Not I

Not I

From our friend, Charles R

I was eight years old when I slipped and fell into the swimming pool at Valentines Park. My chin hit the side of the pool as I went in backwards. All at once a watery mass enveloped me, water rushed up my nose and panic set in. But as the young instinctive center flailed, an observer emerged without ‘I’ attached. After being able to climb out of the pool, coughing and spluttering with a feeling of ‘Yuk’, the experience of ‘not-I’ was intense enough to stay with me.

While visiting a friend in Liege, Belgium we attended a Christmas midnight mass. My upbringing was completely non-religious. Receiving holy communion and listening to the beautiful mass recited and sung in Latin in the fifteenth century Liege cathedral evoked a state of beautiful harmony both with the externals and within myself.

At a concert in New York, hearing Bach’s Brandenburg concertos for the very first time in my life, one of the movements in one of the pieces transported my state from mere enjoyment to what I can only describe as the music breathing life, carrying and supporting a conscious existence.

A few years ago, laying on a gurney in an ambulance, my instinctive center was as close to death as it’s ever been. The EMT’s were keeping my body warm and alive by wrapping it in an electrically heated blanket. It was a relief from the intense shivering and shuddering the instinctive center mechanically performed, trying to maintain its core temperature. As I felt the warmth surround me and my body stop shaking, the impulse to close my eyes for restful sleep occurred. Just as my eyes were closing in anticipation of a rest, an ‘I’ occurred that firmly admonished the desire to submerge into first state. ‘DO NOT SLEEP’. At that moment a simple separate state appeared. The same not-I that had been present at the swimming pool.

This morning while making my wife’s coffee, a few drops of coffee spilled onto the counter along with a few coffee grounds. The same state that appeared in the swimming pool, that also appeared during the Christmas mass in Belgium, at the concert in New York and in the ambulance, again appeared. Not I, but higher centers had emerged. A simple separate person.

My experience is that the connection to higher centers is bestowed more than achieved, and while higher centers function, they require no effort to BE. Even so, without a school, without three lines of work, guidance from the Teacher and help from other students, the burgeoning connection to higher centers could never have occurred.

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Image: Parmigianino, Galeazzo Sanvitale (1524, Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte, Napoli)