Satori - My Brush with Infinity.
It was the summer of 2012. I was living in Florida, had just recently left the Sarasota Ballet Company due to major injuries, and turned 21.
From the accounts of my two friends, I was mid-sentence when suddenly my eyes dilated, an indefinable expression washed over my face, and like a ragdoll, I collapsed to the floor. They held me, shook me, slapped my face but I was unconscious. I felt nothing, I heard nothing.
This painting is a depiction of the first moments of my brush with Infinity.
I remember my living room and my friends, but there was no transition. In a flash, my surroundings were replaced with a field of stars and below my feet was the Earth, quickly shrinking into the distance as I flew away from it. My very first thought was a shocking, unquestioned realization that I must have died, immediately followed with concern. “Oh, shit! Did I just die?”, “How will my death affect my friends and family?” but as quickly as my concerns rose up, they fell aside. It was not a lack of compassion but in this realm, these concerns, fears, and worries had no support for existence. They are as heavy as physical matter itself and with no effort, they were replaced with an experience of love and a knowing that they would be ok. A revelation sprang forth out of my being. Emotional suffering is experienced through the attachment to physical life and way up here there was just the knowing.
With the revelation, I shed the old conditions of my recent life in a body and continued flying through the cosmos.
As I flew, I grew. My perception expanded as all directions of space and time condensed into one point. Decades, centuries, and eons, into seconds. I watched the birth and death of stars, galaxies, and planets. I witnessed the rise and fall, the blossoming and extinction of civilizations, cultures, and species some human and some I didn’t recognize. My eye was at the periphery of eternity, at the center and everywhere in between. My being in combinessence with all that is. My breath amalgamated with the cosmic breath of life. Exhale and inhale, birth and death, cycling through eternity, happening in a moment. Instant after instant, infinity after infinity.
That entire epic resolved in another revelation, what I had just experienced was only one level of reality. Somehow there were more levels to infinity. Before, beyond, and in between. I ventured to move, to somehow expand into other matrices of reality, but the moment I intended to shift I was halted. Met with a force of presence, a kind of light. A guardian of a threshold? I was held there for a moment, I to I with the guardian. An indeterminate exchange was given, something I did not register. I wish I could remember what I was told if I was told anything at all. I was thrust backward away from the threshold. It was like seeing everything falling into a point before me. Faster and faster, everything fell into this point until there was nothing left but me, I was sucked into and then flew through this point. Like turning inside out I unfolded out of my eyes and my consciousness reformed around my body. I was on the floor in the arms of my friends and I could do nothing but cry. I cried hard; I was in shock. From what my friends said about a minute had passed since I fell unconscious and they were just about to call an ambulance. To me it was eons. I didn’t know what to say to them, I didn’t have the words to explain what had happened, without thinking the only thing I said was, “I know what it’s like to see God.”
I will admit, it’s a huge statement and from their reaction, it wasn’t too kindly received. How arrogant to say I saw God, that I comprehended even just a facet of the Absolute Being. I wasn’t trying to convince but articulate my experience.
I didn’t speak about it for some time, it was a visceral experience that changed my life - changed the questions I was asking, changed what would satisfy the thirst in my soul. Needless to say, I have come to experience many teachings, philosophies, theories, and practices since then. Some helpful for a time, others riddled with falsehoods that only satisfied the desire to escape suffering, and others that have endured in my life till today. I continue to seek, and I continue to learn. From what I experienced, enlightenment is larger than we could imagine and the moment you believe you have it all figured out it would be wise to see there is still room for more insight, examination, and healing.
I do not have an answer for which cosmological ladder is best for any one person, but I will say, first you should trust you are worthy enough to climb one then practice discerning what advances you and what only satisfies you. Aim to deepen in being and notice how the deepening parallels an experience of individuation.
Satori
Acrylic and UV pigment on canvas
