To awaken to the Image of God – i.e,. to see beyond duality and realize the union of all things – is one of life’s most profound experiences.
Mystics describe it as stunning, wondrous, a gift of God’s grace. It can also be a very surreal experience. Why? Because to recognize the Oneness of all things, you must have transcended and thus invalidated the notion of duality – which is the way most of the people on earth view the world. In fact, right up until the moment of your realization, duality is how you saw the world. It’s the way the world simply was. 
So, suddenly, at awakening, the world becomes really different. Talk about the floor falling out! Right/wrong, good/bad, good/evil – these polarities are transcended. You realize the Oneness of all things, in God. Nothing is beyond God. Everything is God.
Once you’ve recognized that, the rest of the spiritual journey involves becoming that oneness with God. Because unified consciousness is such a radical shift in perspective, realization is also life-changing. I have never heard of a mystic whose life wasn’t completely transformed by seeing beyond duality.
Ineffable
The other significant fact about unified consciousness is that it cannot be described. It lies beyond form, beyond thought, beyond analysis or comprehension. It simply Is. Upon unified consciousness, you perceive the Divine and Everything That Is as pure Being. This is why, when Moses first awakened at the Burning Bush, the holy words he beheld were, “I Am that I Am.” This is why, in their attempts to convey divine truth, the scribes of the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Muhammed and Rumi all resorted to parable. The battlefield sagas, needles in haystacks, prodigal sons, dusty jewels and more – they were evoked because there is no way to articulate true Spiritual Reality other than through analogy and metaphor. This is why, in his letter to the Phillipians (4:7), the apostle Paul called divine consciousness “the peace which passeth all understanding.” Koans come at the issue from a different angle, but are based on the same principle.
Koans are mind-bending games and stories created by illumined masters. They are designed to reveal true Spiritual Reality by stumping the student’s mind. Their goal is to induce the cognitive equivalent of a computer crash, thereby jolting the student into attaining the consciousness of Being.
If Divine Reality cannot be articulated or comprehended….
Think for a minute about what that would suggest about all the things we humans typically do to order and direct our lives. As human beings, we are driven by our minds. All the goals we chase, the plans we make, the certainties we rely upon to guide us, the things we teach our children, the things we’ve always known were “so”… What if all those understandings, in the face of divine realization, suddenly went tilt?
Awakening in Real Life
Here are some personal stories that will help articulate this state and the challenges that come after attaining it:
“What the…”
After I awakened, my legs crumbled beneath me and I laughed for about 10 solid minutes on a bathroom floor. Then I spent about 5 hours walking slowly about in stupefied wonder. Then I cried for the next three days. Then I walked around in wonder for another month.
The Space Beyond
In the weeks after I awakened, I wrote a song that could only grasp at the barest expression of the state. The song was called The Space Beyond. This is the chorus:
©Suzanne Noe 1999
Beyond, oh Beyond
Beyond all rules and rhymes
Beyond, the Space Beyond
Beyond all thought is love divine
Beyond the dreams of bad and good
Beyond the creeds that say “I should”
Beyond, the Space Beyond That’s where You Are.
“The Most Dangerous Time”
More than a decade before I awakened, I met an artist I’ll call Max. With hindsight, I can see that Max was a mystic himself and had traveled the same rigorous, spiritual road I was only embarking upon.
Max painted a portrait of me. When he painted it (I later deduced), Max knew he was dying. In his final years, he had changed the form of his work entirely, painting what he called “Interpretive Portraits.” Really, he was painting peoples’ spiritual essences. If Max consented to paint your portrait, his condition was that you couldn’t have any input on how he depicted you. He would paint what he saw. Some of Max’s portraits weren’t that flattering. So you could run the risk of having spent a lot of money for a painting you’d never put on your wall.
This occurred in the early 1990s when I was married to my first husband. My husband and I were game for Max’s conditions. Max painted individual portraits of both my husband and me. This was mine:
First viewing
I will never forget the moment that Max turned the portrait around to show it to me. My heart sank. I looked so sad! Worse, Max had painted my portrait on a smaller canvas than my husband’s! We had told him that the portraits were to be a pair. But my canvas, while the same shape as my husband’s, was a good 6″ shorter in length and width.
