The awakening timeline
Here the story of awakening is felt like a somewhat remembered dream, or like the story of a character in a novel or a film. It’s not personal, and there’s no sense that “this happened to me so many years ago.” However, since I wrote emails about it then, I can give you a timeline for what happened in the space-time story. I was 22 and it was 2011 and I had been working on some ways of questioning beliefs using cognitive therapy, and the work of Byron Katie and Ken Keyes for over a year (I had no understanding of Byron Katie’s nondual ideas and whenever she mentioned something nondual I just assumed it was a poetic metaphor and ignored it. I had never heard of nonduality or Advaita and did not have a clue or any interest in what enlightenment or awakening were). For a while this questioning of thoughts made the “me” happier and peaceful, and after 6 months or so I joined many volunteer organizations and saw life as truly amazingly wonderful. I had friends who thought I was having a m