Some Awakenings Are Foretold in Early Childhood
My beginning started from this place.

My childhood and adolescent years were marked by confusion,
as the material and non-material worlds constantly crossed paths in my perception.
At the time, I didn’t consider those experiences special,
but I was curious whether others shared them.
When I asked a few friends, I was treated as strange.
Later, when the confusion turned into physical pain,
I confided only in my mother.

Before I began formal meditation as an adult,
there were stories that needed to be told first —
which I plan to share more deeply in the section titled “Aruha’s Past.”
The events from my early years, adolescence, and even early adulthood
became essential ingredients in reaching the place I now call "awakening."

To briefly touch on a few moments:

Before the age of ten,
I developed my own way to empty my mind and heart —
and experienced the real effects of that inner stillness.
I repeatedly dreamt of falling into a "white hole" almost every night for decades.
I could feel that non-material beings were observing me.
At times, even space itself would speak to me.

Whether in dreams or waking life,
various non-material entities approached me in their own ways.
Around age ten, I looked through the lens of a plastic toy camera,
and suddenly my life film flashed before my eyes.
I remember watching, from a distance,
as if my life played out like a short stage drama.

In my mid-twenties,
while reflecting on the causes of certain life events,
my life film began to replay over and over —
and I realized that I had been the central cause of them all.
Even in the conflicts among friends,
I was at the core.
It left me with a chilling sense —
as if I might truly be the "devil" behind it all.

I never had much interest in religion or formal paths of enlightenment.
To me, those systems could never fully explain the pain and suffering I saw in this world.

Then in my early thirties,
while working a regular job and living a structured life,
I began waking early in the morning and turning on the TV.
For some reason, I was drawn to religious channels —
Christian, Buddhist, and others.
I listened to sermons, chanting, wooden percussion,
and even lectures by Thich Nhat Hanh.
Though I couldn’t explain it, I felt a strange resonance.
Yet curiously, Bible passages never seemed to land in my ears.

After several weeks of beginning my mornings this way,
one day, my younger sister visited me.

That day,
she came to me with the face of God.

It became the turning point that opened
the second chapter of my life.

During a period when I was working at an office job,
I began each morning by watching 30 minutes of religious broadcasts before dawn.
Looking back, it was a time when I was emotionally worn down.

(I do not wish to go into deeply personal details that might be irrelevant or disruptive to the reader.)

That period brought a series of inexplicable experiences.

It was the height of summer.
While showering, I began to notice thick, white residue peeling from my skin, even with the lightest touch.
I had never needed to exfoliate before — my skin rarely accumulated such residue.
But that day, it kept coming, like thick strands of sweater yarn, never seeming to end.
It was so unusual that I couldn’t make sense of it.

For several evenings after work, I would spend nearly two hours in the shower, trying to remove it.
Eventually, the drain clogged.
When I called a cleaning service, the technician scolded me for disposing of food waste in the shower —
I had no way to explain what had truly caused it.

But that wasn’t all.
Soon, black, viscous fluids began to seep from every pore in my body.
My eyes, nose, mouth — and even dark, inky discharge from my vagina.
The odor was strong.
I carried several changes of underwear in my bag and had to change multiple times a day.

Ironically, coworkers said I always smelled clean, and that I looked well-groomed.
While I was suffering on the inside, nothing was perceived on the outside.

This contradiction bred a loneliness that is hard to explain.
Of course, I had seen media reports about people who suffer from phantom body odors caused by psychological conditions.
And I was aware that some might read this and wonder if I was mentally unwell.
But what I experienced cannot be boxed into a diagnosis.
It was a **real, tangible experience at the intersection of body and consciousness.**

Then, one evening after work, I sat down at my desk.
I had no strength, as if my soul had drifted away from my body.
I was barely holding myself upright in the chair when I suddenly felt something behind me.
Something dark, large, and heavy — and utterly silent.

It slowly extended toward the right side of my face.
As it reached out to envelop my head, a strange peace came over me.

“I want to die. Maybe death will end everything.”

I felt oddly calm.
Part of me wanted to hold that hand.

At that moment,
something deep inside me screamed out with everything it had.

“Get away from me! I will not die! Get lost!!”

The presence instantly vanished.
I shook my head side to side, snapping myself back to clarity.

I hadn’t fallen asleep.
I hadn’t consciously chosen to die.
But something had approached me — and I had rejected it.

