The next morning I woke up, and the first thing I noticed was that everything was intensely lovely, the sound of birds, the objects, all were beautiful and alive. I thought that this state might leave me again. But it didn’t leave. I got used to it, so it’s not remarkable anymore. Life itself is remarkable.

Byron Katie had a very similar radical awakening in the attic of a halfway house. One morning she woke up and saw a cockroach crawling over her foot. In that moment, reality radically shifted. She was instantaneously free of suffering, and realized that she was beyond identification.

Michael was serving an eight-year sentence, living in a jail cell with thirty-two other inmates, when he experienced a similar deep shift in awareness. His only link to his wife was the telephone, but his weekly call was frequently impossible because of the threats of violence from his cellmates. Most of his few possessions, even his sneakers, had been stolen. He was absolutely isolated and filled with despair. He had nowhere left to fall. But the depth of his despair proved to be fertile soil. One line in a book provoked his shift: "You are consciousness."

He began to feel uncontrolled love for the guards and fellow inmates. He felt blessed by his situation. This is how he speaks of his life today: "Now, my life is a constant state of contentment. It’s interrupted a thousand times a day, but none of these interruptions shake the foundation of that contentment."

These experiences represent those of countless others who have broken the addiction to personal drama simply because the story itself has crash-landed.

The Role of a Teacher

An awakening can occur spontaneously when we are in the presence of someone who is already awake. The perfume of silence is infectious. Catherine Ingram shared the profound experience she had during her first encounter with H. W. L. Poonja, while conducting a magazine interview:

I fell into such silence in the interview that he would have to remind me to ask the next question. He would say something, and I would realize that there was just nothing else to be said, my mind would stop thinking. All motion of mind that had me seeking for something better fell away at that moment. He embodied such a radiant, magnificent wholeness; he was so clearly not seeking anything. He modeled a possibility of really resting in the center of one’s own being without the idea that there was anything more to get, to do, or to become.

Ingram has gone on to become an influential teacher in her own right, as have many of those I interviewed. Christopher Titmus has been leading meditation retreats for more than thirty years, so he is familiar with the other side of the teacher-student dynamic. He feels that his role as teacher is almost that of a bystander who creates an environment where awakening can come from within the student. "I would feel I was being too conceited if I thought I was doing something of importance. In the collective conditions of everyone being there together, something can happen. The teacher is not central to that."

Many teachers would concur. So many people are waking up naturally in the course of their daily lives; they simply need someone to validate what has already occurred.