You know what I'm talking about. There was a moment.
Maybe it lasted thirty seconds. Maybe three weeks. Maybe it arrived in meditation, or in grief, or once unexpectedly while you were driving and something dissolved and something immense and intimate was simply there.
And then it ended. And since then, you have been trying to find your way back.
That's the trap. Not the seeking — the assumption underneath the seeking. The assumption that what you experienced was somewhere you went, and therefore somewhere you can lose, and therefore somewhere you need to find again.
What if the glimpse wasn't a place you visited? What if it was a moment in which the usual noise quieted long enough for you to recognise what's always been here?
The experience didn't happen to you. It happened as you.
When we say we had a glimpse of awakening, we typically mean: I experienced something extraordinary that I don't usually experience. We locate it in the category of unusual events.
But what was actually glimpsed was not an unusual state. It was the absence, for a moment, of the contraction that usually obscures the ordinary state. The vastness wasn't added. The peace wasn't imported. What happened was that something was temporarily removed — the habitual noise of the seeking self — and in that removal, what remains was apparent.
What remains is awareness. Not your awareness — not awareness belonging to the person — but awareness as the nature of what you are. The open, luminous, knowing quality of experience that is present in every moment, but which ordinarily goes unnoticed because attention is always riveted on the contents of awareness rather than awareness itself.
You didn't gain something during the glimpse. You stopped obscuring something that was already there.
This reframing is not semantic. If the glimpse was a state you entered, then yes — it can be lost, and you must seek it again. But if the glimpse was a recognition of what's always present — then losing it means losing recognition, not losing the thing itself. And recognition can be restored not by going anywhere, but by looking in the right direction.
Here is what actually happened after the glimpse.
The mind — which has one primary function, which is to maintain the sense of a separate, continuous self — noticed what had occurred. And it immediately began conceptualising it, narrating it, comparing it, rating it, and most importantly: filing it in the category of the past.
I once had an experience of awakening.
That sentence is the trap. The moment awareness is filed as a past experience, the seeking begins. The mind says: that was real, and this is not that, and therefore I am not there, and therefore I must get there again.
But awareness isn't in the past. Awareness is what's reading these words right now. It has been present through every single moment since the glimpse — through the confusion, through the disappointment. It never went anywhere. It couldn't. It is the knowing in which all experience occurs, including the experience of apparently losing it.
You cannot lose awareness. You can only lose awareness of awareness.
Is there a moment — right now — without awareness?
Don't think about this question. Just look.
Is there any experience happening that is not appearing within awareness? The sensation of the body? The sound in the room? The thought that arose just now?
Take thirty seconds.
Simply look for anything that is not already appearing within awareness.
You can't find anything outside it. Can you?
Everything that is appearing — every thought, every sensation, every hope about awakening — is appearing within this open, receiving, unlocatable awareness. And awareness itself is not appearing within anything. It is the space in which everything else appears.
That space — that open knowing — is what you glimpsed. And it's here now.
Not as a special experience. As the background of every experience. As what you are, rather than what you experience.
Stop trying to recreate the conditions of the glimpse.
The mind concludes that the conditions of the glimpse caused it and therefore those conditions must be recreated. This is spiritual strategy. And spiritual strategy is the self trying to engineer its own dissolution — which is structurally impossible.
What you can do instead is simpler and more radical: notice what is already here, in this moment, before any strategy is applied. Not the contents of the moment — the thoughts or feelings or sensations. But the knowing of those contents. The awareness in which they appear.
The awakening you're looking for is looking.
You don't need to recreate the glimpse. You need to stop running past what's already here in your effort to find it.
The recognition may come quietly, without drama, without the feeling you've been waiting for. The feeling isn't the thing. The recognition is the thing. And what is recognised needs no particular feeling to confirm its reality — it is simply, obviously, undeniably present.
The glimpse was real. What it revealed was real. And it is still here — through every retreat and every meditation and every disappointment. The one who has been seeking has always been arising within the very awareness being sought.
You have not been lost. You have been looking in the wrong direction.
Turn around.
Not dramatically. Not with effort. Simply — with this reading, with this breath, with this moment — turn the attention away from the contents of experience and toward the knowing of the contents.
The awakening you already had is still here. It never stopped being here. The only question is whether you are willing to stop looking for it long enough to notice what's already found you.