Between the smaller dimensions and – then it hit me – oh my goodness, my skin is the same color as the background! I’m completely fading into the woodwork! Oh, this was dreadful! The words diminutive and invisible echoed harshly in my heart.
Max saw the shock and disappointment in my face and proceeded very gently with me. We sat and talked – alone – for about an hour.
“Your relationship to this portrait is going to change over time,” Max said softly. He talked about the road ahead, saying a lot of things I didn’t understand.
I was beginning to think maybe he was a bit “off,” borderline crazy. But his eyes grew particularly penetrating and his voice took on an emphatic resonance when he said: “The most dangerous time is when you think you know what’s supposed to happen.”
Right, sure. I thanked him, clutched my portrait and went home, devastated.
My husband and I hung our portraits in the living room. His was forceful, bug-eyed and commanded all the attention in the room. As for me, I faded into the background, looking so, so sad.
A changing relationship to the painting
Less than a year later, we heard that Max had died of a terminal illness. Passing by the painting as I roamed through the house, day by day, month by month, year by year, I came to realize the truth in Max’s words – and in his brush strokes.
I came to face the hard truth that in relationship to my scattered, absent and self-absorbed, show-biz husband, I was sad and lost. The portrait told the truth.
It would take me eight more years, but while in relationship to my first husband, I built up the strength to stand up for my own values, dreams and truths (my own Stage 3) by getting a divorce.
Very soon after I separated from my husband, I awakened: I had the experiences described above. In the following years, the portrait took on deeper significance still, becoming an active source of teaching and comfort. I began to see what Max meant by his neutralizing brush strokes. After illumination, the point is to become invisible. The mental agendas, the emotional attachments and the personal will all get ground down. They are burned away in the refiner’s fire of Stage 5 so that the purified soul can eventually merge with spirit.
Max was giving me a road map, I realized. “Become clear like this,” he was saying. “The most dangerous time is when you think you know what’s supposed to happen.” You must become completely empty.
Grinding down all vestiges of the personality
To prepare the human soul for actualized union with the Divine, remember that the three layers of the personality or false self constructed in Stage 1 must be purified: All the thoughts that typically fill up the Mind must be neutralized: 
The tossing waves of the Emotions must be stilled: 
The Actions must be devoid of personal agenda or input. The actions become directed by the Divine after the personal will no longer exerts influence and only after Union has been achieved.
Two “gulps” that emerge from this transition
After making the shift from dual to universal consciousness, then, two new, stark realizations emerge:
- Most people of the world are consumed by thoughts, emotions and actions driven by the personal ego, not by God. After illumination, you see for the first time how VERY far away from the Divine humankind has wandered. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, this is the meaning of “sin,” and why, in the Bible, the apostles and those who had awakened would sometimes run around yelling, “Repent!” It’s why Lao Tzu was so discouraged that, after he awakened, he decided to just go off and leave the world and live as a hermit. He was stopped from doing so only long enough to write the Tao Te Ching. It’s why, after my awakening, I cried for three days straight.
- In the boat of life, after mystical illumination forward, ONLY God belongs rightfully at the helm. If anything other than God is steering your ship, it’s your ego. And that means you’re still in a state of separation, or duality. Not aligned rightly. Not at-one. (To become “at-one” is the meaning of “atonement.”)
A message of correction delivered by Muhammed
So now let’s return to our discussion of the World Religions. With this context, you’ll see how in Stage 4 (Repercussions) Muhammed brought the perfect, “next step” teaching to humankind after Jesus Christ’s Declaration (Stage 3). The spiritual awakening to universality ushered in at the Declaration stage has repercussions. Being able to see the Oneness of all things exposes the fact that basic preoccupations, assumptions and relationships on earth are askew and demand correction, at-one-ment. The admonishment to uphold universal consciousness (“there is no god but God”) and align in total commitment with Allah is the message that Muhammed delivered in his recitation of the Qu’ran, which is the basis of Islam.
Level Praying Field 