Enlightenment, a little story
By: Timoo Van Esch
Tags: Sexuality, Enlightenment, Science, Experience, Spirituality

Colossus of Padmasambhava

Hi dear reader,

I want to use this medium to share my little story about enlightenment.

I’m not some guru or self-proclaimed bless-bringer; I’m just a simple guy from the Benelux. I love Overlanding while at the same time being a homey. I work freelance in IT, with a background of arts & music. So, there’s a lot of contradiction in my life and I love it that way. I don’t pretend I can write a good story, either; I would just like to share an experience with a Medium that is worth having it…

The reason I am writing it, is twofold: On one hand I am looking for recognition. By writing it down, it gets some credibility. On the other hand I am looking for like-minded people, with a similar experience -in their own setting, of course-. Because the hardest part, is to find people with a similar experience. Apparently, it is not that common…

This story begins in 1995.

Let me start with an obvious statement: I’ve experienced what spiritual leaders call “enlightenment”. Now, I know, that sounds like a huge claim and I’m going to explain it later. If not in this post, then in one of the next. For now, I just want to write down the experience itself. To be able for you to understand what happened, I will give you the context as honestly as I can.

Living the Squat

Not the actual squat I lived in…

At the time, I was running a squat with a fellow-student. If you have ever been to a squat, you’ll know that Anarchy is the basis of everything, there. Squats are in many ways the best & worst school you can find; you’ll meet all sorts of people and nobody -ever- will compromise their beliefs nor freedom “for the greater good”. Except when it comes to defending the squat. In court, against the police or reactionary neighbours.

If you have never been to one, let me tell you this: it usually is NOT a bunch of punks ruining their habitat. It often is composed of students, artists, anarchists, “professional” squatters and yes, the occasional drugs addict as well. By the nature of it, squats have open doors to everyone. As a result, you get a mixture of outcasts, artists and people looking for “something different”.

In 1995 I was deeply involved with an artist. He is a painter and exactly 11 years older than me. He was looking for the freedom to express himself, being locked in a family life at home. I offered him a part of the squat to be his atelier. In exchange I had the opportunity to study art in all its diversity, have great discussions, listen to the most crazy music ánd he supplied me with great spiritual literature.

I spent a lot of time reading about spiritual movements. Osho, of course. A lot of others. Something about “The Flower of Life”. And, eventually, Jiddu Krishnamurti. The most pure soul I have ever read about. On par with Spinoza or Erasmus, I’d say.

At the same time I was trying to figure out how computers worked. I got this little i386 PC with 2MB of memory. Going on internet by phone, reading what was available at the time: mainly university studies & discussions and finding the first memes.

It was not all fun & games, though: it was also a very dark period in my life. At the moment, I had nobody to rely upon. I was 23, 24 and my family simply didn’t exist anymore. I left home when I was 16, not being able to live under one roof with my stephmother. I was also in a deep, personal quest to find out who my mother was; she died when I was 5.

So, I was playing “Rémi”, all alone in this world, living those weird experiences you get in a squat. Things like “how to clean a shower, used by 20 non-caring people”, create schedules to cook, etc. etc. And the positive side; organise parties, create a firepit the size of a swimming pool and see 400 people going completely berserk on deep house music at 4 a.m.

Exhibitions

Together with this artist I was trying to create opportunities to get his work exposed. I travelled around sometimes, looking for galleries willing to take him. He did the same, of course.

One day, in the spring of ‘96, he got the opportunity to join in on an art fair. At that moment I was basically his right hand: helping where ever I could. Building frames for his paintings, doing research, finding materials, etc. etc. We thought it would be great, we worked a lot to create a wonderful spot in this huge hangar. Which is difficult, since you have ceilings at 10 meter or so and everything is open and chill. Imagine creating a cozy atmosphere there…

This kind of hall…

We managed. We had huge pieces of fabric, hanging down from the ceiling, all around his little square of 3x5, or something. He filled the lot with woodchips and a huge easel with 1 painting. It looked gorgeous. And nothing came out of it; it was a waste of time and money -for him-. The “art fair” was not so much about art, as it was about wellness and haphazard spirituality, apparently. So once again we were totally out-of-context, making a fool of ourselves with this lovely, artistic spot.

For me though, this started a series of events. While the art fair was running, I met a masseuse. And she invited me to come to her home after the fair. You understand I would not say no to that. Here I have to remind you: I was living in a dark hole. My squat was my home, money I had virtually none, I was living completely outside of society, we had lots of trouble with the legal system (of course; squats are on the edge of legality), food at the table was often a difficult quest and women were virtually non-existing in my life. At the same time I was the minion of a painter, while trying to solve the quest with my mother…

Spiritual Massage?

Isn’t that lovely?

So there I was; I hitchhiked to her place on a Friday (about 125km) and ended up in the arms of the most lovely, spiritual lady. We met at a small café, close to her home and I literally jumped over the table to get a kiss. We ran off to her apartment and had the most wonderful time. The warmth was intense, the love flowing. It was a truly remarkable weekend of love-making. The sex was as deep as I had never experienced before. I dare to state that at that moment, I lost my virginity.

I had been struggling with my sexuality ever since I was a boy, having lived through a lot of disappointing experiences. I’ve been with girls & boys, was involved in a relationship with a man of my age at one time, but never really found it truly interesting. Up until here. This whole weekend we made love, enjoyed good wine, burned incense, read literature, talked about & experienced spirituality, I enjoyed massages, I tried to give one myself and for the first time in my life I experienced the true feeling of deep penetration. What an incredible experience is that, when you are on the same level with your woman and go all the way down!

