This happened when I was in middle school. After finishing my schoolwork, I came home to find the house empty and quiet. Feeling drowsy, I lay down on my bed, focused on my breathing, and eventually fell asleep. How much time had passed? When I woke up, it was raining inside the house. Drops of light, shining like jewels, were pouring into my room. I stared blankly at them without a single thought, then stepped out into the living room to find it, too, filled to the brim with these droplets of light. As I looked at the droplets filling every corner, I was overcome with a sense of ecstasy.
“How can it be raining inside the house?” Just as I began to wonder this, the droplets of light started to fade, eventually disappearing right before my eyes. This wasn’t rain. It was the divine presence filling the air. This experience felt like a reward for the hardships I had endured in my life and moved me deeply.
What I could see wasn’t the whole story. The space where I stood and the air I breathed were both alive. I remember thinking this as I spread my arms wide, spun around the room, and felt happiness coursing through my entire body.
Even though no one had explained it to me, I came to realize that “everything is connected and influences one another.” From that moment on, the related knowledge I had previously accepted merely as a maxim or philosophical logic began to make sense, one by one. In this way, knowledge must be grounded in experience and wisdom so that one can distinguish the wheat from the chaff.
There are sayings from the sages that are difficult to grasp unless we see and experience them firsthand. This also implies that they had already reached a profound spiritual realm. I believe that even though they had attained enlightenment, they did not act superior to others because they understood the fundamental truth of nature: that divinity resides in all things that exist.
Phoenix
