Three Accounts of My Awakening

By Richard Rose

This article is reprinted from a PDF file on SearchWithin.org.

The First Account

IT OCCURRED IN SEATTLE, Washington. I was thirty years of age at the time and I had been fed-up several times with what I was doing. I had been into yoga and other things, and several times between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty I had given it up and wished I could go out, get drunk, and forget about it. In fact, I had gone to Seattle to get married and I was going to chuck the whole thing. I said, ‘If I get married, I’ll throw it out — forget about it.’

But while I was there I picked up a job, and again I gravitated down toward the library. I’m back down there reading books on yoga, and doing my yoga exercises — trying to marry the two, the mundane world, and this mental drive that I had. I think that this was the catalytic factor that caused the experience — trying to bring these two together. I could be wrong.

I had a room in an apartment hotel of sorts, and I would come home every day, sit up on the bed with my feet tucked up under me, meditate and think. So this particular day I sat there — and I started to get a pain in the top of my head, right in the center of the top. The pain got worse — in fact it got so bad that I started weeping.

Tears started to come out of my eyes. I couldn’t stand it, and I thought, ‘Oh boy, three thousand miles from home and I’ve got to blow my stack. That’ s what is happening.’ I thought that I would have a stroke or possibly go crazy. Because I didn’t think that it would just stop on its own.

But I was aware at the peak of this pain of going out the hotel window. I was aware of actually seeing people who were on the street at the time, except that I was above them. This was in daylight, incidentally, it wasn’t night. My window looked out toward the Cascade Range of snowcapped mountains. And I watched this just as if I were in an airplane, passing underneath me.

And then there was sort of a time flipover, in which I was no longer over the Cascade Range — now I could see all of humanity. I knew that all I had to do was look wherever I wanted, and I could see any man who ever lived or would live. There was no such thing as time. These people were all living now — all I had to do was to check them out, if I wished.

So I looked and I saw myself. I could see myself struggling down there — Richard Rose — I could see his whole life pattern. I’m still in a sort of astral projection form, I’m still much attached to the body, to these people, and I feel a tremendous amount of grief. A tremendous amount of sadness for this seemingly senseless struggle.

Then I realized that I was both humanity and my individual self, and that I was everything. And in an instant I realized that humanity didn’t exist and that I didn’t exist. But that I did exist in nothingness and everythingness, infinitely. And how long this lasted I had no way of checking, because I was alone and when I came back it was rather traumatic. And I stayed that way for several days, because it is as difficult to come back as it is to go into it.

First account © 1985 Richard Rose from The Direct-Mind Experience pages 83‒84. Second account © 1984 Richard Rose from his April 28, 1984, lecture ‘Peace of Mind in Spite of Success’ in Akron, Ohio. Third account © 1973 from The Albigen Papers, pages 224‒227.

This article is reprinted from a file on SearchWithin.org called ‘realization_richard_rose.pdf.’

Richard Rose (1917 – 2005) was a spiritual teacher and author of eight books.

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This page was published on June 24, 2017 and last revised on January 25, 2019.