When I woke up Sunday morning I felt very light of weight and my mind was in a very pleasant sort of sedated state. My practice went rather smoothly all through the day and I left the center sometime around five o’clock. I must have arrived back home at around 7 PM or thereabouts only to find my ex-wife proposing to go have dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Foster City called the Fish Market. I just put my things on the bed and we headed north on Hwy 101. Once we arrived we got a table in one of our favorite sections of the restaurant, the Green House, which is called that way precisely because it looks like a Green House, with glass ceilings, etc.

It must have been the month of September or thereabouts because the place was full of students and there was a particularly noisy bunch of them sitting at some tables near to us. It is unusual to have noisy crowds like that at the Green House, but, strangely so, I was completely unaffected by them. My mind was still in that sedated mood I mentioned before and it remained like that for the rest of the evening. We shared a nice Cioppino between my ex and I and then we went back home, where after my customary wash up I went straight to sleep.

The following morning began in the usual way, with my now-habitual early sitting in the living room to kick start my daily practice and then doing the rest of the little things that comprised my early-day routine. That day I had to deliver some things to Stanford University as part of my job and I went ahead with my task. As usual, I was practicing as I drove along. This time, however, the memory of the knot incident on Saturday night kept coming back to my mind.

Whenever that memory came back I would trace again the path up and down my spine like reliving the moment in which I dissolved the knot. I was a bit puzzled about this because I knew it was all related to what is widely known as the Kundalini, or the serpent of wisdom, which is supposed to lay dormant in our spine until we awaken it through the practice of yoga. I had already been reminded of the Kundalini when I first began feeling the swaying, serpent-like sensation in my spine that I mentioned above.

Because of that previous experience, however, I thought that the Kundalini issue had already been taken care of, but now, after my experience of the previous Saturday, I was no longer very sure about that. With this in mind, while I was walking down some trails on Stanford Campus, heading back to my car, tracing the energy path up and down my spine again, I thought that there must be another energy path going from the spine towards the heart. When I traced both paths together I remembered that Ramana used to say that our REAL heart is not the one residing on our left side, but the one residing on our right. So I extended the heart path across my spine and into the right hand side of my chest and “BING” the Ankh lit up.

And there I was, in the middle of Stanford University having my eternal consciousness revealing itself to me. The Atman had “LIT” itself up so that I could perceive it with my own earthly consciousness. The revelation took me entirely by surprise, but along with it also came the unmistakable certainty that there was much more to come. I did not know what that entailed, but I knew I had to get out of the streets as soon as possible. Fortunately, my home was on Kipling Street, which is only some six or seven blocks away from Stanford, so I just got into my car, started it and drove home as slowly as the circumstances permitted.

On my way there I kept telling myself: “Hang in there, Sal. You can make it home.” The other people driving by were just bubbles of eternal consciousness behind the wheel, as their “auras” or Ankhs were perfectly lit, bright and clear. I just kept on driving as slowly as I could manage, trying not to disturb the traffic, but the Bubbles of consciousness kept driving by in their Hondas and BMWs. “Everyone is just the same as I am,” I thought, “their essence is the Eternal Self too.”

As I was approaching home I took the garage beeper out of the glove compartment and triggered the garage door open. Slowly drove the car into the garage, beeped the door closed, shut the engine down and Up I went, right into the full consciousness of My True Self. And there I was, right where I am now, where I have always been and where I will always be: Pure, Eternal Consciousness. But I still had retained part of my ephemeral consciousness, which was watching its Real consciousness in complete awe. This meant that my earthly consciousness was at that point Realizing what its Real essence really is. Sal was Realizing his True Self.

So my ephemeral consciousness said, “How could have I forgotten this?” And then it surrendered again to the Supreme Consciousness, where it realized the innumerable amount of years that it had been around, probably bouncing from one body to another, “waiting” for this specific moment of Self Realization to come. And this ephemeral consciousness became aware of how entire clusters of centuries fit inside a fraction of a second and of how a fraction of a second comprises entire clusters of centuries.

And it knew that it had always been aware of everything that has been, is and will ever be known. And stricken by the silence that emanates from a vast and incomprehensible eternity of existence, it felt the most overwhelming, absolute sense of humility it has ever felt, thereby making Sal’s hands firmly touch each other in a spontaneous gesture of prayer, while Sal’s body bent slightly forward in a spontaneous gesture of reverence.

When Sal’s consciousness was for a while back into itself again, Sal’s body was tenuously vibrating and tears were flowing from his eyes. Had he not been inside the car, he would have probably fallen on his knees on the floor. So he got himself out of the car and proceeded slowly out of the garage and into the living room, where he intuitively sat down on his yoga chair. At that point he felt the surge of Eternal consciousness overtaking him again and this time he was able to elucidate the exact shape that the Atman adopts when it incarnates into a person.