17/Nov/09 - Childhood incidents.

In retrospect it seems like this journey I am on initiated a long time ago - in my childhood.
Some very vivid instances come to mind that make me think this....

I can't be entirely sure but this particular incident occured around the age of 11-12. The house was empty and I think I was contemplating about God and then suddenly I felt this huge wagve welling in my heart, something was filling up my heart and growing and growing and growing and a great surge of love, happiness and pain filled my heart to bursting point, and I ran madly around the house, as I couldn't contain IT shouting over and over again..'Where are you? where are you?' The tears wouldn't stop and it was a long time before I stopped crying. Its as if the physical boundaries between my heart and my surroundings had disappeared and I was this huge space - of what? A space that was one with the space around me - where my heart should have been......

Another incident, I can't be sure of the age - I was in the bathroom having a bath. I heard a procession outside on the road, some chanting going on to the beat of drums (a very common phenonmenon in India!) and I began to be filled with this huge joy, happiness, ecstacy! I started trembling, it felt as if my heart was expanding and expanding filled with this joy, so much so I feared I would explode or implode with this joy - the bliss simply couldn't be contained and the welling tears wouldn't stop. I stood there shivering in the bathroom for a very long time...I don't know how long....

One more vivid experience, this slightly different from the above two and I think I was slightly older then, perhaps into my teens by then. It was afternoon and the noisy Mumbai traffic was roaring by on the main road. We lived in an apartment block right on the main road, so it was never quiet. I walked out into the balcony of the apartment and stood observing the traffic in front of me and suddenly everything went still (within me? outside of me? I was never able to tell!). I suddenly felt as if I was observing everything from a great distance - I was very still and aware, observing everything around and before me and yet I was enveloped in such peace! I was not lost in some reverie; That stillness, was something different, something out of this world or of this world -it felt like the stillness within which everything else exists?