vince’s epiphany
When I woke up (back in 2011) it wasn’t at Liberation Unleashed. It wasn’t through the portal of no-self.
It was the culmination of 43 years of obsessive seeking and a lifetime of discontent before that.
That and the chance synchronicity that all of the other conditions necessary for me to wake up, were present and aligned.
I had tried religion, hypnotherapy, gestalt therapy, rebirthing, encounter groups, meditation, yoga, Advaita, Autolysis, and other things that I don’t even remember now.
When it happened it was because of a single conversation. In fact, it was a single line in that conversation that flipped a switch.
Searching the web I came across this bloke in America (Eric Gross) and that line that precipitated a shift in perspective, was when he told me that “the mosquito bite of seeking will never heal while I keep scratching it.”
WHAM! In that moment, I knew that I couldn’t be awake and still be a seeker.
I had to give up the identifying with being a seeker to be awake. They were incompatible.
Being awake meant accepting whatever was present NOW.
Being a seeker meant that I was looking for something to happen in the future.
All happenings are NOW…
Then I had the realisation that these happenings weren’t being seen in real time. That seeing was always lagging real time by milliseconds. That what was noticed was already done. Finished. …and WHAM!! Another realisation.. They’re finished. They can’t be changed, so wishing them to be different was only adding something that at the very least confused the seeing and quite possibly corrupted it to the point of intense distortion.
This meant not only was it smart to surrender willingly to whatever was noticed, but any other recourse was maladaptive. Stupid even.
THIS IS IT became a catchphrase. It says it all.
The seeking had stopped, but there was still searching the Web for like-minded others to communicate with, when around a week later I came across Liberation Unleashed.
The first thing that they asked me was if a self existed as an inherently separate entity.
What a ridiculous question (I thought)
Although I hadn’t considered it, the obvious answer was that there were only stories about Vince.
They asked me if an experiencer was necessary to experience something. This one I had to consider for a moment, but again it was obvious that the experiencer and the experienced only exist as mental constructs.
Turns out that anybody that has passed through the ‘gate’ at Liberation Unleashed can guide seekers to break the first Fetter. That is the delusion that an inherently independent self exists and is running the show.
So vince started guiding in November 2011 and attributes a lot of ‘deepening’ to this.