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 manic episode, as I felt elated and filled with love and happiness and had a lot of energy.

Then, without warning or understanding, and without any practice or the techniques I had been using, it suddenly became clear that nothing I thought or felt was true or real, and that everything I saw was not a solid separate tangible “thing.” I could see a car and the word “car” made me laugh. Same with people, trees, clouds, etc. Even the idea that I was a young woman named Miranda seemed as impossible as if someone told me I was a bird or a door. The sense of time seemed to disappear as well.  During that period I ended up missing many appointments as time seemed impossible to keep track of and almost everything people said seemed like a joke they didn’t know about. That was the week that felt traumatic to me, as it was like what made me “me,” a solid and independent “person,” was being ripped apart and burned away.

After a week, as it reached a boiling point, the trauma and fear and confusion was replaced by a calm and serenity I had never known or even imagined possible. The world and the person I believed I had been were still dissolving, but now everything was sinking into what people call This, or Wholeness, or nothing being everything. I had no nondual language at the time, but today I would say that what was seen was that the separate self I believed I had been was seen as always having been an illusion and that other people were also not separate beings. Further, there were not only no separate things, but no objects or beings actually existed as we named them, and language was to “this” what a map is to the actual landscape. Artificial lines used to navigate but having no reality whatsoever.

I was quite sure I had gone “insane” or mentally ill, and did think I should go commit myself or tell my family. I was not functioning well in terms of talking to people or being reliable at my job, though I was eating and seemed to manage to follow the rules of society even though none of them made sense. Then I wrote a trusted friend about what was happening. At that time Lisa Cairns had posted her first  5 or 6 videos online. It was fall of 2011. One is no longer online, a two part talk called “the saint and the sinner” but that one, her two part talk on death, and then “the game of love” and a few shorter videos seemed to make sense out of everything I was experiencing and seeing. I watched them over and over. I also started reading Byron Katie’s nondual writings, and what I had thought was simply poetic license I now realized was direct observation. I met a woman named Lynn online who was experiencing a similar breakdown/breakthrough/awakening, and we would sometimes talk for ten hours each day, watching talks and discussing them. As I saw people talk about this, I gained a language to describe what seemed to have happened. Over the next year or so I also found people like Brendan Smith, Rebekah Maroon, Unmani and Ben Smythe, who shaped my interpretation of what simply was seen and felt as life without filters, beliefs, or stories.

So if you were to talk about in in terms of time, I would say it was a 3 week period from first feeling the world and separation pulled away until the experience ended, leaving no more world or person. And yet there remained was what today I call a “dreamworld” or “dream,” in which "Miranda" was felt to be a character, because that is how it is described by speakers I love. It was accompanied by the emotion I  call love, even though not meant in the usual sense. That sense of life filled with awe and wonder but also very simply and obviously "just this," an impersonal seamless flow, has not changed in the past 9 years.

All that has happened is that my ability to talk about this has grown, but that is only learning the language of nonduality. It is also very clear that language is not really true or accurate.  If I hadn’t found Lisa (and had avoided being hospitalized for a mental disorder), I imagine life would still simply be always this seamless flow but there would be no interpretation or description. I believe that happens to many people who have what we call enlightenment and never find nonduality or Advaita.