@Aphelion

I was raised with many people of deep wisdom. Most not only reverenced nature but had spent much of their life living close to it or wrested their living from the land on ranches or in forests or mines. Their hands were never soft. They rarely spoke. They listened, and you learned to listen in their presence. I’ll tell you of my moment of enlightenment (but be careful, since we have all been told that it can’t be explained). While white water rafting at the age of seventeen, I was flipped and trapped under a waterfall. Despite wet suit and flotation vest, I was pressed hard against the riverbed. I was down long enough to not just realize that I was going to die—and there was nothing I could do about it but for the fact to sink in. I didn’t want to die, but in a second or so I realized that didn’t matter, since once I was dead my identity, including my wish to live, would be obliterated. In a matter of a minute or so, it wouldn’t matter to me. I moved on, then, thinking of my poor friends who would miss me, but in ten years I would just be, at most, a painful memory. In twenty or thirty years, no one would remember me. I didn’t matter. In perhaps a hundred years, no one would remember these friends or my family. They, too, would be obliterated. They didn’t matter. In a thousand years or ten thousand, no one would remember my nation. It, too, would share in oblivion and prove to not matter, to never have mattered. The same for my species, and the earth, the universe, and God.
When the last star winks out, none of it will have mattered—and in ten billion years, I will still be nothing—and equal to God. That was the first stage in my enlightenment: to understand that nothing matters. Hence, everything is equal. Since I was going to die and it didn’t matter, I had the freedom to choose how to die for no other reason than my personal preference: would I prefer to die with calm acceptance or to fight against the inevitable purely for the sake of fighting? I admired fighters, so I fought, and dragged myself across the rocks of the riverbed beyond the undertow, and lived. This is the part that authors have a hard time with—describing the clarity of perception in the moments after satori. You know that you can crush rocks in your hands, run up cliffs. You can hear individual insects under specific rocks on the other side of the valley, colors are clear and so are humans. It is also not important. It’s just kind of cool.

—Rory Miller, Meditations on Violence