Who can interfere?

The Summer grass grows

Who can interfere?

The Autumn leaves fall

Who can interfere?

The symphony plays

There is only sounds

The body swims in cool waters

Sensations that cannot be found

Time appears to pass

It can only be seen for what it is

Space appears to appear

It is not there yet its depth is infinite

Where are its edges?

Birth appears like a dream

I cannot find its beginning or end

The assumption is death is the same

After all, a ghost cannot affect the living.

First Awakening - The Shattered Mirror into Presence

For the first ten years of my life, existence was violent, chaotic, and unstable. There was incessant turmoil—violence, instability, and chaos. I moved around thirteen times during this period. I was kidnapped twice by my father, and a whole host of other traumatic events occurred that contributed to my isolation, confusion, and suffering.

Even as a child, I seemed to possess an awareness that others around me did not. I was in a perpetual observer mode. Later on my path, I interpreted this awareness as a sign of spiritual uniqueness. But eventually, I came to understand it for what it truly was: hyper-vigilance born of living in an unpredictable and sometimes unsafe environment. Funny how the mind will co-opt something for its own purposes.

Around the age of ten, I began deeply questioning the nature of existence and my place within it. These were existential fears and uncertainties that felt far too weighty for a child, yet they consumed my thoughts constantly. At night, as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, my mind buzzed with unrelenting inquiry.

Questions like, What is this place? What am I? Why are people here? occupied my thoughts. Without realizing it, I was engaging in spiritual inquiry. Being so young, I wasn’t yet overly reliant on my conceptual mind; instead, I approached these questions with an innocent curiosity. Night after night, I would spend an hour or two staring at the ceiling, letting these questions wash over me. This nightly ritual became so consuming that I often fell asleep in class, earning the ire of my teachers. But I couldn’t help it; I felt an irresistible pull to explore these questions.

I didn’t try to solve the questions logically. Instead, I simply held them in my awareness, feeling my way through them with childlike wonder. I vividly remember the sensation of my mind stretching as far as it could go, like a balloon being pushed to its limits. It was as though I could sense something just beyond the edges of my understanding but couldn’t quite reach it. This process fascinated me and continued for over a year, eventually becoming less intense, but the questions never left me. My mind, trained by habit, continued to probe these mysteries in its own quiet way, always searching for that elusive space beyond the balloon’s edge.

At the age of thirteen, something extraordinary happened. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was at a massive four-story shopping mall with my mom. These mega-malls were all the rage in the ‘80s and ‘90s. As we approached a pair of escalators to ascend to the next level, I, distracted and inattentive, stepped onto the wrong escalator—the one coming down.

As I looked down at the moving steps, reality itself seemed to waver and distort. In that moment, my mind came to a screeching halt, like a koan delivering an unanswerable paradox. My mind had assumed I was in the right place, but when confronted with evidence to the contrary, it short-circuited.

Everything I had known up until that point—my entire life, my identity, my sense of reality—shattered like a mirror breaking into countless fragments. These fragments seemed to be composed of a radiant light, scattering outward like stars streaking into hyperspace in a scene from Star Wars. Then everything dissolved into a brilliant, all-encompassing white light.

In that moment, Tony—my identity, my sense of self—vanished. What remained was an unfathomable Presence, a boundless awareness beyond anything my mind could comprehend. Time ceased to exist, and space collapsed. I was immersed in a state of pure being, knowing intuitively that reality was far more vast and mysterious than anything the mind could grasp.

After the light came an abrupt sense of collapse, as though reality were rewinding itself. Everything rebooted and reassembled, and I found myself back in my normal state. My mom grabbed my arm roughly and yanked me away from the escalator, snapping me out of my stunned state. She thought I had been frightened by the escalator itself. I couldn’t bring myself to explain what had just occurred—she would never have understood, nor would anyone else.

That moment was merely the beginning. My childlike curiosity and natural inclination for inquiry had led me to a direct encounter with reality. But as I would come to learn, it was just the first step on a much longer journey less journey, but that’s another post for another time.