The Grocery Store Mystic

I was in the grocery store the other day — picking up a few items, nothing remarkable about the errand — when something began to happen that, after forty years of practice, I no longer have to initiate. The breath lengthened on its own. The mantra that has lived inside me for decades quietly resumed its rhythm. Ham on the inhalation. Sa on the exhalation. I Am. I Am. I Am.

And the grocery store, without changing at all, was becoming something extraordinary.

Not because anything in the store had shifted. The fluorescent lights were still fluorescent. The products were still engineered to capture attention. The other shoppers were still navigating their carts with the mild distraction of people running errands on an ordinary afternoon.

What was shifting was my awareness. Expanding — quietly, naturally — until I could see what was already there, had always been there, hidden in plain sight: consciousness dancing in the aisles, moving among the products, alive in the faces of every person I passed. Divinity wearing the disguise of an ordinary Tuesday.

This is what I have come to understand after a lifetime of practice: every single day is an experience of the divine — the moment we begin to see the consciousness that lives inside every other human being. When that seeing opens, something happens in the heart. It expands. It recognizes itself in the other. And the grocery store becomes, without any exaggeration whatsoever, a sacred space.

William Blake wrote of seeing the universe in a grain of sand, a heaven in a wild flower. He wasn't speaking in metaphor. He was describing exactly this — a mode of perception in which the infinite becomes visible through the surface of the ordinary. The grain of sand doesn't change. The wild flower doesn't change. The seeing changes. And with it, everything.

This is what Hamsa becomes over years of practice. Not something you do. Something you are. The Sanskrit breaks it open: Ham — from aham, meaning I — and Sa, meaning Am. The Great I Am, reverberating in every breath, 21,600 times a day, whether you are aware of it or not. The mystics of every tradition have pointed at this same pulsation. We'll come back to that.

Isaac Bentov, the Czech-American scientist and mystic, wrote a remarkable book called Stalking the Wild Pendulum — approaching this same truth from the direction of quantum physics. The universe itself moves in this ebb and flow. Expansion and contraction. Inhalation and exhalation. The pendulum swinging in both directions.

But here is what Bentov understood — and what direct experience confirms from the inside:

Most people know that the universe is made of atoms. And atoms are made of even smaller particles, constantly vibrating. A vibration is a pendulum swing — only at an infinitesimally small scale. And at the end of each vibrational swing, something extraordinary happens. The particle stops. And in that stopping, it winks out of three-dimensional existence entirely — back into pure consciousness, back into the field from which all matter arises. It only appears as a physical object when it is in motion and when there is an observer present to perceive that motion. No movement. No observer. No three-dimensional object. Just consciousness.

Your thoughts work the same way. Your feelings work the same way. Your physical body — this sacred temple through which realization itself becomes possible — works the same way. All of it is energy, manifesting in a three-dimensional plane we have agreed to call real.

Which means the gap at the turning point of your breath — the dvadasanta, the still point the Shaiva yogis mapped with such precision over a thousand years ago in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra — is not a spiritual technique leading somewhere else. It is the same gap that matter itself passes through, continuously, at every scale of the universe. When you rest in that gap, you are touching the actual structure of reality.

Not metaphor. Physics. Direct experience. The same truth from three different directions.

Direct experience reshapes your reality. This is the core of everything I teach.

At the natural turning point of each breath — the precise moment where the inhalation has completed itself and has not yet become an exhalation, and again where the exhalation has emptied and has not yet begun to fill — there is a gap. A stillpoint. Not a pause you create. A pause that is already there, built into the architecture of every breath you have ever taken.

If you can learn to rest in that gap — even for a fraction of a second — the ordinary mind stops. Not because you forced it. Because there is nothing to hold it in motion. The wave has reached the shore and has not yet turned back. In that stillness, something else becomes available.

You already know this gap. You have felt it many times — you simply may not have recognized it for what it was.

It is the aha moment. That sudden interior opening when something so unexpectedly beautiful stops you in your tracks. A sunrise you weren't prepared for. A piece of music that reaches into your chest and rearranges something. A painting that holds you in front of it longer than you intended — not because you are thinking about it, but because thought has momentarily ceased. The face of a dear friend you haven't seen in years — appearing suddenly, and your breath stops. Just stops. And in that stopping, something vast and luminous opens.

That is the dvadasanta. That is the gap. Arriving not through technique but through beauty, through surprise, through love recognizing itself across a room.

What makes art truly beautiful? What makes a sunrise open something in your chest you didn't know was closed? It is not the colors. It is not the composition. It is that the experience momentarily suspends the thinking mind — and in that suspension, even for a fraction of a second, consciousness touches its own source. The heart expands. The aha arrives. And you stand there, breath caught, not knowing exactly what just happened — but knowing, without any doubt, that something real just occurred.

