STINSON BEACH AND BOLINAS LAGOON, NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
Aerial photograph by Andrew McKinney
(please click image)
One morning, sometime near or shortly past the middle of the year 1996, on a quiet stretch of sand along a beach lagoon north of San Francisco, unbeknownst to the world or others around, a collision of infinities occured.
Around fifty years before, a man, who had exprienced Awakening some years earlier under the grace and light of the great Indian sage Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, traveled from somewhere on the east coast of the United States to Southern California to seek out individuals that he heard were on the forefront of an Enlightenment movement, and thus then, possibly, not unlike himself, Abiding in the Absolute. After arrival, his efforts, as had invariably transpired on other occasions, did not bear fruit.
Some years later, a young boy, age sixteen or seventeen at the time, crossed paths with the man and was taken somehow by the serenity he seemed to abide in. A couple of years passed and the boy, now nearing the end of his teenage years began study-practice under him hoping to attain similar results as the man had under the auspice of Sri Ramana. Years passed and nothing. Then one day it all changed and left in the wake was a person who wasn't.
Sometime in the mid-1990s it was brought to his attention there lived a very remarkable person that had a very remarkable experience that could be found less than four-hundred miles north of where he lived. He, not unlike his spiritual guide and Mentor who had many years before ventured forth to seek others of similar ilk, went north to see if such a story was true, and if, in the words of W. Somerset Maugham writing of a similar person in his novel The Razor's Edge "it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature."
After arrival he didn't seek her out per se', but had heard she went for walks along the beach on a semi-regular basis. Standing alone one crisp morning following a quick storm that passed through the night prior, a man, a woman and a young girl wandered along the stretch of sand toward where he stood. They passed only a short distance away, seemingly without noticing him. The woman, walking in the center, turned her head ever so slightly as she passed and made eye contact. For both, in an instant, it was like being hit with a hammer.
Stopping for a moment, as though she was stunned, she stepped ever so slightly toward him without changing her gaze and stood before him in which could have been no more than only seconds, but seemed for both as an eternity. Unlike the meeting between Upaka and the Buddha on the road to Benares, wherein Upaka was unable to acertain the Buddha's full level of Attainment, this meeting was like the coming together of matter and anti-matter, ending in the emanation of nothing less than a burst of pure energy. No words were said nor did any exchange occur. None was needed.
As she walked away the young girl was heard to ask, "Who was that man?"
"There was no man," the woman replied.
SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI: THE LAST AMERICAN DARSHAN
RECOUNTING A YOUNG BOY'S NEARLY INSTANT TRANSFORMATION INTO THE ABSOLUTE DURING HIS ONLY DARSHAN WITH THE MAHARSHI
Fundamentally, our experience as experienced is not different from the Zen master's. Where
we differ is that we place a fog, a particular kind of conceptual overlay onto that experience
and then make an emotional investment in that overlay, taking it to be "real" in and of itself.
(PLEASE CLICK)
AWAKENED TEACHERS FORUM
ZEN ENLIGHTENMENT IN A NUTSHELL
GASSHO
(PLEASE CLICK)
CLICK
HERE FOR
ENLIGHTENMENT
ON THE RAZOR'S
EDGE
SEE ALSO:
THE MEETING: An Untold Story of Sri Ramana
