Teresa

I continue to find interesting parallels with St. Teresa of Avilla.  Teresa was a Carmalite nun who went through an awakening.  She wrote a good deal about her experience in a number of books, one of which is entitled  Interior Castle.  In it, she describes the seven rooms in the soul that lead to union with the divine.  These seven rooms match perfectly the descriptions made of the seven chakras and how each is entered by kundalini, cleansed, as one moves closer to fuller union with the divine.  The character of each "room" matches the character of each chakra in eastern circles. 

During my awakening I had a nearly identical experience with an angelic being that Teresa describes in her writings.  This includes an angel who reaches into her heart (with an arrow) and pulls out her insides.  The being who came that early morning who reached into my heart center pulled something out that I recognized as being like a body which had no bones, soft and fleshy, gross in a way, and so similar to Teresa's description that its hard to waive away.  In both cases, the result was supreme ecstasy. 

Before this happened, however, during the first few years of awakening, I had this image which came to me powerfully as I heard someone speaking in my mind about the nature of this experience.  I was driving to Philadelphia and was crossing a river near there.  As I did I felt this presence well up within me and explained that all of this had an inevitability to it, the same as a river flowing into the sea. This experience worried me at the time.  It caused me to feel as though I was losing grip on my control of things.  I didn't know it at the time that this would result in the greatest loss of control, the control of my ego over my life events.  From this point forward, the feeling of blis was expressed as a river flowing into the sea.  I would see images in my mind of the clouds sending down rain, which would fall and gather in small streams while streams would flow into rivers and rivers would flow into the sea.  All of this had a feeling to it that spoke directly to this divine union.  The sense that this was happening was not just imaginary, but quite real, even though I knew that ultimately the experience was merely an image to express a still deeper experience which had no words or even images.

Yesterday I came across a quote by Teresa and it caught my eye for how perfect it was for describing my own experience.  I marveled at how identical the language can be in seeking to give word to such a wordless thing, a mystery.  Here is her quote from Chapter 2 of her book Interior Castle:

But spiritual marriage is like rain falling from heaven into a river or stream, becoming one and the same liquid, so that the river and rain water cannot be divided; or it resembles a streamlet flowing into the ocean, which cannot afterwards be disunited from it. This marriage may also be likened to a room into which a bright light enters through two windows--though divided when it enters, the light becomes one and the same.

Once you have touched upon this, you can feel how utterly true the words are in expressing this sense of having become part of this inner life whereby the water of spirit flows one into the other in a way that drives great ecstasy.  How can one explain or describe it except in this way?  As the voice spoke to me as coming form the river;  "Its inevitable."