About our most vulnerable and defenceless moments

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For instance, when you are so consumed with rage or hopelessness or fear or helplessness such that you’re almost completely cut off from life, suffocating while gasping your last few breaths of air, you might enter a state of paralysis. Emptied of thought, feeling and action, all defences and devices now useless, there is nowhere else that your mind can go but to its natural, story-less state. A moment of transcendence. Some may describe it as an out-of-body experience.

People who are caught in such extreme experiences of pain or powerlessness or so-called ‘near death experiences’ are indeed extremely cut off from life. The death they face, however, is the death of the ego, the end of story, and it can be terrifying. After all, when story is all you have known and identified with, the end of story must mean the end of you.

Yet, it is in these most vulnerable, defenceless moments that the mind cannot but yield to Life, to Love, to God. There is nowhere else for it to go. The writer and poet, Kahlil Gibran captures this experience so movingly in his poem, The River cannot go back:

It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled,
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean

For the ego, the shock of being without story is equally the ecstasy of free falling into story-less-ness. For the first time, the mind experiences infinite freedom, infinite joy, infinite peace, infinite clarity. For the first time, the mind experiences truth, described variously as a brilliant light, love, rapture, ecstasy, bliss, heaven – states devoid of story.

But it doesn’t last. The conditioned world, the world of story, the collective consciousness of story, is unable to cope with such an enlightened mind. And as long as the mind retains a physical form, it has to retain an aspect of story.

The experience can bring about a change in the mind, the quality and stability of which is determined by how long it has been in an altered state of consciousness, in a story-less state of consciousness.

For most of us, the break from story is fleeting, a fraction of a second. We may think it is longer because of the wholeness, the completeness, the purity of the feeling, the feeling of genuine Aliveness, but the fact is, it was probably just a few moments. That’s because the ego’s commentary or judgement, its craving and attachment, its fear and aversion, supported by the collective, conditioned consciousness of story, is hot on the heels of this most real experience of Life, of story-less-ness:

‘Oh, how beautiful!’, ‘That was magical!’, ‘Breathtaking!’ ‘If only I could experience this everyday’, ‘I don’t want to waste a second of this’, ‘Wouldn’t life be perfect if it was always like this’, ‘Why does this have to end’, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to lose this’…

And before you know it, you’re back in story!