There is a point beyond which physics cannot venture: the event horizon, a region of space-time where phenomena cannot be registered. The event horizon is a bodiless border on the edge of a black hole; anything that the black hole’s gravitational field attracts beyond this border will be unable to come back. All possibility of exploration stops here: no unfortunate astronaut who free-fell into the black hole could ever return. We do not know what lies in the black hole, beyond the event horizon. Science has never reached the other side. But spiritual seekers who make a leap beyond—yes, they know. And that is the subject of this book: the possibility of exploring beyond an imaginary confine, a journey of awareness in which one can enter, register phenomena, evaluate their implications, and reemerge with one’s results. There is still a point of no return, but it is of a different kind: it is a threshold beyond which you can never be as you were, and from which you can never turn back. You cannot put your awakened self to death. Sri Ramana Maharshi explains this well: if the bucket (the ego) dips into the well (the self), but the cord is not severed, the ego can return, even after years of absence. In sahaja, though, one’s natural state, this cord is finally severed and the ego cannot return. Here, in this book, Avikal takes us down into that well and shows us how to go about severing that rope.
