Pierre: Forgive my curiosity. Is there a before and an after Realization? Is there a specific state of consciousness beyond mere intellectual understanding? And is this realization sudden or gradual?... How was it in “your” case?
Didier: Before, after… The actual change is the disappearance of something that never really existed. Can we then speak of an event? But hey, let’s assume we can…
Realization cannot be gradual. One cannot simultaneously see and not see an object, the one excludes the other.
At the very moment when our unreality is perceived in time as “object/form/entity”—not at the intellectual level but on the level of lived experience—any kind of going back is inconceivable.
The path to arrive there might seem to take time, the intuitions might seem to become more and more dazzling. But they are never the cause of Awakening, only the foreshadowings of it.
A lived understanding is of an entirely other order than an intellectual one. The paradox is that the state of consciousness that is revealed is in no way different than the one we’ve always experienced. There is, therefore, nothing special to report, except the fact that the association with a “personal image/history” that had created a deep hypnotism is gone forever.
I’ll use an analogy. If one day, through a lack of attention, you take yourself to be a pink elephant, then the day when that identification drops, the following things will be clear:
1. You were never a pink elephant.
2. That which you were before/during/after is the reality upon which the pink elephant was grafted.
3. It seems difficult to become a pink elephant again, because this understanding is not a result of logical deduction but rather a vision, a lived experience.
So to come back to your question: The specific level of consciousness remains the same.
Paradise, which was never lost, which has always been there, is finally revealed… and what we thought we had been seeing and experiencing for many years turns out to be only a pale shadow of it.
