Imagine you’ve been living in a house, using half a dozen rooms. One day it occurs to you — what if there are more rooms in this house?
On the upstairs landing you realize that what you’d always taken to be a wall was in fact simply a dark area. Beyond it, the corridor extends. Indeed, there are more rooms to this house.
You start exploring them. The light’s different in some of them, and the feel is different. It’s startling to expand your understanding of the house. Having tried many new doors and discovered various new rooms, finally, way down the corridor, most unexpectedly, you find a final door.
Even as you find it, you realize some part of you already knew it existed. But that very part of you, you had long forgotten. Now it takes hold of the handle and turns it and pulls. You don’t know how it happens, but you’re all of a sudden standing not in a different room, but a different world, one filled with dazzling light, vast beyond belief, full of peace, full of love, full of an infinite ease, and an utter fulfilment of every last fiber of your being.
How come you’d forgotten this? How come you’d even forgotten the very part that knew about it?
By analogy with practice, it’s not just that you’ve discovered another zone of consciousness. You’ve discovered what consciousness really is. It’s 10,000 times brighter and vaster than you had ever thought it to be. It’s home. It’s what you’ve always been looking for, yet didn’t even recognize you were looking for. It’s as if every last corner of the universe is fulfilled. How could we ever have missed this?