What does it feel like? I know people think about it when I describe darshan, especially if they haven’t experienced it themselves.
It depends, you know. Depends on who it is – which person of God; depends on whether you know each other already and have an established relationship from before. Depends on what they are there for – to warn, to ask, to teach, to comfort.
But if I had to generalize, I’d say it feels like being restored to your true self. I usually have all sorts of anxieties and stress around me when I’m spending karmic matter. It feels like taking other people’s sin, but in atomic form, so it’s not a coherent thing. When I spend it, I feel pain, and I mentally repeat “I’m sorry”, without knowing exactly what I’m sorry for, because it’s too fragmented and garbled to carry any kind of information, but I’m sincere regardless. But after being immersed in that for some time, it feels terrible. I’m no longer sure of anything, because everything in my consciousness was sin, suffering and remorse for days, weeks, months… sometimes years. If it’s years, I no longer know whether it’s karmic transformation or have I been lost, fallen and rejected by God, and I can always think of reasons and rationalisations, and this anxiety makes me focus, makes me try to do everything right, cross every t and dot every i. I can’t tell what God thinks about what I’m doing, but I can at least try to do everything properly, trusting in what I remember of the truth that I saw, when I saw it, long ago, and trusting it’s still the same, that nothing changed; but I don’t know. I’m never sure, and this uncertainty is amplified by the pain and remorse and suffering of karmic transformation.
And when I am in the presence of God, it’s always sudden, without any fanfare or introduction, or announcement. One moment there’s only myself and the misery of what I’m processing, and the next moment there is a presence, and the quality of that presence is like having a long, sharp thorn removed from my body – all the anxiety, the uncertainty, not knowing what God would say, what he would think about things I had to do in the mean time, about the terrible condition I’m in because of all that stuff I’m processing – it all vanishes instantly, because I know. Sometimes I feel information being passed, and sometimes not, but the presence itself is a truth of a higher order, and it makes me know things without words or thoughts.
What can you know without words or thoughts? Well, I can know that I worried for no reason. If my old friend still sees me the same way, it means this shit didn’t really stick to me, it didn’t corrupt me, change me into something He would not want to be associated with. There’s that sense of being with someone who was there with you before the world, before the stars, before all those things people assume were forever here, but we remember them being born or made. It’s the sense of just being there and knowing that if one of us needs to go to hell to deal with some business, the other will watch his back, in such a serious and dedicated way that he’ll have absolutely nothing better to do until I’m safely out. That’s what Lord Vishnu feels, to me. There are limits to what He can do here. However, the feeling of His presence alone tells enough – to Him, it doesn’t matter that I’m dying under a terrible burden, that I’m all shades of fucked up, deprived of power, memories and my true being, trying to feel through darkness and remember who I am. He knows who I am, and He treats me as if I’m my old self, in my full power, with all the stuff I can’t even remember properly now. He doesn’t treat me any differently – He’s the same as when we had coffee up there, before the world. In a sense, He’s the complete opposite to how humans treat me; they see my limitations and barely anything beyond them, and think I can’t amount to much. He sees much more of me than I can even guess in this state, and shrugs the limitations off as incidental and irrelevant. No words exchanged, but all of it is felt, and the effect is profoundly restorative and healing. Just that feeling that He remembers me in my complete form, and this here – He understands it, and understands what will be when it passes, and looks forward to us having that coffee.
That’s what it feels like.