Epiphanies (For G.R.)

The value of an epiphany doesn’t lie just in some new or exciting insight. You might be walking down the street and pass a stranger. Your eyes meet, and for some reason there is a connection. It isn’t sexual or romantic or even a suspicion that this person could mean something in your life.

Instead, the epiphany is that you are that stranger – your experience merges with his. Call this a feeling or a thought, it doesn’t matter which – it’s the sudden expansion that counts. You are flung outside your narrow boundaries, if only for a moment, and that makes all the difference.

You have tasted a hidden dimension.

Compared to the habit of shutting yourself behind the walls of ego, this new dimension feels freer and lighter. You have a sense that your body can’t contain you anymore.

When you watch a young child who is playing with complete focus and yet totally carefree, it’s hard not to feel a tug. Doesn’t the child’s innocence seem palpable at that moment? Can’t you feel in yourself – or yearn to feel - the same delight in play? Doesn’t the child’s tiny body seem as fragile as a soap bubble and yet bursting with life itself, something immense, eternal, never to be defeated?

In a fascinating text called the Shiva Sutras, which dates back centuries in India, one can find similar epiphanies. Each one is a sudden glimpse of freedom in which the underlying experiencer is directly confronted, without interference. One looks at a beautiful woman and suddenly one sees beauty itself. Or one looks at the sky and suddenly one sees an infinity beyond.

No one else, however much you love and adore the person, sees the true significance of your private epiphanies. The secret belongs to you, with you, in you.


Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).