I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Yes, if a diamond could make a sound, this is what it would be like.
My eyes were still closed, and I saw the image of a precious diamond. I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I have no recollection of what happened after that. Suddenly, there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. I heard the words “resist nothing,” as if spoken inside my chest. I was gripped by an intense fear, and my body started to shake. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy.
I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. “Am I one or two? If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.” “Maybe,” I thought, “only one of them is real.” Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “I cannot live with myself any longer.” This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. What was the point in continuing to live with this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world.
I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. One night not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke up in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. It feels now as if I am talking about some past lifetime or somebody else’s life. Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression. I have little use for the past and rarely think about it however, I would briefly like to tell you how I came to be a spiritual teacher and how this book came into existence.
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