The first time I woke up

Let me tell you a story. A few years ago, I moved to Boston for my final year of University to do a long research project. A few weeks in I met this girl who turned my world upside down. Long story short, we fell in love.

But it also soon became terrifying to think I could lose it all. See I had to leave at the end of the scholastic year to return to Oxford and finish up my thesis. Our initial agreement was looming in the back of my mind and I could hear the clock ticking. A question kept surfacing: “How am I going to stay in Boston?”  

Part of me felt crazy for even entertaining the thought. I mean come on – I had only known  this girl for a couple of months. By all external views, including that of my parents, this seemed like a bad idea. But in my heart I had a burning conviction that I wanted to be with her.

I started looking into postgraduate courses I could enrol in; Masters and PhD programs in topics that I was vaguely interested in. I scrambled to study for the GRE and managed to get together two last minute applications. I also started looking for job opportunities in the area, but it soon became clear how extremely unlikely that was to work. Getting a work VISA in the US is not an easy process, especially as a fresh graduate without a US degree.

So from the early days our relationship, I felt a nagging sense of agitation and anxiety about what would happen if I couldn’t come back to Boston. Over time, it grew into an intensely corrosive sensation in my core, like a cloud of acid in my heart. It kept pulling me into a state of panic and despair. I had never experienced anything like it. In the span of a minute I would run circles around myself in my head “What if my applications get rejected? What will we do then? Would I even be happy doing a PhD? Ah shit, I should be doing more to find a job… but I don’t even know what kind of job I want. Where do I even start? What if we have to do long distance? And then for how long?” 

This quickly became a constant feature of my life. I was not able to get rid of it or appease it. I would wake up every morning with pangs of dread and spend the entire day ruminating on the same problem. I would clutch on to every possible opportunity that could let me stay in Boston, even if it was just hypothetical, as if my life depended on it. On a daily basis, I would go through bouts of super-excited highs based on nothing of substance, followed by crushing disappointment and despair. 

For months, I felt current of anxiety flowing through my veins almost constantly. It was pretty awful. It started to seriously affect our relationship, and it became increasingly difficult to be present. There were days were it was so distracting that I would drift off mid conversation and just sit there, soaking in my discomfort. It was torturous yet hypnotic. I couldn’t ignore it, and I couldn’t get rid of it.

Worst of all, I felt paralysed from taking action. I became a burden on my loved ones. Every conversation would eventually shift towards my anxieties and worries. I would talk to multiple people every day, but say the same things to them, like a broken record on repeat. I was trying to offload the anxiety the only way I could, by venting it out to someone else. And it helped, but only temporarily. It was a solace, but not a solution.

Then, around a month before my departure date, I finally got the responses. “We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a place”. I remember the day I got the second rejection very clearly. It was just another morning in the lab until I got the e-mail. I looked up from my phone in shock. I couldn’t believe it. 

A lump started to form in my throat, and I quickly left the lab to avoid embarrassing myself in front of the rest of the research group. When I got home, I threw myself on my bed and I just wept. My hands clutched the sheets and my body was literally shaking.

Suddenly, as I lay there, something strange happened. The outpour of feelings grew so strong that it totally silenced my thoughts. I was left with only with an overwhelming feeling of grief, and there was no chance of suppressing or analysing it . As I continued to let myself cry, it was almost like I had floated outside my own body, watching the whole thing happen. And then I felt something I could have never expected – behind the pain and sorrow, there was a part of me that was untouched. There was a sense of peace and relief. The unthinkable horror that I had been dreading for months had actually happened. Yet, I was still there. The world didn’t end. Not only was I still alive, I was more at peace than I had been for months.

A week or so later, something even stranger happened. A friend of mine had a copy of “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle. It caught my attention, and I asked to borrow it. That night, I sat in bed and I opened it.

Tolle started off by describing his first transcendental experience, and it immediately seemed a bit over the top to me. He used new age-y words like “energy” and “divine” – not really my cup of tea. I had always refused to believe such stuff was legit, but I had reached a point where I just didn’t care anymore. So what if he was saying things that didn’t fit into my worldview? Recent events had made it painfully obvious that my approach to life was pretty crap, so I read on with an open mind. 

I soon realised that this was not like any other book I had read. I was used to digesting a book with my mind, thinking about the concepts and forming some sort of narrative or logical understanding of what the author was trying to express. But this book was not written for my mind. It was speaking directly to a deeper awareness within me.

I was totally immersed. Every line seemed to ring true in my core, and I couldn’t explain exactly why. Then I reached the phrase “watch the thinker”. What happened next is hard to describe. All I can say is that it felt like some kind of light or energy was gushing through me and around me. You know in the first Harry Potter movie when Harry holds his wand for the first time? It was kind of like that.

For the very first time in my life, I actually felt the voice in my head as something that was not me. I had meditated before, and I thought I had some sense of what it meant to be present, but I turns out I hadn’t the faintest clue. This was a much more intense and raw experience of clarity. I was suddenly awake, and I could finally see as clear as day what life really was. It was so blatantly obvious, how could I ever have missed it?

After a few minutes of blissing out, I came to and looked back at the book in awe. “What the hell just happened?” Over the next week or so, I took that book with me everywhere I went. I would read it throughout the day, even during breaks at work. Every time I sat with it, I re-immersed myself into a sea of healing tranquility. There was utter silence in my mind, and I felt like I was truly looking out onto the world for the first time. Everything looked so clear, so vibrant, so perfect. 

I was living the same life, but from a different place.
On my way to work, I would look at a tree, the sky or people walking down the road, and feel a deep sense of connection. I would be dumbstruck as to how I never noticed how beautiful it all was.
As I opened the door to my lab it was like I could feel how the door was experiencing my hand pulling it open. We weren’t two separate things, but just one greater system.
As I worked on my research, I was just watching it happen, but at the same time I was also the one doing it. 

I didn’t understand what was going on, but I didn’t care. For once in my life I didn’t need to understand. All I knew was that this way of being was frictionless, and for the first time in months I was able to feel light and joyful.

I consider this one of the most influential experiences of my life, even though it only lasted for a few days. It showed me without a shadow of a doubt, that there is some ultimate Truth beyond what the mind is capable of understanding. This state of extreme clarity or “enlightenment” is very real, and it is so profoundly beautiful, there is no doubt in my mind that it is the best way to live.

The funny thing is, this beautiful and transformative experience happened in the midst of one of the most trying and emotionally painful periods of my life. This is no coincidence. My suffering was a necessary precursor to me snap out of my toxic mental narrative sand experience that deep peace. They say there is always calm in the eye of the storm. I guess the more violent the storm, the stronger the push to find the eye. It’s easier to wake up from a nightmare than a tolerable, fuzzy daze.
I used to see suffering as an arbitrary injustice in a cruel and indifferent universe. When I would feel anxious, I would say to myself “Not again, please stop! Why is this happening to me? This is so unfair, I don’t deserve this.”

I now see suffering as a sign that I am resisting some fundamental Truth. That I am somehow compulsively turning my gaze away from the present and living in a world of fantasy. The closer I am to the Truth of what is, the less suffering and friction I experience.

Through this whole ordeal, I’ve learnt that a trying experience doesn’t need to be interpreted as a negative thing. It can be seen as more of a handpicked test set in your path by the Universe – an opportunity to transcend and wake up to the lies you’re telling yourself. Now I have no way of testing if that is objectively true or not, but it’s certainly a more beautiful and empowering way to live life, and that’s good enough for me.