A knowing that cannot be Unknown.
Many years ago, I experienced, on two separate occasions, a peak “behind the curtain.”
I have struggled with how to name this experience and, as many know, have been searching for an explanation for it every day since it happened.
The two moments are a little mixed up for me, but the basis is that the first event happened as I was leaving my house, reaching for the doorknob of my front door…
And the second happened in the early hours of the morning while I was in a dream-like, half-awake, half-asleep state (most likely the hypnopompic state).
In both instances, I felt an expansion of perspective – I saw the entire world in front of me, and the entire universe.
I saw everything happening at once – it was all going on simultaneously. Time did not divide anything. It all just was.
Everything added up. There was an answer to all disease, all famine, all poverty, all violence – and I saw the answer laid out in front of me…which, unfortunately, just cannot be comprehended by my limited human brain outside of this experience…
(But it does reduce to something that we CAN understand, which will be explained in #2 below).
On one instance, I laughed my head off for quite some time after – it was all so perfect!
In the other, I burst out in deep sobs, crying from the beauty and the mysticism of what I had just experienced.
Both experiences showed me the same thing: we are all connected. Every single thing in this world is connected to another. A man in Turkey is connected to a baby being born in New York.
An old woman in Germany is connected to a tree in California.
We are ALL connected, deeply intermingled, and we persist.
We are never born, and we never die.
By far the most important understandings and revelations, however, were that:
1. Everything is going according to plan. It is all perfect, no matter how it looks like from our perspective and from Earth. There is a loving, benevolent plan at hand, and despite the chaos we endure on Earth, it’s all meant to be happening…and we all go on. We don’t leave here and disappear. We continue.
2. The only thing that matters is pure, unconditional love. I felt a strong sense of love for every single thing, every single person, every event. I believe that to have been God’s unconditional love for Earthlings and all creatures of the universe. I felt it so potently and it was telling me, “Look. This is all that there is. Everything else is an illusion.”
Ever since experiencing this split second of expanded awareness, knowing of the Divine, understanding of the Great Plan…
I’ve wanted to remember to embody it.
It changed my life and set me firmly on the path of spirituality.
But at the time, I simply did not have any resources to understand what had happened to me.
No one in my life understood.
I didn’t have the right books, until several years later I started to read books about spirituality…
And started receiving the answer, again and again.
The first time I found some solace in what had happened to me was in Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth,” in which he explained expanded consciousness and awareness, seeing the big plan.
I would go on to learn that what I had experienced is what yogis and meditators sit in silence, for years, contemplating God in order to see it.
Knowing that made me realize that we are all the same – there is no better or worse.
At 20 years old, a drinker, on anti-depressants and anti-anxieties, I had still been blessed with this transformative, transcendent experience. I hadn’t sat down to meditate once in my life at this point.
I studied and studied, and found that what I experienced doesn’t only happen in a religious, or even spiritual, context.
The 19th-century poet Tennyson had “peculiar experiences of a vision of ecstasy which was the foundation of his deepest beliefs of the ‘unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of life.’”
Sounds quite similar, doesn’t it?
I have found that many who have nearly died and come back to earth express their experiences quite similarly, as well – Anita Moorjani’s “Dying to Be Me” gave me the deepest comfort and relief, as I realized that what I had experienced is something that has happened to many others.
The reason I talk about this today is because I never want to forget.
I do often forget it – that expanded state of awareness, knowing that I am LOVE, I come from love and return to it, that I am connected to each person and thing in my life, and that it’s all really beautiful – no matter how we see it here on Earth.
I want to remember because it will make me more patient.
It will help me to be more loving.
It will comfort me if the news gets darker and darker, and if people get meaner.
It is a knowing that cannot be Unknown, but that can be Forgotten, and I don’t want to forget.
I know I’m not the only one who has experienced this, now, and I want us all to talk about it more often.
So that we can remember each other, and unconditional love, and the way we are meant to be to each other.
And so, with this understanding, know that I am able to tell you that I love you and mean it wholeheartedly.
It is never something that I just say. It is something that I fully feel, experience, and embody – my love for you and for humanity.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
I LOVE YOU TOO!