This is the answer to my question. My question was how can I be absolutely awake in the middle of a very busy life with my family, earning a living.

As I sat there looking at him doing what I could to just be and when the five seconds were over he asked me what happened. I said well I’m just sitting here. He said, no, no, I told you no thinking. I am sitting here thinking. So let’s do it again. So we did it again. At that point I was starting to realize the bottomless pit I had just started to fall into.

That there was no escape. That this was not a game, that this was not an attainment, that this was not mind in any way. So I just quietly for a couple of minutes and then when that was over he asked me what had happened.

I wasn’t about to say anything, but he kept insisting. I told him nothing happened and that it was just quiet and dark with a little what happens when you close your eyes. He said very good. He says you’ve got it.

He was joking around, he says.’ you got it, haven’t you.’(how will I know?). He says are you sure you’ve got it? And he says, Papaji says, I’m sure you’ve got it. I said, well Papaji, if you’re sure, I’m sure. And that was it.

We had other interactions since then but it sounds funny for me to say this because twenty years of Zen and Vipassana Buddhist training was totally against this, the master gave this. He gave me the gift of awakening. It was nothing I did.

In the days after that each day more of the realization would come, of emptiness, of quiet, of silence and in that silence everything is known. In that silence is the realization, it can’t be spoken. In that silence is the disappearance of the individual doer. The doer was the mind where you might call central organizing principle of individuality, the ego, was shattered in that moment.

It was shattered into fragments, impulses, thoughts would continue, desires came and went, memory, everything was there, but they weren’t held into a pattern called individual. They were just flowing. And without total identification there is no continuity of any kind of individual doer, so the doer got whacked.

Dasaarath Lucknow 1993