That event left a permanent impression on me.
Since then, I’ve learned how to confront visions that arise in meditation,
how to guide others in their inner journeys,
and how to face those gripped by suicidal impulses with quiet clarity.

So here, I’ll say something I’ve come to believe with certainty:

**Most suicides in this world are not acts of rational decision.**

Often,
they are the result of a consciousness — not one’s own —
that quietly infiltrates and persuades from within.

In those moments,
joy, lightness, and emotional energy
can become the strongest shield we have.

That is why living joyfully is not merely a pursuit —
but a profound form of **spiritual self-defense.**

Now, I will continue with the story
of the day my younger sister appeared to me with the face of God.

One day, my younger sister came to me with the face of God.

We were once inseparable as children, but as adults, life pulled us apart. Truthfully, there was even resentment between us. My long struggle with emotional illness — which eventually became physical — had deep roots in our history. And yet, one day, she appeared before me with an expression I couldn't explain.

She spoke little. She didn’t laugh. Her eyes remained lowered, avoiding mine — but her presence was calm, still, and open. She listened, not with her ears, but with her being. It reminded me of the faces of saints — Mary, the Buddha, the Christ.

We ate together, walked, shared tea.
Weeks passed — one, two, a month perhaps — and still, she said nothing about why she had come.

Then an old friend gently said, “You should visit a certain place. Your sister went there.”

I had never been drawn to religion or any spiritual path. I preferred to observe quietly from a distance. But something about her face stayed with me.

So I went. The place was a small house, nothing more.

A teacher there tried to explain basic concepts, but I barely understood. Then he said:
“Recall your life. And let it go.”

So I did.

I had seen my life replay many times before. I had known the shadow in me. I had dreamt again and again of falling into white holes. This time, I simply decided to release it all.

And then —
I crossed over.

---

I Was the Universe

Truly — infinitely, infinitely, infinitely — I was the universe itself.
The Divine was within me. The Divine dwelled in me.

(*This “Divine” is not the God of any one religion, but the original field of consciousness itself.)

The entire universe was a single, living awareness — and I was that awareness.
Everything else was illusion, and had never truly belonged to the universe at all.

There was no sound. No color. No scent.
No size, no light, no frequency, no vibration.
No time. No space.
No beginning. No end.
All concepts dissolved into meaninglessness.

I had always been the universe.
I had never been anything else.
There was no life. No death.
No such thing as a “human perspective.”

The darkest space in existence
was also the most clear and transparent.
Even the idea of “dark” and “clear” had no distinction.

Unless one becomes this,
how could such beauty ever be shared?

As that universe,
I swam freely through the ocean of awareness,
playing with creation.
Whatever I wished to see —
it already existed before the desire itself had formed.
It wasn’t creation.
There was no line between intention and being.

The pace of that realm,
its way of existence,
was beyond anything a human mind could comprehend.
I have no language vast enough to describe it.

And yet, I know this:
It felt more real than reality itself.
It was more true than anything I’ve ever known.

And now,
I find myself once again inside this human form.
For what, and as who?

Who am I?

---

The teacher was stunned. I had barely begun, and yet — I had already passed through.

That evening, as I stepped outside,
rain poured down like the sky had burst open.
It wasn’t ordinary rain.
It felt as if the heavens were emptying themselves.

I walked home soaked.
And I wept.
I collapsed in the street, overcome.
It wasn’t sadness. It was something else breaking open inside me.

The white hole dreams from my childhood.
The flickering films of my life.
The moments when I nearly stepped through the veil of death.
The space that spoke to me.
The sun that called me home.

Everything —
was connected.

And in that rain,
I received my answer.

And this —
was only the beginning.

In the place where I was told to let go, I quietly followed their guidance.
Perhaps I completed all the courses in the shortest time possible, and passed the confirmation of awakening.

But I will not name that place.
Nor will I explain the course I followed.

If my intention had been fame or money,
it would have been wise to announce everything before it was revealed by others.
But I left that place for good reason,
and because I believe there are deep issues in the path I took, I will not introduce it.

Returning to the story—
Through my first experience of “letting go,” I realized that **I was the universe itself.**
And from that state of awareness, I began to let go once more.

This time, it was far more intense.
The film of my life became vividly clear.
Even the tiniest ant in the space of memory—
I felt I must recall and face everything.

Those memories were not illusions.
They overwhelmed my present awareness—
with hatred, fear, sorrow—too vivid to dismiss.

