Very similar to what happened when I was 17. Suffered for a long time trying to get back to this experience of Thusness not getting the joke that it was already the reality underlying the vestment. It's not in the experience but the experiencing which appears as all forms of experience. You can never get closer to or further from reality. Reality is what is actual, it doesn't come or go.
A friend posted this:
From an earlier text I wrote and shared with Father Tiso, who researched the Dzogchen Light Body while in Tibet…
For Easter
The Resurrection Body of Light
Yogananda wrote in 1946, in his “Autobiography of a Yogi” book:
“As I finished writing this chapter, I sat on my bed in the lotus posture. My room was dimly lit by two shaded lamps. Lifting my gaze, I noticed that the ceiling was dotted with small mustard-colored lights, scintillating and quivering with a radium like luster. Myriads of pencilled rays, like sheets of rain, gathered into a transparent shaft and poured silently upon me.
At once my physical body lost its grossness and became metamorphosed into astral (very subtle) texture. I felt a floating sensation as, barely touching the bed, the weightless body shifted slightly and alternately to left and right. I looked around the room; the furniture and walls were as usual, but the little mass of light had so multiplied that the ceiling was invisible. I was wonder-struck.
“This is the cosmic motion picture mechanism.” A voice spoke as though from within the light. “Shedding its beam on the white screen of your bed sheets, it is producing the picture of your body. Behold, your form is nothing but light!”
I gazed at my arms and moved them back and forth, yet could not feel their weight. An ecstatic joy overwhelmed me. This cosmic stem of light, blossoming as my body, seemed a divine replica of the light beams streaming out of the projection booth in a cinema house and manifesting as pictures on the screen.
For a long time I experienced this motion picture of my body in the dimly lighted theater of my own bedroom. Despite the many visions I have had, none was ever more singular. As my illusion of a solid body was completely dissipated, and my realization deepened that the essence of all objects is light, I looked up to the throbbing stream of lifetrons and spoke entreatingly.
“Divine Light, please withdraw this, my humble bodily picture, into Thyself, even as Elijah was drawn up to heaven by a flame.”
This prayer was evidently startling; the beam disappeared. My body resumed its normal weight and sank on the bed; the swarm of dazzling ceiling lights flickered and vanished. My time to leave this earth had apparently not arrived.
“Besides,” I thought philosophically, “the prophet Elijah might well be displeased at my presumption!”
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Also, in the Greek Orthodox
tradition there are many stories about saints living as hermits on the island of Mount Athos in Greece. A recurring theme occurs again and again for over the last several hundreds of years regarding the saintly hermits being seen either completely enshrouded in light or transformed into light. They say this light body tradition goes back to the time of Christ. This poem by St. Symeon the New Theologian is from the tenth century:
“How is it that you have clothed me in the brilliant garment, radiant with the splendor of immortality, that turns all my members into light? Your body, immaculate and divine, is all radiant with the fire of your divinity... with which it is ineffably joined and combined. This is the gift you have given me, my God: that this mortal and shabby frame has become one with your immaculate body that I have been made one with your divinity and have become your own most pure body, a brilliant member, transparently lucid, luminous and holy. I see the beauty of it all, I can gaze on the radiance. I have become a reflection of the light of your grace.”
When I was in Israel a few years ago, I had a rare opportunity to interview Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh regarding several esoteric topics of the ancient Jewish mysticism called Kabbalah. The rabbi is one of its leading masters. We discussed the phenomena of the gradual disappearance of the physical body regarding masters of Kabbalah. He told me that he witnessed these phenomena regarding his teacher several years before. But in this case, it was not associated with the teacher’s death but the gradual transparency of his body while still alive and functioning in the world. He explained that we have an inner “light body” of Divine Light. When we attain a high level of purification from negative thoughts and energies, the physical body is transformed by the degree of inner purity of heart. The body becomes pure Light. The light body is called tselem in Hebrew, meaning “the image of God as created AS the soul of man.”
Here’s a quote from the fifteenth century by the Kabbalah master Rabbi Moses Isserles of Cracow:
“For in truth, it is fitting to describe Him by this parable and metaphor, for light is found with Him, on Him, all those who gaze see, and each one sees in Him like one gazing in a mirror. For the coarse matter that is in man stands opposite...the one who contemplates, behind the clear light that is in the soul, which I liken to a mirror for him, and he sees in it, in an inner vision, his own form. For this reason the prophets compared the divine glory (Kavod) to a human image, for they saw their own form. But Moses our teacher, because he had removed from himself all corporeality and there is none of the dark matter from without, left within him, saw naught but the brilliant Light itself, and there was no (reflected) image, but he saw only the clear aspect.”
Sufi Master Najm Razi wrote in 1256:
“If the Light rises in the Sky of the Heart taking the form of one or more of several light-giving moons, the two eyes are closed to this world and to the other. If this light rises and the utterly pure Inner Man attains the brightness of the sun or of many suns, the mystic is no longer aware of this world nor of the other, he sees only his own Lord under the veil of the Spirit: then his heart is nothing but Light, his subtle body is Light, his material covering is Light, his hearing, his sight, his hand, his exterior, his interior are nothing but Light, his mouth and tongue also.”
As we learn more about the holographic nature of the universe, our bodies need to be included in that holographic model. A 3-D hologram is pure light. If indeed the universe and our bodies are holograms, it’s not too difficult to understand the phenomena of the light body scientifically, as discussed above. It is really just a question of acquiring a deeper sense of perception, one that sees beyond the apparent solidity of our world. Quantum physicist, David Bohm once commented, “The universe is frozen light.”
We can access or re-enter this level of the original Clear Light perception through various means. It’s interesting that in the Judeo-Christian mythos we have the notion of “fallen” mankind. Perhaps we could use the term “collapsed” equally. Our fallen state is actually a quantum collapse. Man is trying to undo the collapse through spiritual and religious means. However, one of the most readily available means is meditation. During the collapse into localized selfhood, the entire energy field also collapsed into a stepped-down mind state that now appears as dualistic consciousness, the mind that functions on the basis of thinking instead of knowing. It divides the unified field of Quantum Intelligence into imaginary parts, such as subjects and objects. This gives the individual the sense of being separate from all “others” and one’s own deepest holistic spiritual-nature. Through meditation methods and other more direct means, one is able to experience the original condition again.
(All quotes and comments following Yogananda’s, are from my book “The Natural Bliss of Being”, available at Amazon)
Happy Easter! 🐣
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