"I fell in love with myself one morning in February of 1986. I had checked myself into a halfway house in Los Angeles after years of suicidal depression. A week or so later, as I lay on the floor of my attic room (I felt too unworthy to sleep in a bed), a cockroach crawled over my foot, and I opened my eyes. For the first time in my life, I was seeing without concepts, without thoughts or an internal story. All my rage, all the thoughts that had been troubling me, my whole world, the whole world, was gone. There was no me. It was if something else had woken up. It opened its eyes. It was looking through Katie's eyes. And it was crisp, it was bright, it was new, it had never been here before. Everything was unrecognizable. And it was so delighted! Laughter welled up from the depths and just poured out. It breathed and was ecstasy. It was intoxicated with joy: totally greedy for everything. There was nothing separate, nothing unacceptable to it. Everything was its very own self. For the first time I -- it -- experienced the love of its own life. I -- it -- was amazed!
All this took place beyond time. But when I put it into language, I have to backtrack and fill in. ...I understood that no thought is true.
...
To say it again: As I was lying there in the awareness, as the awareness, the thought arose: "It's a foot." And immediately I saw that it wasn't true, and that was the delight of it. I saw that it was all backward. It's not a foot; it's not a cockroach. It wasn't true, and yet there was a foot, there was a cockroach. But there was no name for any of these things. There were no separate words for wall or ceiling face or cockroach or foot or any of it. So it was looking at its entire body, looking at itself, with no name. Nothing was separate from it, nothing was outside itself, it was all pulsing with life and delight, and it was all one unbroken experience. To separate that wholeness, to see anything as outside itself, wasn't true. The foot was there, yet it wasn't a separate thing, and to call it a foot, or an anything, felt absurd. And the laughter kept pouring out of me. I saw that cockroach and foot are names for joy, that there are a thousand names for joy, and yet there is no name for what appears as real now. This was the birth of awareness: thought reflecting back on itself, seeing itself as everything, surrounded by the vast ocean of its own laughter.
...Then it stood up, and that was amazing. There was no thinking, no plan. It just stood up and walked in the bathroom. It walked straight to the mirror, and it locked into the eyes of its own reflection, and it understood. And that was even deeper than the delight it had known before, when it first opened its eyes. It fell in love with that being in the mirror. It was as if the woman and the awareness of the woman had permanently merged. There were only the eyes, and a sense of absolute vastness, with no knowledge in it. It was as if I -- she -- had been shot through with electricity. It was like God giving itself life through the body of a woman -- God so loving and bright, so vast -- and yet she knew that it was herself. It made such a deep connection with her eyes. There was no meaning to it, just a nameless recognition that consumed her.
Love is the best word I can find for it. It had been split apart, and now it was joined. There was it moving, and then it in the mirror, and then it joined as quickly as it had separated -- it was all eyes. The eyes in the mirror were the eyes of it. And it gave itself back, as it met again. And that gave it its identity, which I call love. As it looked in the mirror, the eyes -- the depth of them -- were all that was real, all that existed. Prior to that, nothing -- no eyes, no anything; even standing there, there was nothing. And then the eyes come out to give it what it is. People name things a wall, a ceiling, a foot, a hand. But it had no name for these things, because it's indivisible. And it's invisible. Until the eyes. Until the eyes. I remember tears of gratitude pouring down the cheeks as it looked at its own reflection. It stood there staring for I don't know how long.
These were the first moments after I was born as it, or it as me. There was nothing left of Katie. There was literally not even a shred of memory of her -- no past, no future, not even a present. And in that openness, such joy. There's nothing sweeter than this, I felt; There is nothing but this. If you loved yourself more than anything you could imagine, you would give yourself this. A face. A hand. Breath. But that's not enough. A wall. A ceiling. A window. A bed. Lightbulbs! Ooh! And this too! And this too! And this too! I felt that if my joy were told, it would blow the roof off the halfway house -- off the whole planet. I still feel that way." - A Thousand Names for Joy, by Byron Katie
There is a website of descriptions of awakening experiences at: http://www.wheniawoke.com/
Thanks for posting this one.
Nirmala
http://www.endless-satsang.com
Posted by: Nirmala | February 21, 2009 at 10:30 AM