What do any of us have to base the experience of the newly realised human upon?

I certainly had very little.

Many years ago, when mastery still seemed to belong somewhere ahead of me, I assumed it would feel different. How could I not? There was no familiar human template against which to measure something I had never experienced.

I had long since abandoned the more colourful notions of enlightenment – floating three inches above the ground, wings intact, while lesser mortals wrestled with parking spaces. Yet some part of me still imagined there would be a discernible shift between the human experience and whatever came after it.

Perhaps that was the assumption.

That something came after it.

Instead, I find myself more human than ever.

I get tired, I become impatient, I still laugh at inappropriate things, I deal with appointments, family, shopping, bureaucracy and the small practical demands that have absolutely no interest in whether I consider myself realised.

Nothing has disappeared.

And yet something has changed.

Life seems to meet me differently.

A door opens when I need it. Someone appears at precisely the moment their particular knowledge or kindness is useful.

And increasingly, I notice that people want to assist me.

Sometimes I become aware of their demeanour altering during an interaction. What begins as routine becomes something else. They become interested. They look for another possibility, make an extra phone call, offer information I hadn’t thought to ask for, or simply engage with me differently.

And I am affected by it.

Sometimes I find myself quietly overwhelmed by the speed and willingness with which someone steps forward to help. Not great blubbery tears, but a deep breath and a moment of simply feeling, how very kind and gracious of you.

Perhaps that surprises me as much as anything.

The old expectation of having to battle an establishment seems to have disappeared. The establishment itself certainly hasn’t. There is still bureaucracy, still absurdity, and still plenty I could say about systems that appear to have misplaced the human beings they were created to serve.

That is another story.

But somehow, within those same systems, I keep meeting people.

And people keep helping me.

I don’t expect it or try to create it.

It simply happens.

Something I had been told to expect would be difficult resolves with surprisingly little effort. A conversation happens. A delay turns out to have served something I could not, in truth, have bothered to anticipate because of a core belief I now live by:

What I need will be there when I need it.

That belief changes the way I experience reality.

It doesn’t mean I sit around waiting for life to do everything for me. I make the phone call. I fill in the form. I turn up. I ask the question. I do whatever the human situation requires.

Although recently, even the phone call became negotiable.

For a time I lost my voice through ill health. There were things that still needed to be arranged, people I needed to contact and questions I needed answered, so I wrote instead.

And people responded.

Perhaps that is part of what I mean by ease. Not that the obstacle disappears, but that I no longer assume there is only one way through it.

I no longer feel the same need to determine in advance how everything must unfold.

I allow reality room to respond.

None of this requires me to declare that the universe is arranging itself on my behalf.

I have become rather wary of declarations.

I simply notice.

There is an ease in things that was not always there.

Not ease as in everything is easy. Human life remains magnificently capable of making a complete mess of the afternoon.

Ease as in the absence of so much pushing.

Grace does not require ceremony.

And strangely, the longer I embody my mastery, the less interested I am in transcending the human experience.

I want to feel it because, as a realm walker, I suspect I avoided a lot.

Now I am present in it, and I laugh a lot, even amongst the exhaustion.

Supermarkets and shopping centres have become places of interest to me. After many years of seclusion, I find people remarkably kind.

What might once have been considered “oh wow” moments are now, of course, simply moments.

I treasure them, but I no longer need to hold onto them.

The hand opens.

At present I am caring for my elderly mother, far from my own sheltered environment, sleeping on a blow-up mattress on the floor of her one-bedroom bedsit.

There is nothing particularly transcendent about a blow-up mattress.

And perhaps that is the point.

There is the tenderness and irritation. The absurdity. The tiredness. The kindness. The peculiar intimacy of caring for another person. The moment when something hurts and I don’t need to make it spiritually meaningful before allowing it to hurt.

I am not above any of it.

I am here for it.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter surprises of embodied mastery.

It does not remove the human face.

It reveals it.

— Saint Parousia