It’s been on a long, weird, and often painful journey since the awakening happened in 2001, when I was 27. Sitting in that room in Mountain View, California (the city were Google’s HQ is) I focused my attention on my breath in the nostrils, bringing it back each time I noticed that it wandered.
Before long, the attention was centered in the forehead, calm, steady, still. Then, once the level of concentration crossed a critical threshold, the process took charge of itself. Like a tiny blackhole forming inside my forehead, all the unconscious attention throughout my body was tugged free from its preoccupation with the countless subtle sensations and was drawn in and up, like thousands of strands of thread, into that tiny, black point of nothingness.
And then it was clear that the subject, the witness, was at the back of the head, focused forward at this point that was actually in the center of the head, at the top of the spine. Now, everything was centered in this object, witnessed by this subject.
Nobody was doing this. Nobody was making this happen. I could say that it was surrender, but there was nobody to surrender. There was only this point of stillness and the witness of it. The point was infinitely small, compact, complete, collapsing endlessly into itself, final, a singularity of consciousness.
Then, as breathing stopped, the singularity began to rise, lifted effortlessly by some unseen force, as if being levitated from an altar, an absolute offering, accepted. As the point rose, the witness in the back of the head rose with it. As they rose together, the witness, following the shape of the back of the skull, naturally moved closer to the point of focus. As the singularity rose up through the central channel of the head, an intense sensation appeared around the head, an opening, tingling sensation, a feeling of many points around the skull; like goosebumps but more intense.
When the point of stillness reached the crown of the head, it was joined and merged with the witness; they became one.
That’s when I died.
I cannot even begin to describe what happened next, what was revealed. It is beyond words, beyond mind and body, beyond time and space, beyond comprehension. It is Yoga, union with God. It is the Purusha of the Upanishads…
