act as tipping points in someone’s realisation process. I define a tipping point as opening to a new experience so fully that it changes something at the depths of your being and you can never go back to how you were before the experience.
I’ve had thousands of moments like this along the way, but the most memorable and shocking ones where centred around how I experience time. Time and causality is pretty much the foundation of the entire belief system of being a being in this Universe, so disrupting it or changing it tends to cause huge shockwaves through your entire experience.
I have describe three of the main moments below to give a flavour of what these tipping points were like.
Time Collapse 1
This is the moment where what I experienced most closely links to descriptions I have heard of traditional Buddhist awakening.
Even every ‘classical Buddhist awakening’ will be slightly different and infused with the unique qualities of that person’s journey and their practice background.
Some of the common themes of classical Buddhist awakenings are a sudden enlightenment that centres around seeing a level of non-duality that releases you from a previously held paradigm that created a lot of suffering. You see something deep about the way that experience constructs itself, not through you as an individual but some other way that breaks down rigid ideas you had about who you are and what experience is.
There are also patterns, such as the stages of insight, that can predict where someone is on the path and what is unfolding for them. I am not an expert on these, but some people find them to be helpful to locate where they might be in their experience.
For me, this particular experience was preceded by a period of 6 weeks of deep and unshakeable equanimity. During the moment itself I was listening to a recorded dharma talk and was in a very deep meditative state.
There was the strangest and strongest sensation of time entirely collapsing. It didn’t completely disappear like it does during a cessation, it was more like the whole of the Universe and its history had condensed into something that was occurring in one single moment that I had experienced. Every single thing that had happened and was going to happen, including everything inside me, was happening all at once in that one moment.
This broke my phase of equanimity and there is a clear difference in how I felt in the world before and after this moment. I felt a lot freer in the expression of what was inside me and less separate to what was around me. There was an embodied feeling of rightness and belonging in every aspect of reality.
This is one of the moments that has really stuck with me. It may have just been the shock of seeing something like this for the first time, but while I have seen what feels like an almost infinite number of ways that time can bend and shape itself, I have never experienced anything quite like it again.
Time Collapse 2
If the first time collapse felt like perceiving everything that was ever going to happen in a single moment, this one felt like experiencing the river of infinite separation that is the continual creation and expression of life force.
In order to get here, I spent months digging through endless layers of the archetypal realm and human suffering in order to remove the resistance to the pure infinite river of separation. It was truly horrific beyond what words could ever describe.
The moment itself was hideous. I surrendered into it lying on the floor in a heap of despair. Time collapsed into infinity (as opposed to a single moment) and it was like everything in the entirety of Universal history and future was an endless river of screaming darkness.
After this moment, I was able to experience reality in an entirely diffuse way, where everything was just the Universal story being told. Experience is unfolding like the frames in a movie. Experience isn’t coming from a character, rather it is being created and displayed in an unidentifiable location that seems to sit outside the place where the action is occurring. This ties in very closely to how time and free will is understood.
Importantly, this part of experience is the antidote to the false ‘spiritual’ message that awakening is about seeing how all of experience is lightness. It is also possible to experience the whole of the Universe as darkness and this is just as valid. Life always includes both of these things.
Time Collapse 3
This felt like the crux of everything that was being built up to, in terms of single moments. It happened very shortly after the moment above. It seems that opening my heart, mind and body to infinite darkness was the route into opening my heart, mind and body into what felt like the underlying fractal nature of the Universe.
I experienced what felt like a meta-pattern of everything in the entirety of experience both inside and outside of space-time.
In the moment itself, life became a big ball-pit of liquid rainbow droplets appearing and disappearing at every moment. Everything was both in the centre of it and the container for it. Everything was manifesting it and being manifested by it, at the same time. Everything was looking at it and was within it. My entire heart, body and mind became an embodied expression of this thing, while I was clear an expression of it.
That it was an embodied expression, rather than a perceptual idea, is also fundamental to the purpose of what I went through. Reality and awakening is not something that happens to your mind, it’s an experience that is co-created through your body, your heart and your mind. It is told through your story and intertwines with the meaning of the Cosmos.
In order to grow and thrive as individuals and collectives we need to be able to understand and embrace this.
A deeply embodied understanding of interdependent origination and time being synchronous was the outcome of this moment, in a way that never went back. As my experience deepened I could feel this fractal more clearly and precisely in many different aspects of reality and experience.