This Morning, Something Opened
This morning, for a brief moment, something opened.
It happened in a flash.
I was not meditating. I was not trying to reach a higher state. I was not reading scripture, practicing a technique, or asking some great metaphysical question.
I was simply here.
Then there was a jolt.
Not physical exactly, but felt in the body. Not emotional exactly, but deeper than emotion. Not a thought, not an idea, not an argument, not even an insight in the usual sense.
It was an opening.
The closest I can come to saying it is this:
It felt as if the heavens opened.
Not visibly. Not dramatically. Not with angels, light, or voices. But inwardly, immediately, unmistakably.
For one flash, reality felt completely real.
More real than my thoughts about it.
More real than my doubts about it.
More real than the categories I usually use to understand my life.
It felt like THE Answer.
Not an answer to one question, but the answer beneath all the questions.
And before I could explain it, before I could decide whether it was profound or foolish or spiritually inflated, something in me knew.
This is it.
This is what I have been looking for.
Then, almost immediately, the mind gave it a name:
I am already enlightened.
Even now, writing that sentence makes me hesitate. The words sound too large. Too final. Too easy to misunderstand.
But the words came after.
The opening came first.
The awakening came first.
The feeling of reality came first.
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It did not feel like I had achieved something.
It did not feel like I had become someone special.
It did not feel like I had arrived at the end of some long spiritual road.
It felt like the road had opened beneath my feet and revealed that I was already standing where I had been trying to go.
Then came another recognition:
I am in heaven.
Not heaven somewhere else.
Not heaven later.
Not heaven after I become worthy, purified, wise, disciplined, or complete.
Heaven as this.
This breath.
This body.
This ordinary morning.
This life, not perfected, but present.
For a few moments, I did not believe enlightenment was something I had to attain.
I felt awake to something already true.
Then the mind returned.
It wanted to understand what had happened. It wanted to name it, test it, explain it, protect against exaggeration. It wanted to know whether this was a genuine epiphany, a passing state, a psychological event, grace, or the fruit of thirty years of inquiry.
But another set of questions came even closer.
Can I live from this?
Can I meet the rest of my life from this changed perspective?
Will this opening alter how I speak, how I choose, how I love, how I listen, how I respond to desire, fear, conscience, disappointment, and time?
Or will I revert?
Will I return to the old habits of mind — the searching, the striving, the self-doubt, the restlessness, the familiar distance from what is already here?
Will I forget?
Those questions felt as real as the awakening itself.
Because if the opening was true, then the real question is not whether I had an experience.
The real question is whether I can let the experience live me.
The first thing was not a question.
The first thing was an opening.
A jolt.
A flash.
An awakening.
A feeling that reality itself had answered.
And then came the human task:
to remember, to return, and perhaps, little by little, to live as if what opened this morning was true.
