Coming Back

The literature is enormous on how to get there and thin on what happens next. Accounts of insight, breakthrough, awakening, whatever the local vocabulary calls it, are abundant and detailed. Accounts of the following Tuesday are rare. This is a strange gap in a body of writing otherwise obsessed with method, and the gap is not accidental.

It is not accidental because return is the part that mostly fails, and failure is less publishable. Whatever happened does not persist unchanged. The state fades, ordinary conditions reassert themselves, and the person is left holding a memory of a condition they can no longer access. What they do with that memory determines almost everything about whether the experience was valuable or corrosive.

The traditions that thought carefully about this were blunt in a way the contemporary presentations are not. The Zen formulation about chopping wood before and after is usually quoted as reassurance and was not meant as reassurance. It is a description of a demotion. The wood is unchanged, the day is unchanged, and the expectation that they should have changed is the error being corrected.

There are three ways this goes wrong and they are all common enough to be recognisable. The first is preservation: organising life around returning to the state, which converts an experience into an addiction and makes ordinary conditions intolerable by comparison. The second is inflation: treating the experience as a credential, which produces a large proportion of the teachers discussed in the previous essay. The third is dismissal: deciding afterwards that it was neurological noise and meant nothing, which is the intelligent person's way of not having to integrate anything.

What the traditions proposed instead is unglamorous and demanding. The value of the experience is not in the experience. It is in what it does to conduct over the following years, and conduct is the only available evidence. Someone who reports a profound realisation and is unchanged in how they treat people has reported an experience, not a transformation, and the traditions generally declined to distinguish those on the basis of the report alone.

This gives a test that is severe and usable. Not what did you see, but what is different now in a way that someone who lives with you would notice without being told. Patience, honesty about your own motives, capacity to be wrong in public, decreasing need to be seen as the person who knows. These are checkable. States are not.

There is a companion observation that keeps the test from becoming cruel. Integration is slow, and slower than anyone wants. The traditions spoke in terms of decades. An experience lasting an hour may take fifteen years to work through, and most of that period will feel like nothing is happening. The absence of visible change at eighteen months is not evidence of failure. Impatience with the timescale is one of the main ways people abandon the process at the point where it was beginning to work.

There is also a case for the ordinary that gets consistently undersold. The condition being returned to is not a lesser state that has to be endured between real experiences. It is the medium in which anything gained has to be spent. A realisation that cannot survive a difficult meeting, a family obligation, a long week, was not durable, and durability is the property that matters.

So the useful question after any experience of this kind is not what it meant. Meaning is generated afterwards and is largely a function of what you were already inclined to believe. The question is what it costs you, from now on, in behaviour that would otherwise have been easier.

That is the only part anyone else can see, and it is the only part that was ever the point.