The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra — written over a thousand years ago — saw it with equal clarity. In Verse 118, it enumerates the moments when pure consciousness becomes directly available in ordinary life.

ksutadi-ante antar-vyomni mano dhyatvam ksane ksane |
kruradau bhairavo bhaktya gacched bhairavam avyayam |

"Just before or after a sneeze, at the onset or cessation of anger, in fear, in deep sorrow, when fleeing from conflict or from joy, in curiosity or wonder, at the onset and cessation of hunger: in all these states and more, the state replete with Being of the Absolute is available."

— Christopher Wallis, Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Verse 118

Every involuntary moment when the ordinary flow of thought is briefly interrupted. Every gap. Every aha. The sneeze, the fright, the sudden beauty — all of them creating the same still point that intentional breath practice cultivates deliberately.

And in Verse 73, the Vijnana Bhairava speaks directly to the experience of music.

nartake gita-vadye shrvan svarasya purnatam smaret |
param brahma shrvan yo anandam agato bhavet |

"The yogin who relishes music and song to the extent that he or she merges with it becomes filled with unparalleled happiness, attains heightened awareness, and experiences oneness with the Divine."

— Christopher Wallis, Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, Verse 73

Not through effort. Through the gap that beauty opens. Through the moment the listener disappears into the listening.

These are not techniques reserved for monasteries and meditation halls. They are descriptions of something that happens to every human being — the moment a sunrise opens something in your chest you didn't know was closed, the moment the music reaches in and rearranges something, the moment you turn a corner and see the face of someone you love. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is simply saying: that moment — right there — is the door. Learn to recognize it. Learn to rest in it. Learn to enter it consciously rather than stumbling through it accidentally.

What the practice does — what intentional, sustained attention to the breath and its turning points does over time — is take what happens to you accidentally in those aha moments and make it available deliberately. Not manufactured. Not forced. But chosen. Invited. Entered consciously rather than stumbled into.

The sunrise opens something in your chest you didn't know was closed, and for a moment, you touch the infinite. The practice teaches you to rest in that gap — to extend that moment, to deepen it, to learn to live closer and closer to that threshold until it becomes not a peak experience occasionally visited, but a ground state. The permanent fragrance of an open life.

This same practice, taken to the very edge of sleep — watching the breath, resting in the dvadasanta, letting the stillpoints lengthen — becomes the doorway into what the yogis call the tandra state: the luminous threshold between waking and sleep where the deepest teachings arrive not as concepts but as direct experience. But that is a full teaching for another time.

Even in a grocery store.

As the breath lengthened and the stillpoints deepened, something began to happen that I have come to recognize over decades of practice.

The ajna chakra — the center of expanded perception located at the point between the eyebrows — began to open.

This is not a metaphor. It is a felt experience, as distinct and recognizable as the feeling of sunlight on your face. A subtle pressure, a gathering of awareness at that point, and then — a widening. As though an aperture that is normally set quite narrow begins to open to a larger field.

What changes is not what you see. The fluorescent lights are still fluorescent. The products are still screaming for attention. What changes is how you see — and what becomes available to perception beyond the purely physical.

People begin to register differently. Not just as bodies navigating a store, but as fields — energy patterns, emotional textures, the quality of someone's inner state becoming perceptible the way temperature is perceptible, not seen exactly, but unmistakably felt. You pick up on things. A heaviness moving through the cereal aisle. A brightness near the flowers. The quiet grief of someone standing very still in front of a shelf, not really looking at what's there.

One of my teachers used to say simply, “See God in each other. ” Five words. A complete teaching.

But there is a world of difference between being told to see God in each other — nodding along because it sounds spiritually correct, because you're supposed to believe it — and actually seeing it. Actually feeling it. Actually knowing it in the way the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein meant when he coined the word ‘grok’ in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land — to understand something so completely, so fully, that you merge with it. That the knower and the known become one.

And that title itself deserves a moment of reflection. There are times on the spiritual path when we look around at the apparent craziness of this world, its violence, noise, and distraction, and we genuinely feel it: the sensation of being a stranger in a strange land. Of having glimpsed something most people around us haven't seen yet, and not quite knowing how to live in both worlds simultaneously.

But here is what the path eventually reveals: this strange land is not foreign territory. It is your own consciousness, dreaming itself into form. Every person in that grocery store. Every product screaming for attention. Every heaviness in the cereal aisle and every brightness near the flowers. All of it — your own play of consciousness, expressing itself in ten thousand forms, waiting to be recognized for what it actually is.

