A Saint for Three Days...Except I wasn't normal. It soon became apparent that I was in an elevated spiritual state. When I went outside and passed people on the street, they seemed divine to me, especially children. By this I mean that I was aware of their essential goodness and their infinite importance and the casual mundaneness of that infinite importance and the jovial benevolence of the world we all inhabit together. This awareness was so overwhelming that tears of joy came to my eyes.

This condition lasted three days. The most striking thing about it was the conviction that the world is not only benevolent but also good-humored, almost as if it's a friendly joke that all of us are in on; all of us should be winking at each other. But this description is misleading, because it seemed as if we are the joke. And that doesn't express it correctly either, because calling it a joke makes it seem trivial, and this insight wasn't trivial. It was profound and beautiful and important; it was what people mean when they say God; it was love; and for three days it was tangible to me, to the point that I kept crying tears of joy intermittently.

Or maybe the most striking thing was that pedestrians on the sidewalks of New York City, where paranoia is an artform and children learn before they are weaned to avoid eye contact with strangers, kept looking into my eyes and smiling at me.

But why shouldn't they? I loved them -- not in a soppy way, but as if we were such old friends that we didn't have to bother saying hello.

Or maybe the most striking thing was that I was happy. Or that I was fearless.

After three days, the spiritual awareness subsided. Luckily, it didn't subside completely; an attenuated trace of it remains to this day, and I'm extremely grateful for it.

I hope this final paragraph will be read carefully, because I don't want to be misunderstood. I am an ordinary person, no better or worse than anybody else. But this experience was a taste of sainthood. If you stayed permanently in this state which I merely visited for three days, you would be a saint. And so I conclude that yoga is a technology for turning people into saints. Should this be a surprise? Indian scriptures have said so for several thousand years.


Copyright 1999 Freddie Yam.


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Freddie Yam is a contributing editor of Realization.org. The event he describes took place on March 6, 1998.