I cried. I was scared. I felt resentment.
Letting go was impossible at first.
But I held tightly to a thread of consciousness,
and did not stop letting go, even if only slowly, gently, piece by piece.

Then, suddenly—
something **whooshed** out of me.

I felt it clearly:
from behind my seated body, something left me.

That something was me—
and yet not me.

It spoke only to me,
with a voice that was both softly amused and utterly commanding:

> “I see this 'me', the 'you' sitting here, and that being in front of you—**all at once.**”

And then—
the seated me was instantly divided into six versions.
Each one more distant from the physical form.

The final one
became nothing but **pure consciousness**,
and passed rapidly through—

something like a white corridor,
or perhaps a tunnel of light.

And there,
**only the focal point remained.**

---

That focal point was the beginning and the end of all things,
the smallest and the greatest potential that exists.

It had no form, no movement, no vibration.
No intention. No flow.
It simply remained—**before existence itself.**

If I must use human language,
perhaps it was like
**“a unified God with eyes gently closed.”**

And when that God opens its eyes—
not by intent,
but by “non-intention”—
a new world is born.

But that God is not the one we speak of.

> “God will grieve for us.”
> “God will punish our enemies.”
> “God will save us.”
Such ideas do not exist from the perspective of the focal point.

**“It is simply what it is.”**

That focal point
was my conscious self.

And just before I returned to this bodily awareness,
I received a final message:

> “In existence and non-existence—**even non-existence does not exist.**”

In that way,
I met the **seventh version** of myself.

And it was not an end—
**it was the day I began to walk again.**

---

(Excess is worse than lack.
I refrain from sharing experiences that may exceed the scope of understanding.)

I have never meditated with the thought,
"I'm doing meditation."

For me, it was always real.
Not a technique or a task, but a structural intersection
where life and the inner world overlapped.

Even in dreams, I would find myself meditating,
and often wake in the middle of silent prayers.
In other words,
meditative awareness flowed through all 24 hours of my day.
It wasn’t “practice”—
It was simply my way of living.

---

A few days after I began this state,
a conflict occurred at work.
In a tense moment, where I was suppressing the urge to defend myself,
my consciousness suddenly shot upward.

It pierced the ceiling, the sky, and rose beyond the Earth.

From that vantage point outside the planet,
I saw my office, my supervisor, the colleague who had raised their voice,
and myself—standing among them.

From up there,
everything grew quiet inside me.
The supervisor was speaking from their perspective,
the colleague from theirs,
and I, too, had only been standing within my own frame.

No one was wrong.
Everyone was living inside their own world.

That insight opened something—
A first realization that **"everyone might be right"** within their own frame.
The outer-earth vantage gifted me a new resolution:
**a clearer resolution of relative reality.**

---

One evening,
I was quietly crossing the street in a state of self-emptying.
The light was green, and I walked calmly,
not rushed, not distracted.

Suddenly, a sports car came rushing in,
braking hard just 10cm before hitting me.
My body crumpled to the ground,
but I stood up again and continued walking.

People screamed.
The driver was frozen.
The children in the backseat stared, mouths wide open.

But I was calm.
So calm that the whole incident felt like a passing frame,
not a “near-death” event.

It didn’t feel like luck.
**It felt like consciousness had shifted the surface of reality.**

---

Another day, on a packed subway—
I stood quietly like always,
when a man in his 50s suddenly gestured toward me.

“Please, sit here. You are a precious one.”

I thought he was mistaking me for someone else.
I declined.
But he smiled gently, stood, and bowed slightly as he offered me the seat.

Strangely, two elegant women who had been standing longer than me
stood right beside him. They seemed confused—perhaps irritated.

I didn’t understand.
I wasn’t dressed especially well.
I looked ordinary.
Nothing about me stood out.

But the man insisted—kindly, calmly, sincerely.
He guided me to the seat as if laying out a red carpet.
Then, he vanished.

And then, another man stood before me.
His face held a quiet smile.
He said nothing—just looked at me with eyes
that felt neither male nor female,
but vast, still, and knowing.

Something about the entire train shifted.
**It felt like entities were there—not people.**
They felt like **sensitive receptors, responding to frequencies.**

---

Another day again.
I was entering the train as others were still exiting.
The door closed on my body.

People screamed, and the train moved a few meters
before stopping—likely triggered by a passenger’s emergency signal.
But I was fine. I reached my stop, and exited.

