An Essay on Awakening as Immersion
Introduction
There is a door in the soul that most of us spend a lifetime standing before.
We feel it — its weight, its solidity, its silence. We know, without knowing how we know, that something vast waits on the other side. We knock, sometimes gently, sometimes with both fists. We press our ear to the wood and hear what might be the sound of water, or wind, or something that has no name in any language we were taught. We back away. We return. We light candles on the threshold and call it a spiritual life.
This is not a failure. It is, I believe, the ordained shape of the path itself — the long preparation of the vessel before the flood is allowed in.
I have stood before that door. I stand before it still, in certain hours. But I have also felt, and feel with increasing frequency and fullness, the water beginning to move — seeping first under the crack at my feet, then pressing with gathering force against the door’s face, and then, in moments of grace that leave no residue but transformation, pushing the door open and rushing through in something I can only describe as a mercy I did not earn and could not have imagined.
What I want to offer here is not a theory of awakening. It is closer to a testimony — one voice reporting on a flood that belongs to everyone.
The Seeping
What does it mean when the Sacred first finds its way in?
The water does not announce itself.
That is the first thing I learned. I had expected trumpets — some dramatic interior event that would mark the beginning of genuine spiritual life. Instead, what came was moisture. Subtle. Almost indistinguishable from ordinary feeling. A softening around something that had always been hard. A warmth that arrived, unprovoked, during a piece of music, or in the middle of a forest, or in the eyes of someone who looked at me without wanting anything.
In Bhakti tradition, this is recognized as the first stirring of bhava — a wave of sacred feeling that begins to move through the devotee before the devotee even understands what is moving. Sri Ramakrishna described it as the first trembling of the needle when it comes near the magnet. The needle has not yet arrived. But it has begun to tremble. That trembling is everything.
For me, it began in 1971 — though I would not have described it in these terms then. I was a young man who had stumbled into a spiritual path, drawn not by doctrine but by something I felt in the room when the teacher was present. Something I could not name but could not ignore. It seeped in through the crack between who I thought I was and what I faintly suspected might be true.
This is the water at its most tentative. It does not flood. It infiltrates. And in doing so, it begins, molecule by molecule, to change the composition of the interior.
Jnana would say: the first glimmer of viveka — discriminative wisdom — is itself a grace. The intellect begins to suspect that the world it has been treating as ultimate is not, in fact, the last word. This suspicion is water. It seeps. The door does not yet move, but its wood begins to remember that it is permeable.
The Pressure
What does it mean when devotion becomes longing that will not be consoled?
There comes a time when seeping is not enough.
The water rises on the other side of the door. The pressure builds. And what was once a gentle infiltration becomes something that presses — with increasing insistence, with something that can only be called need — against the barrier between where we are and what we are.
In Sufism, this pressure is shawq — the divine ache, the longing that intensifies the closer the soul moves toward its source. Rumi does not spare us: the reed flute cries because it has been cut from the reed bed, and that crying is not pathology — it is the path itself. The pain of separation is the engine of return.
I know this pressure. I have felt it in the hours before dawn when something in me refused the comfort of ordinary sleep and would not be quiet about it. I have felt it in the hollow that opened sometimes in the middle of what should have been a full and satisfying life — a hollow not of depression, but of divine dissatisfaction. The Sufi masters would recognize it immediately. Something in you knows what it is missing. And it will not pretend otherwise forever.
This is when the door begins to crack. Not because we have forced it — though our longing is part of the mechanism — but because the accumulated weight of the water, the sheer pressure of what is trying to enter, finds the door’s resistance beginning to yield.
The crack is a mercy. Light comes through it. And with the light — a sound. The sound of what has always been waiting.
The Bhakta, in this moment, does not analyze the crack. One falls to one’s knees before it. One presses one’s face to the thin line of impossible light and weeps — not from sorrow, but from the first real encounter with what one has been loving all along without knowing it.
I have wept that way. I weep that way still. Not always. But sometimes, in the presence of certain music, certain silences, certain moments of beauty so acute it becomes unbearable — the tears come without invitation, without emotion as we conventionally understand it. They are the door remembering it is not actually solid.
The Opening
What does it mean when the self can no longer hold its position against the flood?
The door opens halfway and the world is never quite the same again.
What comes through is not what we expected. It is not information. It is not an answer to our questions, though all questions somehow lose their urgency in its presence. What comes through is presence itself — vast, intimate, luminous, indifferent to none of it.
