Finding Currentcy, by Accident

2026

I've been sitting on this for twenty years. Not because I doubted it. Because I wasn't sure anyone needed to hear it from me.

What I can only describe as an awakening arrived while I was standing on the downtown platform of the 2nd Avenue subway station. I was meditating on nothingness, something I did then and still do, thinking about how the universe is expanding into nothingness, and I entered a trance-like state. I disappeared within myself, but there wasn’t any activity. When I came back I didn't immediately recognize my surroundings. The colors of the tiles, the concrete, the metal beams weren't how I remembered them. I wasn't confused. I was unsure. Like someone had adjusted everything by two degrees while I was gone.

I didn't rejoice. I had realized a truth I couldn't un-realize. A truth I hadn't been looking for. That part didn't matter anymore.

——

I questioned it immediately. It didn't match the story I knew…the trials of Siddhartha, the formulas from yoga and mindfulness classes, the documentaries. I felt unworthy of whatever had happened. So I kept it to myself and kept living.

What I'd realized, standing there trembling from the inside, was that the person I thought I was isn't really the true me. I know how that sounds. I grew up in western culture, where the individual self is the whole project. It's hard to reconcile. I'm still reconciling it.

I think accidental awakenings are more common than we let on. There's no bestseller category for them. No formula. They just arrive, uninvited, on a subway platform, and then you have to figure out what to do with the rest of your life.

——

The awakening itself: a wholly encompassing nothingness, without limits or constraints. It surrounded me like a heavy cloud folded around my body. I lost sight, hearing, sensation. It wasn't scary. It just was. I don't know how long I stood there — not longer than fifteen minutes. Time had stopped.

When I came back I spoke to myself. I said, now you know. Then I opened my eyes, though I'm fairly sure they were already open.

I manage it like an addiction. It calls to me. I moderate it. I'm not ready for everything it uncovers.

——

I don't talk about it much. During the summer, twenty years ago, a neighbor at a block party remarked that I was the calmest person he'd ever met and asked what my secret was. I told him, probably too bluntly, that life was simply about nothing and that this realization had freed me from a certain kind of worrying. He couldn't fathom it. No heaven? he asked. No, I said. This is it. We make our own meaning. Life is a gift, a ball of clay. He laughed nervously and the conversation faded. I'm not a preacher. It's not my goal to give anyone anxiety about their own life.

My daughter calls me a calm-crazy person. That's about right.

——

I look for hints of it in other people. Shortly after he died I read an interview with Harry Dean Stanton. He said:

The void, the concept of nothingness, is terrifying to most people on the planet. And I get anxiety attacks myself. I know the fear of that void. You have to learn to die before you die. You give up, surrender to the void, to nothingness.

That's the closest anyone has come to describing the direction my awakening pointed. I wasn't alone. I just hadn't known where to look.

Stephen Hawking, asked what existed before the Big Bang, said simply: nothing. Ecclesiastes said it differently: from dust to dust. The answer keeps arriving from different directions. Physics. Scripture. A character actor from Texas. A subway platform on 2nd Avenue.

——

Each day I try to see the world through what I call Currentcy:  the practice of reading the energy underneath things, seeing the big picture or the very small picture, removed as much as possible from the filter of self. I fail at this regularly. I get irritable, grouchy, caught in the net of things like everyone else. I've had bouts of anxiety, depression, lived with hyperactivity. The awakening didn't fix any of that.

What it gave me was something harder to name. A low frequency hum underneath everything. A sense that the waves keep coming whether or not I'm watching, whether or not I'm ready, whether or not I understand what's making them.

I find solace in moments, in patches of time. I seek them like friends. They feel timeless — from before time existed. From before anything existed.

That's where I go when I need to remember what's actually happening underneath what appears to be happening.

I'm just some person it happened to. I'm not sure that's the point. I'm not sure the point is mine to determine.