When that recognition deepens — not as philosophy but as lived, felt, embodied knowing — the stranger disappears. Not because the world becomes less complex or less challenging. But because nothing in it is truly foreign anymore. You begin to see everything in a different light, no matter what the circumstances. The craziness included. The negativity included. All of it held inside the same vast awareness that breathes Ham and Sa in your chest 21,600 times a day.

When you truly begin to grok the consciousness living inside every person you pass — not as a belief, not as a spiritual aspiration, not as something you're performing because a teacher told you to — but as direct, immediate, undeniable knowing — something happens that no amount of belief can manufacture.

Ecstasy begins to well up in the heart.

Not the ecstasy of excitement or emotional enthusiasm. Something far quieter and far vaster than that. A fullness. A recognition. The heart expanding to contain what the mind could never hold. And in that expansion — that aha, that inhalation of pure wonder — you are touching the same threshold we have been circling all along. The dvadasanta of the heart. The gap where pure consciousness stands revealed not as a concept but as the living reality it has always been.

The store becomes a living field of consciousness — each person an expression of the same awareness breathing Ham and Sa in your own chest. I Am — and there, and there, and there again.

Here I want to pause and say something that I consider essential teaching — not a footnote, not a caution buried at the end:

When you open in this way, you must also learn to guard your energy.

An open, flowing, energetic field is attractive to those who are depleted, angry, or carrying significant pain. This is not their fault — it is the nature of energy seeking equilibrium. But if you move through the world in an open state without awareness of this dynamic, you will find yourself drained in ways that are difficult to explain. You may feel inexplicably exhausted after ordinary errands. You may absorb emotional states that are not yours and carry them home without knowing it. This is not a minor inconvenience. For those who are genuinely opening — whose ajna is beginning to awaken, whose field is becoming permeable — it is something that requires real attention and practical wisdom.

The New Testament contains a passage that has always struck me as one of the most honest descriptions of this dynamic ever recorded. Jesus (I call him Yeshua) is moving through a crowd when he suddenly stops and asks: “Who touched my robe? ” His disciples are baffled — there are people pressing in from every direction. But Yeshua is not asking about physical contact. He felt something specific: power flowing out of him. A woman who had reached toward him in desperate faith had drawn from his field and been healed — and he knew it, not through sight or reasoning, but through felt awareness of the energetic flow.

He felt the power move through him and out of him.

And here is what is essential to understand about that moment: he was not depleted by it. Jesus knew himself to be one with the Father — a clear, open channel for an infinite source of divine power moving through him into the world. What flowed out was not his personal energy to be spent and exhausted. It was the infinite Shakti of pure consciousness expressing itself through a human form that had become transparent to it. The flow was real. The source was inexhaustible.

This is the model — but it is not the starting point. It is the destination that practice moves us toward. Until we are rooted that deeply in the infinite source, until the channel is that clear and that stable, we must be practical and self-aware. We must know when our energy is being drawn upon. We must know how to return to the center — to the breath, to the Ham and Sa, to the I Am — so that compassion can flow outward without the center being compromised.

The protection is not about closing down or hardening. It is not about becoming less open or less loving. It is about learning to give from the infinite rather than from the personal. Rooted in the source, you can move through a grocery store full of human suffering and human beauty — fully open, fully present, fully permeable — and return home with your center intact.

We will give this the full teaching it deserves in a dedicated piece.

And so I moved through that store — open, centered, breathing Ham and Sa, I Am — the ordinary chatter of the mind growing quieter and quieter, thinning like morning mist as the breath deepened and the stillpoints lengthened. Not drifting. Entering. Moving into that thought-free space where the noise of the conditioned mind falls away and something else becomes possible.

It is in precisely this quality of stillness — not in the busy, associative chatter of the ordinary mind — that genuine spontaneous arising occurs. Not a thought I was thinking. An appearance. The image and memory of a dear friend arose on their own, clear and warm, in the quiet interior space that the practice had opened.

I have come to recognize this quality of spontaneous arising as one of the hallmarks of elevated consciousness. The synchronicities that emerge from this space are not accidents. They are not coincidences dressed in spiritual language. They are the natural expression of a field of awareness that has temporarily released its ordinary boundaries — and begun to touch the unified field in which all of us, apparently separate, are actually moving together.

What happened next still makes my heart sing when I think of it.

We had met in this same store some months before. And our conversation had found its way, as conversations between certain people always do, to the things that matter most.

We had been talking about a photograph of Sri Ramakrishna.