In Advaita Vedanta, this is the first stabilizing of the recognition that Brahman — pure Awareness, the unbordered ground of all experience — is not elsewhere. It is here. It has always been here. The seeker’s great shock is not that one finds something new, but that one recognizes something ancient that was hidden in plain sight. Tat tvam asi. That thou art.
But recognition at this stage is still incomplete. The door is halfway open. We can stand in the torrent and feel its reality. We can, in the right conditions — meditation, sacred music, the grace of a teacher’s presence, an ordinary afternoon that suddenly becomes translucent — step fully into the current. But the door is not fixed in its open position. We return. We find ourselves, again, in the hallway, with the memory of water still on our skin but the door once more closed or nearly so.
This is not failure. This is baqa after fana in the Sufi understanding — the return to the world of forms after the moment of annihilation in the divine. The mystic does not stay drowned. One returns, marked, carrying something of the flood back into ordinary life. This oscillation is itself the work. Each time the door opens, it opens a little more. Each time we return, we return a little more changed.
Jnana, at this stage, is not dry or cerebral. It is blazing. The intellect, having seen what it has seen, becomes a torch rather than a lamp. The difference between Bhakti and Jnana is not, I have come to believe, a difference in what is found — it is a difference in the style of finding. The Bhakta is undone by love. The Jnani is undone by seeing. But what undoes them is the same thing. The flood does not change its nature depending on who is standing at the door.
The Drowning
What does it mean to be wholly taken by what you have been moving toward?
I will speak carefully here, because I am speaking of something I understand only in glimpses — not as a permanent resident of the further shore, but as one who has, in certain mercied moments, felt the final gush of water take the door entirely off its hinges.
There is a teaching in the Bhakti lineages about mahabhava — the great feeling, the overwhelming divine emotion that dissolves the boundary between the devotee and the Beloved entirely. Mirabai sang from that place. Ramakrishna lived in it for days at a time. It is not mystical extravagance. It is the logical conclusion of love that has been refusing to accept limits.
And in Advaita, the corresponding recognition is sahaja samadhi — the natural, spontaneous abiding in Awareness that does not require the removal of ordinary experience but simply reveals what ordinary experience has always been resting within. It is not trance. It is not withdrawal. It is the fullness that was always here, finally unobstructed.
The flood does not destroy you. That is perhaps the most unexpected thing. What it destroys is the sense of a you who might be destroyed. What remains is something that, paradoxically, feels more genuinely you than anything you ever insisted on being. The Sufis call this fana fil Haqq — annihilation in the Real. What appears to drown is the false self, the constructed self, the one who built the door and forgot it was a construction.
On the other side of the door there is no door. There is only water. And the water is alive.
I do not claim to live there permanently. But I know the water is real. I know the flood is not a metaphor. I know it because sometimes, unexpectedly, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon or in the final bars of a piece of music that should not be able to do what it does, something in me opens — and the water is there, pressing in, luminous and enormous and intimate beyond anything the word intimate was designed to hold.
This, I believe, is what all the traditions have been pointing toward. Not the door. Never the door. The flood.
Epilogue
You are already wet.
That seeping you have felt — in music, in grief, in sudden inexplicable tenderness — that is not accident. That is the flood finding its way through every crack that love has opened in you.
The door is not your enemy. It was never meant to hold forever. It was meant to build the pressure. It was meant to make you long.
Stand at it one more time. Press your palm flat against the wood. Feel what is pushing from the other side.
Then step back.
And let it come.
Sources & References
- Sri Ramakrishna — The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, recorded by Mahendranath Gupta (M), trans. Swami Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942
- Jalal ad-Din Rumi — Masnavi-i Ma’navi (The Masnavi), trans. various; see also The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks, HarperCollins, 1995
- Mirabai — devotional poetry (padas), various translations; see Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems, trans. Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield, Beacon Press, 2004
- Shankaracharya — Vivekachudamani (Crest Jewel of Discrimination), foundational text of Advaita Vedanta
- Al-Hallaj, Al-Ghazali — Sufi sources on fana, baqa, and shawq in classical Islamic mysticism; see The Mystics of Islam, Reynold A. Nicholson, 1914
- Nisargadatta Maharaj — I Am That, trans. Maurice Frydman, Acorn Press, 1973 (on sahaja samadhi and natural abiding)
Numinous Waves 