AWAKENING

Question: I haven’t met you before, and I would dearly love to hear what it was like for you at the dawning of your Awakening. Could you see it coming, or did it spring on you out of this nowhere?

Hanuman: I was in Haridwar in April of 1990. It was my first meeting with my Master, H.W.L. Poonja. And we were a small group at that time, maybe there were ten of us. And we would meet in the Master’s apartment on the Ganges, where He held Satsang every morning.

And He was quite obviously a living Buddha. All time came to a stop. And the most amazing words fell out of His mouth. The mind stopped.

A number of days passed, perhaps a week. I was walking along the river, back from satsang, to the other side of the river where I was staying in the government tourist bungalow. And as I was walking back, all of a sudden, it was crystal-clear: That which He was speaking of. Clear now not in a conceptual way, but as a self-evident, most obvious truth: ‘Consciousness is That which I am.’

More like a dawning than an explosion. I don’t even know if I stopped in place or if I kept walking. It was as clear as clear could be. In some ways everything changed at that moment. And more essentially, nothing changed at all. For I am as I have always been.

I recognized That which I always am, That which I have always been, and I realized that I wasn’t at all who I had taken myself to be. All that came to an end. It was like that.