During the initial awakening, there were long periods of feeling myself dissolving as a larvae in a cocoon. Everything, including what I most took myself to be, dissolved. And there were even longer periods of feeling everything being reorganized and put together differently. This happened most strongly during the night, but also through they days.
Now, there is a similar experience. Last night, I again felt everything dissolving. I gave all of me – my human self and the I – to God, to Christ. Giving it all up, and Your Will be Done. This dissolving has been going on for a while now, but last night felt like a shift, a more complete surrender from my side. I wish to shift into this more complete – and deepening – surrender now. Continuing to resist is too painful, and it doesn’t go anywhere.
I was 16 the first time it happened. I walked down the road from the house to the mailbox, it was a clear and starry winter night with a big wind blowing through it. And as if with the flip of a switch, everything is revealed as God – as infinitely loving and wise consciousness. Everything – the road, trees, stars, the wind, the mailbox, the houses, my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my image of an I – is infinite and infinitely loving and wise consciousness. Everything is God. This shift stayed and there was a sense of a tremendous energy flowing through me, dissolving my old human self and putting it together differently. This process lasted for several years, and there was also – at some point – a sense that the initial nondual awakening would/should (it seemed to have a specific purpose) shift into a oneness – where all is still revealed as God yet happening to an I (an imagined I taken as what I am).
This time, it happens at the tail end of a dark night of the soul. The initial one may have been a dark night of the senses, and it was in many ways easier since it happened within an awakening. Everything is God, so there is trust there to allow and even wholeheartedly welcome it. Now, it happens at the tail end of a period where it seemed – at least for long periods – that God has abandoned me (as if that is possible), and my deepest and most basic fears and beliefs are instead at the surface, so it seems more difficult to allow and wholeheartedly welcome it. There is less trust, so more of a tendency to wish to escape it. It seems that this time, the invitation is for me to consciously shift into wholeheartedly welcome it, and to do so more and more consistently.
Note: Cocoons don’t always look pretty from the outside. And that goes for this process too.