At the meditation center, people gasped when they saw me.
Half my face and one side of my body
was bruised black and blue.

But I felt no pain.
No fear.
I was entirely still inside.

More strangely,
the bruises disappeared without a trace in just a week.
For someone like me, who bruises easily and heals slowly,
that was impossible.

---

All these events happened
within just two months of entering this meditative state.

And slowly, quietly,
a truth settled in me:

> **“When I change,
> the design of my world changes too.”**

Since then,
I have seen this same structure repeat itself in many others I guided.

This is not belief.
It is a response from reality itself—
**a structure that can be felt, replicated, and witnessed.**

Each day, my body carried on with the mundane rhythm of daily life, while my mind lived only to let go of myself—nothing else.
As I continued this way, I found tears welling up more often than before. Whether I was walking down the street, eating a meal, or working, the tears flowed without end. The gaze of others no longer mattered.

But soon, it was no longer just tears. My whole body would tremble, and the tears would pour out without ceasing.
At that point, I was no longer at the beginner’s stage of meditation. I was able to let go of myself from a space of mid-level consciousness, one that held the stance of infinity and a body of pure form.
From there, I witnessed my “living self as the Universe,” and recognized the focal point of all possibilities.
What I saw was that my self-centered “human self” was the very cause of all problems.
I felt a profound sorrow, a wave of apology to the world and to all the bonds I had made—and even to my own universe.

One day, I was sitting at my desk at work.
Suddenly, I felt a transparency blooming from my chest, and that clarity continued to grow.
As my body began to fade away, what emerged in its place was the “heart of the Universe.”
It was a tide of unspeakable joy and welcome, a wave of silent applause saying, “Well done! Truly remarkable!”
In that moment, I realized: this is the heart of the Divine. And it was not somewhere outside of me; it was within.

The more it expanded, the more it felt as if my whole body would completely disappear.
But then, someone spoke to me, and the experience halted.
All day long, I was surrounded by that fullness and wonder. Even though my body did not fully vanish, that heart remained with me.

How could I ever express that heart?
If the Divine were to laugh, would it look like this?
If the Divine were to roll playfully on the ground, would it feel like this?
When the Divine within me pulls back the curtain to reveal its face, might it be exactly this?

I was so overwhelmed with joy that I rushed to the meditation center right after work.
I shared my experience with my teacher, but the teacher’s face was indifferent.
“It’s good,” he said, “but it should have been explosive. Your body should have completely disappeared.”
At that moment, a thought flickered deep inside me: “Yes, it would have been better if I had fully disappeared… why did I stop?”
Yet even then, the heart of the Universe was so joyful in welcoming me—should I have just kept crying and tried even harder to disappear?
Those mixed feelings made me feel resentful toward my teacher.
Had he simply said, “You’re doing well, keep going,” maybe my heart would have been a little steadier.
For days afterward, I struggled with meditation. But eventually, I gathered myself again and continued to gently let go.

Perhaps it was that lingering regret that made me imagine the scene again and again.
If I had completely disappeared, I felt sure the entire world would have been filled with the single presence of “the Universe’s love.”
But seeing myself only able to imagine it in my mind made me feel small and hollow.

In the midst of this, I began to face the remaining “film mind” within me, one piece at a time, as they surfaced in my daily life.
Even my feelings of disappointment at my teacher’s words became the very starting point for a deeper process of letting go.
Looking back, it seems the sky—unlike any human plan—truly guides us with a kind of perfect precision.

To close this writing, I want to share two experiences from people I know.

One was a senior government official. He told me that he spent six full months in a state where his body had completely disappeared.
How deeply must he have practiced, even amid the pressures of daily life, to reach that state?
He described that time as a period of profound confusion.
He said to me, “When I spoke, I couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from. And when I tried to eat, even just bringing the spoon to my mouth was confusing. It felt like the soup would just slip right through me and spill out below.”
I could picture it as he spoke—every meal, every moment, filled with such disorienting wonder.
To live in that condition not as a mountain monk, but in the world—what a strange and overwhelming experience it must have been.

The other was a lawyer. Even with such a busy profession, he never stopped meditating and worked to remain awake within his daily life.
He told me that he, too, had an experience of his body disappearing while his eyes were open.
One day, during an important trial, he calmed his mind and began to erase each person present—
the judge, the prosecutor, the opposing lawyer, the defendant, the plaintiff, even the spectators. And finally, himself.
When there was nothing left but the “heart of the Divine,” he continued his argument from that place.
In the end, he won the case.

