Awakening sneaked up on me. I was training as a yoga teacher in England and out of curiosity picked two books to read, «The Power of Now» by Eckhart Tolle and «I Am That» by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj. Reading «The Power of Now» a light came on inside, everything in the book seemed so obviously true, and so easy to access. I then began reading «I Am That» and in the first few pages a very deep chord was played. Afterwards, walking in the street, the incesssant thinking spontaneously stopped, I was amazed. A few days later, in a moment of complete grace, I had a clear realization of what was real and what was illusion and all further questions became unnecessary. From that moment on the mind became quiet and took the back seat. A few weeks later I met my first spiritual teacher, Tony Parsons. The meeting was brief but the affect was profound and over the next year it was Tony´s words «there is no one» that came back to me over and over, anchoring the shift in me and my feet to the ground.
But awakening is a funny thing, it´s never quite what you think it is. Even after the fact. For the longest time it seemed like the essential shift happened in a moment of realization. Now I see that the realization was just a moment of crystallisation, the head finally got what the heart had always been yearning for, what it already knew, somehow, and I began to know the subtlety of the heart. What is called the shift is then the inner aligning to this, it´s not a mental position that you can choose or not... that´s always the surprising thing, it´s like reality changes, every cell transformed. It´s as though the room had been full of water before and someone came along and drained it ~ somehow everything is light, and clear.
from http://www.livingpresence.ca/tomas/
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