Dear Anita,

Yes it was a unique experience and I felt I wanted to share it, because after that I felt a very deep inner joy, which from a cognitive perspective, like you say, created a totally unique and unprecedented experience or pathway, different to the same perceived repetitious daily routine, which is actually a constant stream of unique events, we just can’t see it properly. I have recently been reading ‘The Stillness Speaks’ which is part of the Power of Now Series by Ekhart Tolle. It’s really helping me to realise the chatter of the egoic mind is not really ‘me’, it’s just a stream of words and my mind has spent 40 years constructing what it thinks it is, identifying itself with what has happened, ‘my story’, but this is not me. I had read ‘the power of now’ years ago and it really had a revolutionary effect on me, but its effects wore off, which I can only put down to the world re-dominating my mind with its
‘shoulds / shouldn’ts’
‘likes/dislikes’
‘I don’t want to be here/I want to be there’
‘I need this or that to be happy’
‘I will be happy when….’
‘what can I do next to bring me closer to that goal’
‘I’m labelling that person with that label, and that other person with another label, they are now in a box’
‘this bad thing is happening or happened to me, it’s unfair, I want fairness and justice for this, the universe owes me’ (which leads to a underlying resentment to nothing in particular which bubbles under the surface).

It’s so easy to get caught back in that invisible prison of the mind, it takes a book like this to awaken you again, if awaken is the appropriate word.