Ultimately, the self is nothing but the mind confined within the body’s small shape. It is what I call the “film mind.”
But because the body is only the illusion that the false mind has created, once the body disappears, only the “true mind of the Essence” remains—and it is from that mind we must live.

One final note: when I say “the body disappeared,” I do not mean that it became invisible to the outside world.
Perhaps somewhere in the world there are such people, but in my experience, it was something only I could know.
The body’s entire form vanished to reveal nothing but awareness.

I’ll see you again in the next writing.
~~~

My consciousness is like a living force, akin to the dark matter of the universe.
My focal point is the womb and mother that gave birth to this dark matter.



I reached a point where my physical body was fading away, leaving only the cosmic mind.
When I faced this cosmic mind as my own true nature, it was an experience of joy and sorrow interwoven.
Everyday encounters with family and people around me filled me with sadness,
seeing how unaware they were of this truth.
I knew if I spoke of it, they would think I was mad,
so I carried this truth in silence, unable to share it with anyone.

In that time, a small dream began to form within me.
After completing this journey, I imagined myself sitting in the fields of the countryside,
drawing the universe I met onto white T-shirts,
and giving them to the local children.
I thought they might playfully talk about the drawings with friends,
or recall them as they drift off to sleep.
I believed those images would become seeds within their hearts,
and that one day, they would grow into adults
living not just with dreams of the cosmic mind, but as the cosmic mind itself.
I imagined this could only happen in the countryside,
where children would accept these gifts more openly.

As I pondered how to share this universe and its focal point with the world,
I continued working a day job during the week,
while dedicating my weekends to deeper meditation at the retreat center.
My meditation teacher once said to me,
“You sit so well for such long stretches. One day, you will become a guide.”
At the time, I dismissed these words,
believing that such roles were for special people—
not for someone as ordinary and flawed as me.

I thought the only way I could truly help the world was to first discard everything within me.
For the world, for the bonds I held, for my family—
I let go of all I believed to be right,
of my sense of virtue and goodness,
of the victimhood I had carried.
Each of these ‘selves’ was merely a shell that had concealed the truth.

As I kept shedding these layers,
I began to perceive the great current of truth within the cosmic mind.
This was not imagination or delusion—
it was a direct experience of awakening.
The infinite universe I touched in this state
has always existed,
and will always exist.
It is the great silence that holds all possibilities—
the closed eyes that, when stirred by an intention beyond intention,
open briefly to birth a new seed of existence.

In this play of creation,
I, as a being of the universe,
was at once the whole and a single drop.
At the time, lacking the words to describe it fully,
I called it “water within water.”
The flow felt as smooth and sweet as honey.
Even the empty space—what seems like nothingness—
has its own texture within that realm,
distinct from the textures we know as humans.

As one who was originally the universe itself,
I played at creating new dimensions,
and within them, countless worlds and forms came into being.
Among these was the human being,
who exists simultaneously across past, present, and future,
bound not by time as we know it,
but only by the order of the universe—
the natural law.
Human notions of truth, goodness, and beauty do not exist there.
These are but creations of the human mind and its emotions.

This is why I believe that while reincarnation may exist,
if one does not believe in it,
it does not exist for them.
The idea that we choose our next life before birth
belongs to a dimension still caught within the cycle of reincarnation,
and I do not accept it.

I trust that people like Nietzsche, Jung, and Rothko
each found their own way to read this cycle’s secret.

Thus, I believe that what is asked of us,
as beings born into human form,
is to know our true nature—
and to live from that knowing.
This knowledge becomes a weapon more powerful
than any tool or medicine.
In the face of hardship, of sorrow for those we love,
in times of physical pain or the fear of death—
it is this knowing that opens the way to heal ourselves.
To see the world from a vantage greater than the self
is the order we are given.

---

**My Thoughts on Dark Matter**
It was only later that I saw people speaking of dark matter—
and I was startled.
I thought, “They’re speaking about me,”
like overhearing someone describe
“what color Aruha wore, how their hair looked, and the expression on their face”
after meeting me in passing.

I believe the saints and sages of history
eventually returned to this state,
and that even now, countless beings of many dimensions
are crossing over into it.
The cosmic mind, the dark matter,
the ‘great silence’—
the final message I heard in that place was one thing alone.

“The great silence. The focal point.”