A Very Interesting Experience

by Rani Willems

Oh Lord, if I worship you from fear of hell, cast me into hell. If I worship you from the desire for paradise, please deny me paradise. – Rabia

As many of you know, I had an experience of (apparent) enlightenment for some years and shared satsang. I have already written a long article about my experience (see ranimu.org), but this is a nice opportunity to share some more and say hello to you all.

When that huge space opened into the source of Existence, everything looked simple, and I felt that I had found home, that enlightenment had happened. I was in touch with the all-knowingness of Existence, with great clarity and the vastness of the empty Source. I felt that everything I had ever wanted was here. I failed to notice that I immediately got attached to the void and through that soon lost connection to my body. I felt that the search had ended, that the path was complete. (The fact that I only truly entered the path after that opening is something I had no idea about in 1998 when it happened to me.)

Some of my friends wanted to give me feedback, but I was convinced that they did not know the space I was in so I did not listen to anyone. Many friends rejected me, I rejected others, I got expelled from the (Pune) Ashram, and soon I had entered a pretty isolated space. This did not bother me at all because I was immersed in the bliss of my experience.

Only years later did I come to see that it is absolutely necessary to have a living guide who has already walked the path, that the sangha may be quite a good place to check your sanity, and that the dharma serves as signposts in the vast emptiness. But Osho was no longer in the body, His words were so vast that I could not recognize any signposts in them, and I had lost the sangha. I was on my own. I thought that that was part of the whole thing. I had heard Him say so often that we have to stand alone, even if nobody believes us; we have to have the courage to stand alone. So alone I stood.

The isolation did not last long. People came to find me at home, and I shared with them, at first one to one and later in small groups. Before I knew it, I was on a satsang tour through Europe. It all seemed to happen in a very simple and organic way. I now know that the ego survives through many levels of realization, but back then I did not. It took a few years before I noticed that the ego was still there, disguised as “Miss Nobody.” It became visible when I engaged again in intimate personal contact.

After much initial protest from my side, I entered into a relationship. My heart was touched, my genitals were touched, and I entered the body again. The first crack happened. Soon after, my best friend died of cancer in my arms, and another big crack in the pot appeared. I started to share all this in satsang, and not many wanted to hear it. Many people just want to be told that there is only bliss, and they want to disappear. What did not occur to me until much later was that the spiritual search is not about disappearing, but is in many ways about appearing as an unconditioned, free individual.

Eventually the entire pot broke. By that time I had already lost many of my students, and I found myself in a very scary place. I knew I had to let go of satsang, but that was my only source of income. I had hardly saved any money. Because there was “nobody” there, I felt that nobody deserved the money that came from satsang, and I had given a lot of it away as it came to me. At that time I felt I was not of this world, and I did not even want to accept the reality of needing money for myself. My love partner had also become my working partner, so we ended up living together, stranded in a caravan in the forest, in the cold winter, in Holland.

In one go, all the pain of my entire life came to visit. The superego came back with such vengeance that I basically collapsed in despair. Thoughts of suicide accompanied me. It was such a shock! The possibility that the enlightened space could leave me had never occurred to me. The two years that followed were the most difficult and painful ones of my life.

There is no escape from karma. Everything I had thrown out, rejected, or denied came back for a visit. Someone once said, “When you fail to live with reality, reality inevitably will come to live with you.” How true this turned out to be! Without the support of family and some friends it would all have been a lot harder. They came visiting with bags of groceries, helped with money, and offered their hearts to us. I took some cleaning jobs and later worked as a nurse for the dying – hard physical work that brought me much-needed grounding. The “Return” had started. I was coming back into the body.

At first it was very hard, because I was terrified to dissociate again. Therefore I identified with each and every thought, not knowing how to be totally present in the feeling without identifying with it. While I had stayed connected to some of my close friends, I was still largely isolated from the sangha I had grown up in. I was so covered in shame, guilt, and pain that I had a hard time reaching out. My biggest pain was that I felt that I had misled so many people. (Of course, I had only misled myself.)

I also read a book that helped me a lot, Halfway up the Mountain by Mariana Kaplan, which describes all the pitfalls that one can fall into when one prematurely claims enlightenment. It brought me the proper context, and I began to understand the crisis I was in.

Slowly, I reached out to some of my old colleagues and friends, and my pain became exposed. I turned to Almaas’s books where I found a lot of helpful guidance, and eventually I came upon the Diamond Logos Teaching of Faisal, who many years ago seems to have gone through the same experience. Avikal invited me to assist him in a Satori group in Osho Uta in Cologne, and I happily agreed. Being back in the Osho Buddhafield was very healing. My superego told me that one can never go back to the old, but my heart was so happy. I realized that working with people and assisting in the transformation process is my great love and joy.

The tide had turned. Life started flowing again. Inspiration was back. I moved to Cologne and joined Osho Uta. At the moment of writing I am leading my first group, and a great part of the work is on the superego. I have come to understand that this is the glue that keeps our conditioning in place. It is the foundation for the path. I have found a new way of working in which emptiness can be integrated in the body as well as in the psyche – working with the resources rather than with the issues.

I feel so lucky that I crashed, because once power and position were linked I created a bulletproof set-up for myself that did not allow any feedback or guidance to enter. I am so grateful that my love for truth turned out to be the strongest force in my life and that it keeps on guiding me. I also came to realize that Satoris and other sudden openings are like fireworks only because there is still some obstruction there. Over time, each new reality becomes rather natural and uneventful. As someone once said: One cannot live in heaven too long; there are no restaurants and no toilets. For this we have to go down to Earth.

So now I don’t want to get so high anymore. The daily meditation practice that I had for many, many years before the enlightenment experience is now even more important. In many ways, the path really started for me after this experience; with denial and hope gone, the path has taken on a very different quality. I no longer expect miracles to happen (even though they continue to do so), and I have a much more realistic picture of the work that needs to be done. As I embrace the world, I also embrace myself – and vice versa.

I feel that ego inflation is bound to occur when great openings happen. The superego becomes a spiritual superego. This is not personal, but a mechanical process that happens in the mind. It seems to me that it is better to know it and acknowledge it so that you can work with it.

I am very grateful that through this journey I have come in contact with so many other beautiful teachings and traditions and, most of all, with so many beautiful people. It brought my sannyas arrogance to the surface. While we are a particularly juicy, alive, and special bunch we are also famous for our arrogance. I now know that there are many other amazingly beautiful, inspiring, and sincere people on the path. I have also had a chance to create a distance between me and Osho. I reconciled myself with some of what were, in my eyes, His mistakes. I lost the idea that I had of His infallibility, and the split inside me between the “good” and the “bad” Osho has healed and melted away, making my own transformation more realistic as well.

The incredible festival that we had in Cologne in May to celebrate 25 years of Osho Uta was a great healing for me. So much richness and integration has come from this experience, so much fullness after all that emptiness! As Buddha says: First we have to learn that form is emptiness, but then we must recognize that emptiness is form. We have to come full circle. Again, and again, and again because our lives resolve between these two.

rani@ranimu.org

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