Question: What did you experience at the moment of enlightenment?
Linda: It wasn’t just a moment. It was just the culmination of years of practice. What happened was so amazing at the time but now I hardly remember it. That’s what’s so amazing about this state. You let go of everything, even that point which people find incredibly fascinating.
For me, as I’ve said, as it was happening – I’ve said it a lot of times before – it was like a fairy tale come true. That was the feeling. It was like, ‘How can this really be happening?’ I remember as a child sometimes there would be fairy tales or things like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny and sometimes I’d pretend they were true for a while and then suddenly I’d realise, ‘Ah, it’s not really true.’ This was the other way around. It was like the fairy tale was true.
What I saw as reality became incredibly unreal. What I thought was unreal became real and much more tangible than anything in this worldly existence. It was like the Absolute just became real, tangible even though I couldn’t touch it, taste it or feel it. And, there was no question about it. There was no question in me, ‘Is this it?’ It was just completely obvious. And then all my questions went. All my pain went. And I was in pain up until that point. It took a few days. It happened over a few days. It wasn’t just click, that’s it. It just happened over a few days, really softly. There were no explosions, and bright lights. You like to think that there are. It was so simple and so ordinary, it was shocking.
There was such beauty and such simplicity, such gratitude, such love. . . but it wasn’t projective at all. It was just incredibly soft and incredibly ordinary and incredibly natural as if everything in the universe just clicked into place. All my life made complete sense, everything that had happened, all the seemingly bad bits and good bits and why I did this and why I did that. There was no question about that anymore.
I finished the retreat and went home, got up the next day and had breakfast.