You may know the image. Ramakrishna stands with one hand raised, the other resting on his heart, eyes closed, face utterly transported. He is in samadhi — breath suspended, mind dissolved, consciousness absorbed into what he called the Mother. This was his name for Kundalini, for the living force of the universe, for Shakti herself moving through and as all of creation. He entered this state constantly, spontaneously — not through effort but through the overwhelming recognition of the Divine in everything he encountered. A name. A song. A sunset. The thought of the Mother. His breath would stop. His body would become still. And he would remain in that suspension — that kumbhaka that arrived not as technique but as grace — sometimes for hours.

His kumbhaka was not something he did. It was something that happened to him when consciousness recognized itself.

There is a story about Ramakrishna that I have always loved.

A great yogi named Totapuri came to visit him. Totapuri was the accomplished one — a master of traditional Patanjali yoga, disciplined, rigorous, capable of entering deep states of samadhi through years of sustained practice. By every external measure, he was the teacher. Ramakrishna was the devotee, the ecstatic, the one who wept at the thought of the Mother and swooned into samadhi in the middle of conversations.

But Totapuri's heart was dry.

He could enter the deep states. He had mapped the inner territories with precision. And yet the ecstasy — the living flood of Divine presence that moved through Ramakrishna like weather, unbidden, overwhelming, glorious — that he could not access. He watched Ramakrishna move in and out of samadhi with a look somewhere between bewilderment and longing.

The story goes that Ramakrishna eventually touched Totapuri at the ajna chakra — that point between the eyebrows where perception expands beyond the ordinary. And something that all of Totapuri's years of technical mastery had not been able to unlock — opened. The Divine flooded in. Totapuri, the accomplished yogi, the teacher who had come to instruct, fell at the feet of Ramakrishna in ecstasy.

I love this story not because it diminishes technique — technique matters, practice matters, the years of showing up matter enormously. But it tells the truth about something that every serious practitioner eventually discovers: there is a dimension of this that cannot be forced open from the outside. It opens from within, when consciousness recognizes itself. When the ajna awakens. When Shakti moves.

All of us have different experiences along the way. Different entry points. Different moments when the door opens, and the flood arrives. But when you begin to touch Divine ecstasy — even at its edges, even for a moment — nothing else comes close. Nothing else even compares.

I want to say something directly to those who come to these practices through curiosity rather than devotion — through the thrill of astral projection and out-of-body experience, through the adrenaline of multidimensional exploration, through simple fascination with the territory beyond ordinary waking consciousness.

It doesn't matter how you enter. The experiences themselves become the teacher.

This is why I always say, in the Astral Monk Project, that direct experience reshapes your reality. Not belief. Not philosophy. Not someone else's account of what is possible. Your own direct, lived, undeniable experience — entered through whatever door was open to you — begins to do something to you that nothing else can. Quietly. Cumulatively. Irreversibly.

Every genuine excursion beyond the ordinary boundaries of the physical self begins to show you, from the inside, that you are not what you thought you were. That the walls are not where you believed them to be. That consciousness does not end at the boundary of the skin, or the boundary of the body, or the boundary of this dimension. Each experience — even the ones that feel more like adventure than revelation — chips away at the foundational misunderstanding that has caused human beings to suffer since the beginning: the belief that we are small, limited, bound.

We are not. We are pure consciousness, currently expressing as a human being. Currently — not permanently. Not essentially. The human form is real, and it deserves care and reverence. And it is also temporary. The body will age. It will eventually go. But what you are building through these practices — the direct knowledge of your own unlimited nature — that does not go anywhere.

This is why the great Shaiva declaration resonates so deeply with me: Siddha Svatantrabhavaha — Shiva Sutras, III.25. A Siddha — an awakened, realized being — lives in absolute freedom. I would add: in absolute ecstasy. Not as a peak experience occasionally visited. As the default, ground state. As the water in which ordinary life swims.

Ramakrishna swooning in the marketplace. Two friends laughing in a grocery store in Florida. Different expressions. The same recognition.

My friend and I had stood in that same grocery store and laughed together about that photograph — not irreverently, but with the laughter of longing and recognition. This, we had both said. This is the state. To move through this world — all worlds — seeing everything saturated with Shakti. Eyes open. Breathe occasionally still. The scintillating blue light of consciousness visible everywhere — in the faces of strangers, in the ordinary objects of daily life, in the fluorescent-lit aisles of a grocery store in Florida.

Not the mundane world as something to transcend or escape. This very world, transfigured. Seen clearly for what it actually is.

That conversation was alive in my mind as I turned the corner into the produce section.

And there he was.

Looking up at me with a wide smile.

