Beyond: Nothing, Yet Complete
The second retreat I attended with Lorn and Lucia was in July 2020 and was held online. At the end of the retreat, I felt relaxed and peaceful, but did not notice any shift to a higher state of consciousness, as was spoken about on the retreat. Right after the retreat ended, I made lunch, sat and ate it, and decided afterwards to walk out to the mailbox, which is about 150 ft down the country road we lived on. I was enjoying the beauty of nature and stillness as I walked, and about a third of the way down the road, the shift happened.
Suddenly, everything in the environment was intensely looking at me, from the fence post to the trees to every blade of grass and piece of gravel on the ground -everything simultaneously looking at me. I felt tremendous energy in my body while looking at everything that was strongly pressed in on me from everywhere. I then looked upwards to the broad expanse of the blue sky, and in that moment, I felt my perspective totally change. I was now in this vast, unending, unbounded expansiveness that was looking at my body and mind and everything in the environment. I was no longer the mind, no longer the body. I was this free eternal Being.
My first thoughts were that this shift to this Unbounded Being that I truly am was so simple and so close, all my 69 years of living and 50 years of TM practice - how could I have missed this? And as I realized that it had always been there, the body started to laugh and laugh and laugh some more. I went inside the house and lay down to rest and found that this new state of unboundedness was also there with my eyes closed.
Over the next 2 years and 9 months, the state of Unbounded Beingness continued to deepen and refined perception in this state brought great bliss, and then the next shift happened to Unity Consciousness…
Shift to Unity Consciousness: During the 2 years and 9 months in Cosmic Consciousness, I was the unbounded Pure Being, separate from mind, body, and objects in the environment, but increasingly over that time I became more and more in rapport with all the objects I looked upon. There was a closeness, a deepening intimacy with the everyday objects of the world, but no shift yet to being everything as described when Lorn and Lucia would speak of Unity Consciousness.
The Shift to Unity Consciousness started in between sessions of an online retreat with Lorn and Lucia. I was sitting in a room at home that suddenly had the space in the room filled with very lively energy that felt thick, similar to what it would be like to move your hands or walk through a room of cotton candy. This went on for a while, and the non-changing, eternal, unboundedness that I am and had been my experience for the last 2 years and nine months started to very slowly dissipate and dissolve. It was like a balloon slowly leaking air or releasing a gas into a room and having it slowly disappear.
Because this unboundedness was who I was, I felt like I was slowly dissolving, disintegrating, and that my essence was dying. I actually checked my physical vital signs to see if I was physically dying and found I was physically sound and safe, and realized that the Being was what was dying. Lorn and Lucia assured me that the shift to Unity Consciousness can occur in this dying scenario and that I was in the midst of the shift.
This loss of the Being as it dissipated continued over the next day and a half, and I did not feel comfortable as I went on with my daily activities. Then I went outside my home and was standing in the driveway. While looking up into the blue sky through the branches of the oak trees, an explosion occurred where the Being that had been dissipating was shot out into everything and everywhere, seen and unseen. It was like my Being was a stained glass window that exploded and shattered into billions of pieces and spread into everything. Everything was now Being, from the blades of grass to the mountain miles away in the distance, but there was no distance between me and the mountain because it was all one wholeness. Everything was so dear to me and was myself. The unboundedness of Cosmic Consciousness was no longer there, but now this oneness of everything and being everything everywhere, seen and unseen, was my true nature and felt like it had always been that way.
In the 3 years since the shift to Unity Consciousness, the Oneness and Wholeness have deepened over and over again, and refined perception in Unity Consciousness is now providing knowledge of the mechanics of creation. Bliss deepens with all this.
Shift to Brahman - I had been in Unity Consciousness for 3 years. The experience was of the Being that I am being in everything. It was a very intimate and beautiful and had the experiencing of everything in creation, seen and unseen, being one Wholeness. There was much bliss and everything had a great liveliness to it.
Then when on the last day of an online retreat with Lorn and Lucia , the shift to Brahman really got into full motion. It took a few days for the shift to occur and to realize that that is what happened.
Lorn was speaking on the retreat about the Nothingness and Pure Divinity. I actually do not remember the words he said, but what I do remember arising was this very strong feeling of upheaval at my very core. It was like something deep inside me was being broken apart and disintegrated and annihilated and obliterated. What immediately happened then was that I started to have huge unstressing emotionally and mentally, even though I rarely before ever had much unstressing during retreats. But this was a big mental and emotional roughness and agitation that started and lasted for 36 hours.
Two mornings after the retreat, I awoke and arose to do do my day and realized that all the emotional and mental upheaval was gone. But as I started the activities of my day, it felt like someone had pulled the plug out of the source that was providing energy to me. My mind was clear but it was so hard to stand up and do chores. Because of this extreme low energy, went back to bed. I remember laying down and wondering if this was the energy level people have when they are dying. I also noticed that there was no Being and the experience of Being everything everywhere was gone. I just figured Being would return when I recovered from this extreme energy depletion.
By the next day, my energy had come back quite a bit and slowly returned to normal that day, but the Being did not return.
I had not meditated since the end of the retreat because of all that had gone on, but when I sat to meditate, I did not feel the usual sitting in Being. Instead, I felt sitting in emptiness. For a month before the Brahman shift, I had been feeling during meditation program, a magnetic pull. This intense magnetic pull felt to me to be something of grandness and divine. But now I realized that this magnetic pull no longer existed because there was nothing there anymore for it to pull on, because I no longer existed.
Even my body seemed like it was gone. I could see it as an appearance when I looked at it, but it felt like it really had vanished. At this point, I finally realized that this was Brahman.
As I look at the world today, the world does not exist, though somehow the appearance of it is there. There is no struggle between these paradoxical statements and observations. As a matter of fact, this lack of struggle is part of the fabric of what is experienced in every part of my life now. It is so different than my Unity experience of the last 3 years. No Being, No being everything everywhere, no Self, and no liveliness or bliss. It is nothing, yet complete. I am satisfied in the nothingness. There is a groundedness and stability of the nothingness.
— AD, California, USA
