I once heard that Bruce Lee knew how to strike a blow that didn't kill all at once. It set up a vibration that lived undetected inside the body, burrowing through some vital organ until the victim dropped dead years later. One November night in Manhattan a dozen years ago, I had an experience that worked its way through my heart and my mind like that blow. In the midst of getting mugged on the streets of Hell's Kitchen, something happened that transformed my sense of my possibilities as a human being, and my sense of connection to the cosmos--and to the divine. The spiritual life, I learned, isn't a metaphor or a remote possibility. It is a reality, a way of being in the world, and it is as full of adventure as anything I could wish for in my ordinary life.

I was pep talking myself past the empty parking lot near Tenth Avenue when three men rushed out at me from the shadows of a gutted tenement across the street.
I heard and felt them pounding toward me in the dark before I saw them, and from their speed and intensity I knew that they were predators. They breezed by me, stopped, wheeled around, and took up stations around me, surrounding me like lions singling out a weak calf.
We stood and stared at each other. Incredibly, I was gripped by an impulse to smile and make friends, to defuse the situation by finding common ground. But within seconds, I realized that I wasn't going to disarm these men by chatting about the wind. Their eyes were as dead as the bashed-out windows in the building across the street. Victims weren't meant to get a grip on eyes like that.

The big guy, the leader, darted behind me and jerked his arm around my throat. I felt his chest heave, and heard the rasp of his breathing. Staring up at the side of his face, I saw a long, shiny scar. It was strange, to be pulled so close, and it may have been the intimacy that caused me to feel a pang of compassion for him, for the wounding that had made the scar. He pulled his arm tighter against my neck. He was pumped-up, panicked, out of his mind.
"Money," he croaked, choking himself on rage. But he was pressing down on some nerve point in my shoulder that paralyzed my arm, and with his arm around my throat I was unable to speak, unable to tell him that I couldn't reach my money.
"Money!"
My vision went black around the edges. I kept flashing on how absurd it was. I couldn't get the money if he wouldn't let me go, but he wouldn't let me go unless I gave him the money.
"Money now!" he repeated like a robot.
My brain started to race, calculating and considering as if it had switched into emergency survival mode. I watched it with detached awe, as if it were a computer, wholly apart from me. Within a few moments, the computer recognized its utter uselessness and crashed, and as it went down I became aware that there was an unusual kind of attention--a light--welling up in the back of my brain.
` It was as if an attention that is always in the background of my awareness was coming to the foreground--as if the clouds of my ordinary thoughts and emotions had parted to reveal the sky. This "sky" attention was an embracing, watchful light that filled my mind and allowed me to see myself just as I was--trapped, gasping, all my thoughts and feelings scared away. It filled up my body too, allowing me to experience myself as a whole.
I'd encountered moments of this attention before, in meditation, but this attention had force and direction. It grew brighter until a stream of dazzling, white light shot out of the top of my head, soaring up until it was thirty or forty feet above me and about ten feet in front of me, where it merged with a greater light that seemed to come down to meet it.
My body relaxed, and the steel arm clamped around my throat loosened its grip a bit.
I realized that I could see myself and my attacker from above. Yet I was still in my body, still rasping and gasping. I could see the top and back of my own head, and his head, and I could see the two wraiths standing on the pavement. I was dangling from a mugger's arm, knees buckling, looking up at the light, and at the same time I was aware of being part that light.
As I looked up at this light, this presence, it seemed to gaze down upon me, embracing me in loving attention. I felt buoyed up, completely supported by a sea of love and light, yet I was aware that I was part of that sea. I felt searched, and I was certain that what was being searched for was some feeling that was unknown to me, buried under all the attributes that made me "Tracy." After a time, the light seemed to stop and then pour through a particular spot. I sensed that the deepest, most hidden corner of my nature was being seen at last. This brought with it an extraordinary sensation of being connected to the cosmos, as if I had been delivered from the prison of my isolation and welcomed to take my place in the living world.

One day years later, while I sat at my kitchen table in Brooklyn looking out the window at the gardens below, the experience with the light blazed back up to the surface of my mind. I suddenly realized that what I had lost over the years was a sense of the scale of my possibilities and of the value of my own experience. I knew that I was capable of moments of a finer attention, yet I thought that "real" transformation--whatever that might be--was something that could be bestowed on me from outside....Now it struck me that the most significant aspect of my experience was the vision that part of of the divine light that had embraced me had come out of me. I had seen that in addition to my ordinary self I was connected in some mysterious way to an unknown luminous Self that was an aspect of the divine, or God, or ultimate Reality. This other Self, it had seemed, was awake and aware in me all the time, even though I was usually completely cut off from it. But I had seen that I could be aware of it, and that awareness hinged on experiencing myself with total openness. I knew that the appearance of the light was a kind of grace, yet something deep in me had innately known how to open up and receive it, and I now realized that transformation was an organic potential, a birthright.

In the months that followed, Jeff and I began to notice more and more accounts of transforming moments, in which people suddenly encounter entirely new visions of themselves and their connection to reality. The conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus, the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, the revelation of the preciousness of life that came to Dostoyevesky as he awaited execution by order of the czar--these moments and many more, throughout history and across cultures, suggested that the capacity for enlightenment is innate....The stories of transformation that we encoutnered came to seem like evidence of a secret history of awakening, a threading through the history of human life.

INDEX