Nirmala - How to experience Oneness more deeply

Q: I know intellectually that I am Awareness. I say "intellectually" because I don't yet sense it
as fact. Do you have any additional pointers?

A: Many people have grasped the Oneness and their true nature as Awareness intellectually, but
it is not a common or an ongoing experience for them. It seems there is often a gap between an
intellectual knowing and a more grounded, knowing-in-your-being kind of knowing. The bridge
between these two is, very simply, repeated experiences of Awareness. We tend to only really
know something we have experienced a lot.
For everyone, different amounts of experience are required for that knowing to be felt in an
ongoing way. How many times would it take to do something like flying an airplane before you
felt you knew how to do it? If you piloted an airplane once for two minutes, would you feel you
knew how to fly an airplane? Hopefully not! But if you had flown solo hundreds of times, you
would probably have an ongoing sense that you know how to fly an airplane.
So having a deeper experience of Oneness is usually a matter of having lots of experiences of
Oneness and Presence. However, it can also result from one very strong or long lasting
experience. Although everyone would like to have a single big experience that does the trick,
from my many conversations with people, more often this shift seems to happen gradually, as a
result of a series of experiences.
There is one more point I'd like to share with you. Experiences of Oneness are wonderful and
of great service to this shift, but such experiences are not that important in and of themselves.
Like every other experience, the experience of Oneness comes and goes. And any effort to get
or keep such an experience will cause you to suffer as much as striving to get or keep any other
experience.
While it's profoundly delightful to experience Oneness, a deep knowing of the truth is what
matters. When there is a deep knowing that Presence, or Being, is all there is and that is who
you are, it no longer matters if you're experiencing it in this moment or not. It is similar to how
while it is useful to own an automobile, imagine if you had to experience your car twenty-four
hours a day in order to own a car! Owning a car is much easier than that since you trust the
existence of your car, even if you can't see it in this moment. We have had enough experiences
of the reality of physical objects that we have developed a trust in them, which allows us to
freely move in and out of experiences of our car without doubting that it will still be there when
we need it.
In the same way, with enough experiences of Oneness, you just trust this deeper reality.
Experiences of our true nature are necessary to develop this trust in Oneness, but those
experiences don't have to be ongoing for this knowing and trust to become ongoing. The real
point of spiritual experiences is for the experience of Oneness to become irrelevant because the
deeper sense of knowing is so constant.
There are no techniques or processes that can cause you to experience Oneness or Presence,
and there is no formula for the shift to a deeper knowing and trust. However, spiritual practices
and teachings can put you in a place of curiosity about and receptivity to the spontaneous
arising of Presence. They make it more likely for a spontaneous experience of Oneness or
Presence to arise.

download pdf