Since she was a deeply spiritual woman, she teached me things I have not experienced since. f.i.: At one moment she told me how to hold my orgasm. By doing so, while being & feeling incredibly deep inside her, the energy went straight up my spine and it felt like my head exploded. The whole weekend we were making love, deeply and most intensely. And it was literally 180 degree to the other side in my life. The contrast could not have been bigger.

On Monday morning I went home again, to my dark hole in the squat. I was 24, she was 36. And for the first time in my life, I felt I “made love”. The weekend after I travelled back, of course, and it was still great to experience, but she started to talk about her ex, about reuniting, etc. etc. And the 3rd weekend she cancelled, the last minute. There I was. Left alone, back in my squat. With the most wonderful experience I had ever had.

Enlightenment

This, but without the colors… ;-)

Little did I know that this experience was only the runner-up for the next one, a true life-changing experience. I was back in my squat, feeling abandoned but not quite, lonely and alone at the same time, amazed by the experience of those weekends and afraid of the darkness around me. I was sleeping in a sort of “garage box” and had experienced the most wonderful thing in the world at the same time. This was só Black & White that I couldn’t make soup out of it, it didn’t make sense -at all-. As if Yin & Yang lived in 2 separate worlds.

This third weekend, bereft of this beautiful, ongoing experience, something happened. I went to bed, listening to music. And I started to rise out of my body. I don’t know if I was asleep or not. I just started to float above myself. I could see me, the squat and then I stopped watching. And suddenly there was this bright, white, all-consuming light. There was no time, no space, no nothing. Emptiness, they call it in Tibetan Buddhism. Literally nothing.

I therefore also have no clue of how long that experience lasted. It could have been seconds just as well as minutes or hours. There was no “me” experiencing it. “I” was literally gone. There was light. And that’s it. I was not “one with the world”, I was not conscious of myself. Just pure, bright light. I was not aware of this at the moment; only afterwards, while thinking back, I can see what happened.

Pure, bright White

This moment of light broke when the “I”, me, started thinking again. I got afraid; I was nowhere where I should have been; I could not recognise anything; I was completely lost. At that moment my identity started to come back and it felt as if I was “falling back to earth”. Through the levels of angels, desperately looking for my mom. Watching the earth from above, seeing a new-born making its way to its mother. I literally saw a white light making its way to earth, somewhere in the Mediterranean area, a little obscured by clouds, so I could not see where it landed exactly. You know, all these things we learn, when reading spiritual literature.

I don’t know what happened afterwards; I think I simply fell asleep and woke up the next morning. Hence, that’s why I have no clue as of how long this moment lasted.

Before I go back to that moment of light, I want to dissect with you those moments of “falling back”. The angels I mention, were angels I was reading about while studying “the flower of life”. A book/life’s work of some charlatan, trying to convince people of the existence of angels. And that new-born?

That was the fear of the painter I was working with. He was going on holiday to Greece with his wife and she wanted a 3rd child (they had twins already). He didn’t and was afraid she might trick him into pregnancy. Which indeed happened, 3 weeks after my experience. 6 weeks later, he told me she was pregnant. I saw that coming and had tried to warn them. Proof was still waiting in their letter box when they returned from their holiday…

Nothing of what I saw while falling back was real, at least not as real, not as intense as the white light. And, after carefully dissecting all my memories of the moment, I am sure that nothing of what I saw could not have been formed by my own imagination. I had all the knowledge to form these images. It took me 7 years to admit I had all prior knowledge to form these images and to dissect every moment of the experience.

A Layman’s attempt to a Scientific Explanation…

So, what about that white light?

What happened at that moment, that made me change my whole life, eventually?

It took me a long time to even accept what happened to me. It took me even longer to dissect it. And for what I understand now, I would say that my brain shortcutted. I had too much conflicting experiences to make any sense of it. For that, I need to express something I deeply understand myself: Reason is made by “man”. It’s a human invention. Life does not have reason; reason is a method to explain life in such a way that we feel comfortable with it. For us it’s a necessity to understand what’s going on, so that we can imagine follow-up steps to take. But it’s not life. It’s an explanation.

At the time I was still searching for “The meaning of Life”, of course. I was young. And was estranged by the fact I could not find any reason to life. To me, this cumulated in this strange & wonderful experience. In which my brain simply gave up reasoning. There was no reason behind it all. It “just happened”. Without justification, without prior knowledge or built-up agenda-points to reach for a certain goal. I didn’t train myself to get enlightened. I did read a lot about “being”, but that’s it. The fact I lived in a squat had nothing to do with the fact I experienced the most deep love-making I have ever felt. Nothing at all. It simply didn’t add up. There was no linear road leading to this, there were just coincidential experiences. And the only binding factor was that “me” was experiencing them.

From a scientific point of view, I would say that my left and right half of my brain stopped communicating for a moment. Or, as science progresses, those parts of my brain normally relying upon input from the senses and communication to make it understandable, simply stopped working. For a moment I had an empty mind. Meanwhile your body doesn’t stop. Which to me, as a layman, looks something like all the energy, all the signals from your body to your brain stop at the end of your spine. In your brain stem, or basal ganglia, or even cerebellum or something. And since these organs don’t “interpret”, there is only this signal of white light, of pure energy flowing through your brain.

Simply because the energy is not absorbed into signals of communication, you’re left with a Pure White Mind…

Post Scriptum: If there is interest, I will write a follow-up. Kind of “Life after Enlightenment”. Because a lot happened after that, of course. And it completely changed the way I look at life. If not, that’s fine too. And this will just be another obscure post on Medium… ;-)