...how many people who know nothing about non-duality occasionally stumble into it. I suspect that it is very common in children, and it reminded me of several stories. Here is a page from the start of Suzanne Segal's book:
"I used to meditate on my name. As a child of seven or eight I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed......and say my name over and over to myself. The name would reverberate in my mind with each repetition, starting off solid and strong. My name, who I was. Then fainter, repeating, repeating, repeating, until a threshold was crossed and the identity as that name broke, like a ship relased suddenly from its mooring to float untethered on the ocean waves. Vastness appeared. The name became a word only, a collection of sounds pulsing in a vast emptiness. There was no person to whom that name referred, no identity as that name. No one.
Then fear would arise, my heart would pound hard in my ears, and I would struggle for air, my lungs squeezed in fear's iron grip. I would stop, get up from the couch, walk around, force myself back from the vastness and into the identity of that name. It was too frightening to bear for one so young. But later that day I would return to the couch, sit again, start the name.
I will never know what compelled me to do this practice or how the idea of it ever arose. But the dropping away of personal identity, the dissolution of I-ness that occurred in this daily practice when I was just a young child, was only a preparation, a foreshadowing, for the profound and permanent state that has become my abiding reality. The journey began when that name was peeled away, leaving a mountain of emptiness in its stead."
Gangaji once reported in a satsang that she also experienced non-duality as a child, and when she told her parents about disappearing, they grew very concerned and took her to a shrink. The shrink prescribed some medication (I think is was a phenobarbitol), and she took the drug until late into her teenage years when she decided that if she was going to disappear, then so be it. She stopped taking the drug, but didn't encounter non-duality again until many years later when she met Papaji.
I remember a kind of waking dream that occurred when I was in the fourth grade that was very frightening. In the dream I became aware of a vastness that caused me to feel so insignificant that I felt I was on the verge of disappearance. This dream was so powerful that the sense of it returned many times over a period of one or two years, and each time it scared the wits out of me. I have met other people who had similar experiences as children, but none who reported that such experiences continued into adulthood. Apparently because children are much less conditioned than adults, and much less dominated by mind, they are much closer to the vastness of who they really are.
"I used to meditate on my name. As a child of seven or eight I would sit cross-legged, eyes closed......and say my name over and over to myself. The name would reverberate in my mind with each repetition, starting off solid and strong. My name, who I was. Then fainter, repeating, repeating, repeating, until a threshold was crossed and the identity as that name broke, like a ship relased suddenly from its mooring to float untethered on the ocean waves. Vastness appeared. The name became a word only, a collection of sounds pulsing in a vast emptiness. There was no person to whom that name referred, no identity as that name. No one.
Then fear would arise, my heart would pound hard in my ears, and I would struggle for air, my lungs squeezed in fear's iron grip. I would stop, get up from the couch, walk around, force myself back from the vastness and into the identity of that name. It was too frightening to bear for one so young. But later that day I would return to the couch, sit again, start the name.
I will never know what compelled me to do this practice or how the idea of it ever arose. But the dropping away of personal identity, the dissolution of I-ness that occurred in this daily practice when I was just a young child, was only a preparation, a foreshadowing, for the profound and permanent state that has become my abiding reality. The journey began when that name was peeled away, leaving a mountain of emptiness in its stead."
Gangaji once reported in a satsang that she also experienced non-duality as a child, and when she told her parents about disappearing, they grew very concerned and took her to a shrink. The shrink prescribed some medication (I think is was a phenobarbitol), and she took the drug until late into her teenage years when she decided that if she was going to disappear, then so be it. She stopped taking the drug, but didn't encounter non-duality again until many years later when she met Papaji.
I remember a kind of waking dream that occurred when I was in the fourth grade that was very frightening. In the dream I became aware of a vastness that caused me to feel so insignificant that I felt I was on the verge of disappearance. This dream was so powerful that the sense of it returned many times over a period of one or two years, and each time it scared the wits out of me. I have met other people who had similar experiences as children, but none who reported that such experiences continued into adulthood. Apparently because children are much less conditioned than adults, and much less dominated by mind, they are much closer to the vastness of who they really are.
