The Three Samāveśa's, Three Shifts in Identity

She was once afraid of the world.  She tried to protect herself from it.  It was exhausting; always trying to find security, always trying to get Home. Decades of spiritual practice and apparent spiritual failure.  

Then one day, in one moment, a deep, eternal Silence moved in, which displaced all that she thought she was.   No past, no future, no story.  Her name was left behind.  She stepped into herself and crossed over into the looking.  The hands...how odd...are they hers?  How absolutely beautiful.  The face in the mirror...how strange...who is that?  She now knew herself to be the wide-open and accepting space that she always was.  She understood that “accepting” spaciousness was her very nature.  She was vast and contained the world.  Fear dropped.  Peace.  Silence.  (ānava-samāveśa*)

She existed in the world, and the world appeared within her and to her.  Identity is Witnessing Consciousness.

Both over time and in an instant, “accepting” gave way to “embracing.”  The embracing was so tight, and so loving that the distinction between “that which was accepting” and “that which was accepted” dissolved.  The knower and the known, were both extinguished into pure knowing.  The lover and the beloved merged in the fire of the intense embrace, leaving only pure loving.  In the tightly weaved and entangled intimacy, there was no room for “other” or “two” or “I”.  All nouns dropped.  Time and space are seen as conceptual. Life at zero distance.  The center fell away.  All is Consciousness.  (shākta-samāveśa)

She existed in the world, and as the world.  Seeing non-dually.  Identity is Unity Consciousness.  

Then one day, in a moment, the world disappeared. She was thrust into The Absolute, pure Potentiality, Radiant Nothingness, the Void, pure Bliss, pure Love, pure Being.  Stillness.  Silence.  Eternal and Infinite.  Absent time. Absent space. No relation.  Both no-thing, and completely Full.  Awareness, prior to Consciousness.  She was immersed in, and existed as, the Energetic Fabric, from which all of manifestation arises. (shāmbhava-samāveśa*)

The eyes opened, and an apparently objective Universe is born.

She now exists in the world, as the world, in a world that does not exist, in all worlds, prior to existence.  All is God.  Wherever the eye falls is God.  There is nothing but God.  God Realization.  Universal Consciousness. 

And no one ever awakened, and no one ever will.

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This account maps closely to three phases (plus one) of awakening as described by Hareesh Wallis: https://youtu.be/6EUqUDbWpBs?si=rkCMvpUXQYJRNr8M.  

*The samāveśa definitions, from Hareesh Wallis: 

ānava-samāveśa = immersion into one's essence-nature

shākta-samāveśa = immersion into the total field of Energy (Shakti)

shāmbhava-samāveśa = immersion into the Divine Absolute

Adyashanti implied the three stages of awakening in the Epilogue of his book, "The Way of Liberation", pages 41-44

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"True, it is strange to live no longer on earth,

and to practice no longer customs scarcely acquired;

roses, and other expressly promising things,

not to give them the meaning of human future;

what in endlessly anxious hands one used to be,

to be this no more, and even one's own name

to lay aside, like a toy that is broken."  Rilke