If Not Me, Who? If Not Now, When?
by Robert Rabbin
 When I was 11 years old, I had one of those epiphanies that shape one’s life in unexpected ways. In my case, I developed a restless soul that longed for missing pieces in the puzzle of living:
Who am I? What is my purpose? How shall I live? A few years later I took to the road on a spiritual quest, traveling around the world in search of answers to my questions about life and living, reality and truth, meaning and purpose. I spent the next 25 years immersed in various non-dual wisdom traditions, including ten years of study with Swami Muktananda. During the course of those years, I experienced awakenings, realizations, epiphanies, and transcendent bliss beyond the scope of words. But there always seemed to be a higher place, a summit yet to climb. One day, I stood atop a summit from which no other summits could be seen. I had found the missing pieces of my long-ago longing. My search for existential clarity and wholeness came to an end standing atop a summit of eternal silence and pure being. The weight and confusion of "self" had disappeared, like a snowflake blown from the face of the Earth.
It seemed I had come to a final end, resting in deep peace marbled with constant inner joy. From time to time, gusts of bliss would swirl through the emptiness of my being. Whenever questions or troublesome thoughts or feelings arose within me, they were immediately dissolved in silence and stillness. My eyes looked through and past everything, locked on eternity. Life came and went by itself.
And yet in some unknown, unseen, unfelt place, a storm was gathering, which would force me from this place to a truer place. Though there was no further summit on the climb to existential clarity and wholeness, there was more distance to travel—the distance back down the mountain, to the valley from where I had come.
In Little Gidding, T. S. Eliot writes, "The end is where we start from." I came to one end, only to find myself at another, wholly unexpected, beginning. I was to start over again. Another restless spirit began moving through me, a new passion: a deep hunger to fully engage the world around me, the world I had neglected during years of inward-focused meditation. But there it was, bright as a sun and wilder than an avalanche. The world, which had become transparent, had become solid again, but not so solid I couldn’t see all the way to its soul...
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Copyright Robert Rabbin. This article was
originally
published at our website, SoulfulLiving.com,
in June 2004,
as part of our "Spiritual Practice" Issue.
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