We greeted each other with the particular warmth of those who know what is actually happening beneath the surface. And in that moment of recognition — his face appearing suddenly, unexpectedly, in the space my practice had already opened — something accelerated. The expanded state I had been moving through the store intensified in an instant. The mind, already quiet, went completely still. And what flooded in was not thought, not excitement, not the ordinary joy of bumping into someone you love — but something vaster and quieter than all of that. Great joy. Ecstasy. The aha of two fields recognizing each other, each making the other burn a little brighter.

This too is a dvadasanta. Not the gap between breaths. The gap between one moment and the next — when the unexpected beauty of a dear friend's face stops everything, and in that stopping, pure consciousness stands briefly, luminously revealed.

He showed me a picture on his phone that made us both laugh with pure delight — one of those moments where the cosmic sense of humor becomes briefly, unmistakably visible. We stood there in the produce section, two people who had recently stood in this same store talking about Ramakrishna swooning into samadhi at the thought of the Mother, now laughing together under fluorescent lights next to the organic carrots. And I realized, standing there, that I was on the edge of samadhi. Just like Ramakrishna.

My heart was happy.

There is something I want to add that I have not yet said.

This dear friend — this well-known teacher whose work has touched millions — I first met him in 1978. He was already an established practitioner then, years into his own path, a devoted disciple of the great Swami Yogananda's lineage, older and further along the road than I was.

I was not yet a monk. I was a young man whose Kundalini had recently awakened with a force I had no framework to contain — consciousness blazing, out-of-body experiences arriving unbidden, flights into realms I had no map for. I was weeks away from selling everything I owned — my car, my plans, my idea of what my life was going to look like — for a one-way ticket to India. I needed to find a teacher who could help me understand what was happening to me. Someone who had been where I was going.

We met in that charged moment — his path already deepening, mine just catching fire. And then life moved, the way life moves. Different roads. Different teachers. Different continents. I went to India, took my vows, and became a monk of the Saraswati Order two years later in 1980. Each of us went further into our own tradition, following the thread wherever it led, for decade after decade after decade.

And then — a grocery store in Florida. Nearly fifty years later. Two men who have actually lived the path, standing in the produce section, laughing about Ramakrishna swooning into samadhi. The young man who sold his Firebird for a one-way ticket to India. The established practitioner who was already deep in his own tradition when they first met. Both of us somewhere closer now, perhaps, to what we were always moving toward.

Different lineages. Different decades. Different rivers — arriving, as they always do, at the same ocean.

This is what the path does, if you stay on it long enough. It brings you home. Not to a place. To a recognition. To the understanding that the pure consciousness you were seeking out there — in India, in the ashram, in the years of practice and sacrifice and surrender — was here all along. It was you all along.

Two old friends. The produce section. Laughing, swooning a little, hearts full.

What joy.

Before enlightenment: chopping wood, carrying water.

After enlightenment: chopping wood, carrying water.

Lama Surya Das titled one of his finest books, ‘After the Ecstasy, the Laundry’. I love that title. Because it tells the truth about where the real practice lives — not in the cave, not on the retreat, not in the extraordinary moment carefully arranged for maximum spiritual effect.

In the laundry. In the grocery store. In your home. In the errand that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything sacred.

This is the understanding that grounds everything I teach in the Astral Monk Project. And what happened to me in that grocery store — the breath lengthening on its own, the dvadasanta opening, the ajna awakening, the field expanding, the spontaneous appearance of a dear friend, the ecstasy welling up in the produce section next to the organic carrots — was not a lucky accident. It was the natural fruition of practices I have been living for over forty years.

Practices that are available to you.

The three core areas of the Astral Monk Project exist precisely because they work together — not as separate techniques but as different expressions of the same awakening force, each one amplifying and igniting the others.

These three practices synergistically ignite each other. Astral projection opens the boundaries. Meditation deepens the stillness. Kundalini and Shakti provide the living fire that makes both possible. Together they do something that no single practice can do alone: they begin to permanently reshape the way you experience reality.

Not as a belief. Not as a philosophy. As direct experience.

Direct experience reshapes your reality. This is the heart of everything I teach.

In the issues ahead, we will go deeper into each of these areas — the mechanics of conscious out-of-body experience, the specific practices that open the deep meditative states, the signs and stages of Kundalini awakening, and how to navigate them wisely. We will continue to explore the extraordinary teachings of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, the Shiva Sutras, and the living tradition of Nondual Shaiva Tantra — not as academic subjects but as living maps for direct experience.

The grocery store is full of Shakti. So is the laundry. So is the perfectly ordinary moment you are living right now, as you read these words.

The door is never locked.

The entry fee is a single conscious breath.

None of it is ordinary. None of it has ever been ordinary.

Dive inward, fly free.

Don / The Astral Monk