Other

Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Quote by Meister Eckhart

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Bhavagad Gita

BG 6.20: When the mind, restrained from material activities, becomes still by the practice of Yog, then the yogi is able to behold the soul through the purified mind, and he rejoices in the inner joy.

These three quotes, I believe, all convey the same thing. With Nietzsche's quote, I have seen people use the Abyss as something negative. For example, don’t look where you are not supposed to for too long, or it will eventually bite you. But I see it differently, or maybe the same but with a different outcome. Sometimes we have to move through the abyss to touch the infinite. When I say touch the infinite, I am talking about a direct experience that is physiologically realized.

I want to describe what I mean by direct experience, but I first want to say I have a hard time describing it to other people. Every time I have tried to talk about it, my mouth starts to quiver, and I cut it off short because I'm afraid of what others will think. I end up sounding like a fool, and they respond as if they didn’t even hear what I said. I think it is so bizarre that it is hard for people to grasp. I barely grasp it myself, but I know what I experienced no matter what others might feel or think.

I spent many years meditating with a group of people in the North Carolina mountains. Our spiritual teacher taught us always to take five minutes to integrate back into the world after each meditation. Sometimes, when you take the integrative five minutes, you can fall asleep until the five-minute bell goes off. When your body is carrying a lot of stress, it can be hard to come out of the five minutes, and you can hear people snoring away. I remember those days fondly. One time at a retreat, I fell asleep during the coming-out phase. As I was waking up, I became aware of something else watching my dream. There was me and something other than "me" experiencing “my” dream. These two things happened instantaneously. I was used to bizarre things happening to me, but this was definitely different.

During break, I found my teacher walking in the hall talking to his trusted students. I worked up the courage to walk up to him and ask about my experience. My teacher called "the infinite" or "God" the transcendent, because the word God had too many connotations. Because of this, I asked him, " Is the transcendence always with us, and we just don’t realize it? That was what came to my mind at that particular moment to ask him. He looked at me quizzically and asked me to ask the question in front of the group.

I have social anxiety and did not want to ask this in front of the group. But of course I did what he asked because I wanted an answer. Once we all gathered back together, I raised my hand. When he called on me, I just stuttered, and my lip quivered. I wasn’t making a lot of sense, so I stopped and said exactly what had happened, knowing how strange it sounded. He looked me straight in the eyes, and all he said was “that was god”. My whole body started shaking because something tangible to the question I had asked all my life was acknowledged. Still, part of me was in denial and had to process what he had just said. He moved on to other questions while I sat with this intense feeling. That happened maybe 15 years ago, and I still grapple with what it means.

Since that experience, I have had a hunger to understand the nature of this “other.” What it feels like to me is that it witnesses or is watching everything. It knows your sins, your attributes, your hunger, and how you love. So if we think we are hiding, I feel we need to think again. However, it seems to be observing without judgment, waiting to be noticed. But how do we notice? Can we swim down into the abyss? If God is seeing all these things that we may not even be consciously aware of, can we take a peek? The conscious self seems to have a serious grip on what it thinks is true, which makes "seeing" a hard process. But I also feel on another level that it is all a beautiful process, because it is truth, and what do they say about truth?

To me it sounds like Meister Eckhart was one serious dude who not only felt gods witnessing, but merged with him on some level. When this happens, are we even truly human anymore? On some level, I believe we have let go of the steering wheel. My conscious self finds this endeavor scary. However, on another level, it feels like a relief not to have to control my life when everything is always changing. I don’t have a lot of answers, but I believe quotes like these are like a road map to the unfathomable. Because it has to be a physiological transformation to truly understand, and even then I’m not sure there will be answers. However, this is my trajectory, like it or not. As I write this, Tom Petty’s song “Free Falling” is playing in my head.

I do, however, believe that once we let go of the rudder, an innocence starts to permeate, and life becomes a wonder instead of something we need to control.