The Adventure of Awakening on the Mystical Path—Part 3

It was in Cyprus, January 1964, when the extraordinary event occurred that changed the whole course of my life.

By Muz Murray, in Curiosity · 09 Aug 2025, 07:01 · 0 Comments

Credits: Supplied Image; Author: Muz Murray;

I was sitting on a bollard at the quayside, at the port of Limassol, gazing vacantly at the sea in the afterglow of sunset. I was feeling very tranquil and relaxed when I began to feel a strange pressure in my brain. It was as if some deliciously loving hand had stroked numbingly up the back of my head and descended through my skull, as if it was pressing another ethereal brain on top of mine.

I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation, as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or perhaps rather as if the whole universe was welling up out of me from some deep centre. My ‘soul’ thrilled and swelled and my consciousness passed out across the ocean and the land in all directions, over the ocean and through the sky and out into space.

Wave after wave of revelation swept through my whole being, too fast for my normal conscious mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it.

Every single cell of my body seemed to record and intuit the experience, retaining it like the negative film emulsion in a camera. I became aware that every cell had its own limited form of consciousness, although collectively they were all still subject to a single controlling consciousness, which was mine. And it seemed to me that the whole of humanity was in the same condition: each ‘individual’ believing in his own separate mind, but in reality being in-dividual (that is, indivisible) from a single controlling consciousness—that of ‘Absolute Consciousness’ itself.

Overjoyed

At the time, the awe and wonder of the things experienced were beyond speech. Who would understand it in any case? It took me over ten years to digest the experience myself, before I was able to talk about it at all. But it was such that my whole secure, brash and cock-sure intellectual world was turned topsy-turvy and inside out, and for once I was overjoyed with existence.

All the following week, I walked about in great happiness. I saw with a crystal vision which gave a greater luminosity to the air and all but made the people and buildings around me transparent. It was at this time that I realised that I had the capacity for ‘seeing’ deeply into the nature of others. Just as a diamond-merchant knows the quality of true diamond from cut-glass beads, so I found I was intuitively ‘seeing’ the level of ‘soul-quality’ in the development of those around me.

For the next few years, as I was trekking alone down the length of Africa, I had to rethink everything I thought I knew. Slowly, I absorbed the knowledge filtering from the sunconsciousness in my cells. But the intellect, having been by-passed by the experience, still demanded satisfaction. So I began to devour every book on mysticism I could find until I came across a large volume called Cosmic Consciousness by Dr Maurice Bucke, M D (a psychiatrist friend of the poet Walt Whitman). He had chronicled what appeared to be an increasing incidence of such an extraordinary phenomenon throughout history. Thus, my intellect was satisfied. I had done no practice to prepare me for the event. I had never taken a drug. I was not having delusions (not that the ‘inner me’ thought so for a moment, as for the first time in my life I had a solid core to my being) and I was not going mad. Others had seen what I had seen, had been where I had been.

As the experience soaked into me, slowly—very slowly, mellowing a savage youth, my character and lifestyle began to change. Little by little, without conscious effort or intention, I began to withdraw from stimulants in my diet. I found myself growing away from blood-foods such as meat, fish and eggs. And alcohol and tobacco no longer had a hold over me. I tossed my pipe and tobacco into the Nile and never smoked again. I became consumed with the meaning of life.

What is existence? What is reality? What kind of creature am I? What am I supposed to do in life?

On the path

I could no longer take anything for granted. I was on the ‘Path’.

By the time I arrived in South Africa, I had come to the conclusion that meditation was the next necessary step for self-unfoldment. At this point, I felt that I was on the wrong continent and needed to be in India to find a meditation master. But at the time, I was unaware of the spiritual saying: ‘When the pupil is ready, the Master appears’, and so it came to be.

A Sikh Master just arrived from India, and gave me initiation into Shabd Yoga, a form of meditation involving mantra (mystic sound) and inner hearing, also known as Nada Yoga.

The guru—or spiritual preceptor—has many forms. Since we seemingly exist in this wondrous hologrammistic appearance of a cosmos all around us, I can do no other than see every aspect of existence as my teacher. The universe is a learning-system which always brings us the lessons we need. What I see in the way you are or the way you act may, in the moment, be as much my teacher as the sage on a mountain. Or I may gain as much from observing a frog in meditation, a child at play, or the bumbling of a bee in the light of a buttercup.

To come to the understanding that life is not a question, or an answer—it simply IS—and to align oneself with its workings, surrendering to each experience without reacting or getting in the way—this, we may say, is the way of a mystic.