Introduction

S hortly before I started teaching, I was sitting by myself one night thinking about some extraordinary insights that I had experienced over the prior twenty-four hours. They were inspiring, uplifting, liberating insights. I found myself thinking about them very ­­­in­tensely. I wanted that penetrating clarity to return. Indeed, I desperately longed to have those insights again and because of that I was suffering. I was making a tremendous amount of effort while I was thinking about them, because as often occurs when something liberating happens to us, we have trouble letting go. It was for that reason that I was trying so hard. I was attempting through the power of memory to recapture something that had occurred only hours before. Suddenly, in the midst of all of this I caught myself. “What are you doing?” I said out loud. “What are you doing?” In that instant of recognition, it became obvious that the striving to recapture what had occurred in the past was not only causing me to suffer, but was the very thing that was keeping me separate from what I had always thought I wanted the most—which was to be free. When I saw this, everything came to a halt. I stopped in my tracks. Ever since that moment, I’ve ceased to look back in time to any particular experience in order to know if I’m free. This insight in many ways was more profoundly liberating in its impact than the countless moments of revelation that I have experienced before or since. What I realized in that instant was that freedom has no history. This literally was a quantum leap in my own evolution. viii “Truly, freedom which is the insignia of the Timeless in the processes of Time can have no history, since all historical phenomena may be considered as the kaleidoscopic dance of the Absolute in the theater of the panorama of perpetual experience.” Swami Krishnananda Rishikesh, India November 12, 1996 ix