The autobiographical life adventures of Sharon Janis, author of Spirituality For Dummies, Secrets of Spiritual Happiness, and Breakthrough Consciousness.
You came empty-handed into this world,
and you will leave it empty-handed.
Although you are fully aware of this,
you still behave in total ignorance,
believing that your life will never end.
– SUFI QAWWALI
PROLOGUE
It started as a low rumbling. I had barely sunk into the arms of an exhausted sleep after a hundred-hour workweek when the world went mad. The earth itself, metaphor for all that is stable and dependable, was dancing. But this was not a gentle dance; it was a dance of destruction. This was a display of force unlike any I had witnessed before.
Instinctively, I jumped up and ran to the alcove I had designated as the "earthquake spot" just days earlier, when two small shocks rumbled through town. During my five years in Los Angeles, we'd had a few temblors. Most of them occurred during my workdays at various television studios, where I usually would joke about the shaking walls, impressing co-workers and friends with my bravado. Those small tremors were nothing like this.
I’d just spent a year editing the "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers" television show. With my apartment shaking violently from side to side, I visualized images from the many scenes I’d edited of big power ranger monsters picking up various buildings and shaking them until all the contents spilled out. Holding tightly to the doorframe to keep from being tossed around, I wondered for a moment if I was dreaming.
A glass shower door upstairs shattered, and my neighbor's 35" TV smashed against the wall. What devastation must be occurring all around me? In my mind's eye, I envisioned a jagged line running up the coast. This shaking might only be the edge of something even more huge. I imagined the entire west coast crumbling at its seams, perhaps swallowing thousands of lives with each quaking gulp.
I truly believed this was The Big One. I was about to die. The ceiling could crash down any moment, squashing my body like a bug. These were my final moments as me. From within an expanded sense of time, the twenty-to- forty second earthquake seemed to take hours.
"Now what am I supposed to do? I should know this!"
I thought I had made peace with the idea of death many years earlier. Yet now, as the walls closed in on my life, my pounding heart cried out with anguish at the large gap between where I was and where I'd hoped to be during my last moments of life. Once upon a time, I had anticipated that my death would come as a great merging into the Grand Source of all, as promised in one of my favorite Indian texts:
Whatever state of being a soul remembers at the moment of death,
he goes to that very state of being.
Therefore, at all times meditate on Me (the Supreme Soul),
keep your mind and intelligence fixed on Me.
In this way, thou shalt surely come to Me.
– THE BHAGAVAD GITA
Now it was too late. I had fallen off the path of spiritual evolution and wasted my precious time. I had been meditating on TV shows and worldly success. Why couldn't my death have come when I was beyond personal identification, living a life completely devoted to God? Why did it have to come when I was just like everyone else, afraid of losing things that never truly existed?
Even greater than the fear of death was my embarrassment at having discarded the precious gifts given to me through the years. I cowered before my God and couldn't recognize Him. First I tried to paste a face on him, invoking the images of my spiritual masters. Then I repeated my mantra, in hopes that it could magically lift me up. I wanted to leave this world from a mountaintop of elevated awareness, instead of from the valley in which I had been dwelling. How could I make the leap? Was it even possible to break through untold layers of illusion in these last few moments of personal existence? Could I become immortal at the threshold of death itself?
The rumbling stopped.
The cacophony of smashing, crashing and creaking also stopped. There was dead silence and blacker-than-black darkness.
A voice pierced the stillness. "Holy shit!"
I had to chuckle. It was one of the guys who lived on the second floor.
I was in my body, on the floor, still on earth — and in shock. I had been given another chance. Next time, I had to be ready.
Having pursued several avenues for growth in the past, it was clear I now had to find a more personal way to relate to this unnamable, perhaps unknowable Truth. But first, I had to remember what had already been learned and forgotten.
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again;
and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business.
- T.S. ELIOT
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Chapter One
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