Post one of three, in section My Experiences
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 presence rather than indifference and ignorance; to move from a place of eros and intelligence, rather than coldness and stupidity; to choose truth even when it takes courage. To be able to see clearly.
A Buddha
To describe it simply a Buddha 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 experience is on a fundamental level. It is someone who is here to change how reality is perceived and embodied. Exactly how this manifests is different in every age and in every case.
The collective understanding of what reality is, is always developing. In our current age both our understanding of reality and our individual experience is much more complex and nuanced than it has ever been.
However, modern paradigms tend to have forgotten or been desensitised to many innate ways of being. For example, most humans have lost their intuitive connection to the Universe.
Combining and integrating these two things – a modern understanding of the world with an intuitive interconnection with the Universe – is a huge challenge and was a lot of what my awakening journey was about. This integration process was especially intense because human lives are infinitely more meaning-dense than they have ever been before. Even compared to a hundred years ago, the depth, breadth and complexity of information that can be accessed now through direct and indirect understanding is enormous. This includes things like relationality, introspection, physics, systems-thinking and more.
Mysticism
One of the core qualities of Buddhahood is being connected to the mystical elements of experience, which tend to get wildly more mystical than most modern people can begin to imagine. It is also holding this within a rational and open-minded perspective. The point of having paradigm-breaking experiences from the perspective of a Buddha is not about reifying mystical experiences into conceptual ideas but about opening fully to the true nature of experience.
The three bodies is a useful way of understanding the experience I am in. I can become fully absorbed in any given one in any moment and they also weave together into a single flowing experience:
- The Nirmanakaya is the physical incarnation in this lifetime; the body is a vessel for transformation and acts as a bridge between the divine and the human realms.
- The Samboghakaya is a subtle body of limitless forms and it translates as enjoyment body. It has its own intelligence to it that unfolds both individually and collectively. It’s non-dual and the energy is distributed throughout the entirety of space-time. This subtle realm connects people to their life purpose and the realisation that practice can be for the benefit of all beings. This aspect of experience is very literal and infuses all things. It’s a large part of what I describe as the imaginal and I envision that science and culture will come to understand this aspect of experience during my lifetime.
- The Dharmakaya, is literally translated as the Dharma body. It is pure Buddha Nature or direct connection to essential truth.
One last important thing to share is that 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 these things and more in these three 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.
For me my experience feels incredibly integrated and natural, but if you want to imagine what my experience is like from a more normal perspective a hefty dose of psychedelics is probably the closest thing.
The most overwhelming shift in the process of getting here was shutting down the conceptual mind and experiencing the world purely from my heart. I entered an incredibly unusual state of consciousness for months and years. Amongst many other things, during this time I completely detached from the normal timeline that humans use to construct reality.
Every moment in this part of the process was meaningful in a way that was completely overwhelming. This new timeline that was on a different scale to how humans normally perceive time meant that I could live months 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.
One of the ways I described what happened was that it was like having all the habitual human pathways deconstructed while all of karma was 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.
If you want to know what it’s like to be me, here are 100 little descriptions.
Tipping Points
My process was a full-time experience of everything being continually refactored, day in and day out for years. I lost count of the number of paradigms I’d shifted through before the process even began in earnest.
It’s hard to pick out single moments that changed things, because there was such an inconceivably enormous amount of change over quite a long period of time; however, it can also be clarifying to identify key moments that act as tipping points in someone’s realisation process.
On an awakening journey there are single moments that you can experience that can change something at the depths of your being and you can never go back to how you were before the experience.
The most memorable and shocking of these moment where centred around time. Time (and causality) are some of the deepest beliefs that humans hold and if you change your experience of these, it changes how experience constructs itself through you.
I have described three key tipping points around time to give an example of what these experiences can be 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.
During the moment that I experienced time entirely collapsed. It didn’t completely disappear like it does during a cessation, it was 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.
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.
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 infinity. It felt like a river of infinite separation that constitutes the continual 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 opening to all this suffering. It was truly horrific beyond what words could ever describe.
Time collapsed into infinity 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. From here experience is unfolding like the frames in a movie, it’s not 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 the underlying fractal nature of the Universe.
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.
A deeply embodied understanding of interdependent origination and time being synchronous was the outcome of this moment, in a way that never went back.