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The First Glimpse (4 of 5)

Christopher Shaw
Jul 13
4 min read

Essay 3 of 5 in The Sleepwalkers


Co-Founder, ArcherShaw

“You do not become the ocean. You remember you were never the wave alone.”



There is a moment — and if it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will, because it is not rare, it is simply unnamed — when the sleep breaks for a few seconds and you feel something so simple it’s almost embarrassing to describe. You’re doing something ordinary. Washing a dish. Watching light move across a wall. Sitting in traffic. And without warning, without earning it, without doing a single spiritual thing to summon it, you are suddenly, unmistakably here. Not thinking about being here. Not narrating it. Just here, pulse and all, the way you were before you learned to be afraid of your own aliveness.


Then, almost always, it’s gone. And most people do the single most understandable, most tragic thing imaginable: they forget it happened within the hour. They file it under “nice moment” and go back to the loop, because nobody ever told them what they’d just touched.


I want to tell you what that was, because this is the essay where the series turns. We’ve named the sleep. We’ve named its cost. We’ve honored why it was necessary. Now I owe you the truth about what’s underneath it, waiting, the entire time you were asleep.


That flash was not a mood. It was not a fluke of brain chemistry, though your brain chemistry was certainly involved. That flash was pratyabhijña — recognition — and recognition is a very specific word, chosen with precision by people who understood exactly what they were describing. Not discovery. Not achievement. Re-cognition. You did not find something new in that moment. You remembered something you already were, the way you might glance at a photograph of yourself as a child and suddenly know, bodily, that the same “you” has been running underneath every version of yourself since — the contracted adult and the open child both animated by the same unbroken pulse. The veil didn’t get replaced with something better. It just, for one unguarded second, got thin enough to see through.


Here is what makes this essay different from the others, and I want to say it plainly: this is not a technique essay. I’m not going to give you five steps to manufacture that moment, because the moment was never manufactured in the first place, and treating it like a product you can engineer is exactly the kind of contracted, acquisitive thinking that put you to sleep to begin with. You cannot achieve your way into recognition. You can only stop interfering with it long enough for it to do what it was always going to do anyway, which is surface.


So let’s talk about what interferes.


The most common thing I watch people do with a glimpse of awakening is immediately try to hold onto it, and in the holding, lose it faster than if they’d let it pass. This is the addict’s exact relationship to a high, and I say that without judgment, because it’s the same nervous system doing the same thing it has always done: found something that felt like aliveness and grabbed, out of fear that it wouldn’t come back. But spanda is a pulse, not a possession. A pulse by definition contracts and expands. Chasing the expansion and refusing the contraction isn’t spiritual practice. It’s just a more elegant addiction.


The second thing that interferes is worse, because it’s dressed up as spiritual maturity: dismissing the glimpse as not enough. I have sat with people who had a genuine, undeniable brush with their own aliveness and immediately diminished it — that wasn’t a real awakening, real awakening is bigger than that, I probably imagined it. This is the contracted self’s most sophisticated trick. It cannot stop the glimpse from happening, so instead it minimizes the glimpse after the fact, and convinces you that what you touched wasn’t real, so you’ll stop looking for it again. Don’t let it win that argument. The glimpse was real. It is always real. It is, in fact, the only completely real thing that happens in a day otherwise full of performance.


What actually deepens a glimpse into a life is neither grasping nor dismissing. It’s something closer to what a good therapist does with a client’s first honest tear in eight months of guarded sessions: you don’t lunge at it, and you don’t pretend it didn’t happen. You simply mark it. That was real. I saw that. Let’s not rush past it. Do this for yourself the next time the pulse breaks through — pause, name it internally, let it matter for four or five seconds longer than your instinct wants to allow — and something in the nervous system begins to learn a new lesson: aliveness is safe to notice now. That is one of the deepest mechanisms of healing, spiritual or clinical, stated as simply as I know how to state it.


This is also, I think, the most hopeful thing I can tell you in this entire series: you are not trying to build something you don’t have. You are trying to stop overlooking something you’ve never once been without. The pulse did not arrive in that moment by the sink. It was always running underneath the sleep, the way a heartbeat runs underneath a body in a coma. You weren’t dead. You were unconscious of your own life-force, which is an entirely different, and far more curable, condition.


Next, in the final essay, we talk about what happens after the glimpse — how recognition becomes a practice instead of an accident, and what it actually takes to live from the pulse instead of visiting it.


For now, the next time you feel that unearned flash of aliveness — however small, however ordinary the moment — stop. Don’t chase it. Don’t dismiss it. Just say, quietly, to yourself: I see you. I’m not going anywhere this time.


Continue the journey in The Sleepwalkers:



 
 
 

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