The day "I" died and the nature of Reality came to light

There is a point where the search for the Self suddenly terminates. Reaches its conclusion.

That point is referred to as Enlightenment.

I will try to describe this as it occurred in my own direct experience.

There is a clear before and after this point. But the before and after are really the same. Experiences before and after are the same.

There's nothing gained through Enlightenment.

Something is lost. Or found to not even have ever existed.

What I say now will try to express in words what is realized at that most crucial point. When it becomes clear that the one seeking Enlightenment does not even exist.

And what does exist is most clearly alight!

Light of lights, Wonder of wonders.

So, let's try. I can compress it down to a few minutes, but you have to understand all of this hits home in a flash.

A lightning bolt of clear unquestionable Truth.

It is not a long drawn out experience of bliss or something.

It is being gobsmacked! God smacked!

There is a side to it which really cannot be expressed. But just hearing this may turn you into that lightning rod; the mind honed and fully receptive for that bolt of pure Insight.

The moment the Insight arrived was a very ordinary moment. I was at home with my family.

It just so happened that we crossed paths in the corridor; my wife, daughter, and me, and we ended up in a spontaneous huddle. Little family hug. And at the moment, as I went down on my knees, and my heart filled with love; the normal kind of love, the mind's defenses went down. And because I was obsessively practicing self-inquiry, in that moment the question arised:

What am I?

What am I to feel this love? What is my wife? What is my daughter, really?

In Nonduality teachings the self is said to be an illusion. I'd heard it a thousand times before, meditated on it for hours and hours.

But only a part of the self was being subjected to the questioning. Call it the narrative self, or the thinking mind, or the felt sense of self. But when the lightning bolt arrives, in that very first instant, or rather in the rumbling before its arrival, what is realized is the scope of such self inquiry was all wrong.

The first thunder clap.

Surprise!

The subject of the inquiry is you. Everything you have ever considered as yourself in any way. Body, mind, soul, person, human being...

Nabeel.

I.

All of it!

And then the first bolt strikes.

Complete annihilation.

I wasn't even an illusion. I never even existed. There was maybe a breathless moment, it's hard to say now, because it all happened in the flash, but there was a sense of history being rewritten. Like something that seemed to have been there, was erased not just in this moment, but even from the past.

Like in those time travel movies, they show a character being wiped out even from a photo frame. Never even existed.

All the memories of this life were rendered in a truer light.

There's no me!

No such thing!

No me as a physical or mental or metaphysical entity. There are no conscious entities at all in the entire universe. No such entities are possible, because Consciousness is not a property of separate little things.

But this isn't the complete Realization. That was yet to come.

This was the moment of complete surrender.

You see? This is what is meant by "surrender".

It is not a hidden insight or realization that blocks you from Enlightenment. It is this admission: The admission that I am not the thing that is conscious. What makes this admission at that point feels like I. But later, now I can say, what made that admission was just the thinking mind.

This instrument that had assumed that it was the thing that was conscious.

Now, if this was the end of the story, it would be a terrible ending.

Luckily this death; this annihilation, was only the first strike. In this case, lightning struck twice.

Listen, this is important to know.

The lightning has to strike twice, or you're stuck in that terrible nothingness. This non-being, emptiness. Those are just what the mind sees as it tries to look upon Reality.

The mind sees nothing.

But surrender is exactly giving up this identity of being the mind. The arrogance of thinking that this bundle of physical and mental phenomena is what is conscious.

As soon as that admission is made, the second bolt can strike.

And so it struck!

But now there was nothing to strike. The mind had fizzled out in the comprehension, the magnitude of its error.

So, this bolt coincided with an implosion of the mind, and an explosion of the Heart!

You may recall, this all started in a certain state of mind. A bit of love was there. Now it swelled up. It became a tsunami.

Love.

Awe.

Devotion.

You!

You!

The one listening, feeling, perceiving, making perception possible.

The one that is conscious, is none other than You!

Reality!

The Supreme Reality. The Singularity beyond space and time.

This base Reality, the fundamental basis of everything, is in Itself sentient. Is Sentience itself.

That is I!

Truly I.

So all that happened, if you take out all the drama, is very simple. The mind admitted that it is not the thing that is conscious. And if we think of the mind as a reflection of the brain activity, then you could say the body-mind structure, this instrument, admitted that it is not conscious.

And as soon as it did so, it was clear what You are.

Because clearly, You are conscious. You are what is conscious. So you, who the mind predicted to be this individual little entity that needs protection, was born and will die, has all these little desires and fears, that you was found to not exist.

And what You truly are came to light.

Thunder struck.

And yet, isn't this most normal? Most obvious?

Where did it all get so confusing?

Where does it all go so wrong?

What seemed like not nothing, like emptiness, from that old perspective, is in fact this fullness and completeness of the Whole; the actual Self. And this Self is not actually unknown. Because the sense that I am; the sense of be-ing, on which all identities are based, is actually the knowledge of this Self.

The Self-Awareness of this true I.

So that was it. The end of the road.

Nonduality.

Not two.

Not even one.

There is exactly none.

No one.

But there is the Self, which is none other than I or You.

And again we're getting into the weeds, because the point is that there's no individual me or you.

So, what remains standing after this flash of Insight?

A burnt out husk.

From the outside, nothing much has changed.

Even in that moment, nothing much changed. The eyes watered a bit. Nothing seemed to change.

But from the inside, it is quite clear now that what is called Nabeel, is really just a collection of phenomena.

A persona; a character being played.

And then there is Reality, which is not other than I. The Singularity that is watching this show, and all the other shows. The pure Light whose reflections are the show.

Just staying in this Understanding leads to the most perfect and complete peace. But often this knowledge fills this mind with an urge to express itself. To plant the seeds of this Truth somewhere and use this mouthpiece to maybe say a few words, which may be enough to pierce another one of Your Dreams.