The children’s nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty is a good metaphor for how the illusion of the self is shattered and one wakes up to nondual awareness. One might call it the parable of Humpty Dumpty. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.” That in a nutshell – or more accurately an eggshell - is the story of spiritual awakening. It is the story of the end of the self.
The children’s nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty is a good metaphor for how the illusion of the self is shattered and one wakes up to nondual awareness. One might call it the parable of Humpty Dumpty. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.” That in a nutshell – or more accurately an eggshell - is the story of spiritual awakening. It is the story of the end of the self.
Occasionally I am interviewed as a guest on a podcast, a YouTube channel or live on a radio show. Early in the interview I am usually asked to describe my spiritual experience of nondual awareness, especially how it came about. Consequently I have told the story many times. I have told it in my books and on this podcast and YouTube channel. After the last interview I did I was thinking about how I could cut out the personal details and cut right to the heart of the matter.
What came to my mind was the children’s nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty. It is a good metaphor for human life. It is the story of my life. One might call it the parable of Humpty Dumpty. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.” That in a nutshell – or more accurately an eggshell - is the story of my life. It is the story of the end of the self. Let me explain.
When I tell the story of spiritual awakening into nondual awareness, I always say that it happened in three distinct experiences, each twenty years apart. The whole process took forty years, which I would not recommend. It is a long time, and it is unnecessary. Nondual awareness is right here now. No time is needed to know it.
But for me it took 40 years to realize that. Forty happens to be a symbolic number in the Bible. Forty days of rain during Noah’s flood. Forty years in the wilderness for the people of Israel. Forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness after his baptism. Forty days of Lent in the Christian calendar. It took forty years from my first encounter with the Mystery of Holiness that we call God to when that Mystery became the present conscious reality of my life.
This is where Humpty Dumpty comes in. In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, he is described as an egg, which is important for the metaphor. Without getting into the personal details, the first time when I became conscious of what Rudolf Otto calls the Mysterium Tremendum the shell of my self was fractured. I told my girlfriend who was present at the time – now my wife of 48 years – that it felt like God barely brushed me with the tip of his finger, but it was enough to do me in. I was “undone” to use Isaiah’s phrase.
The shell of the self cracked that night, and it never healed – thank God! When I am buying eggs at the grocery store I always open up the carton to see if there are any tiny cracks. An egg may not be broken completely. The membrane underneath may still intact but the structure of the shell has lost its integrity. So I move on to another carton of eggs. The self is like a shell, and my self cracked that night in 1973.
The second time was about twenty years later. Once again without getting into autobiographical details, that second time the shell of the self was completely shattered. If the first occasion was a single hairline crack in the shell, this time the whole shell was shattered all over. At the time I described it to my spiritual director as feeling like I was falling in an abyss. Now I would liken it to Humpty Dumpty falling off a wall.
If you have ever peeled a hard-boiled egg, you know what it looks like when you shatter the whole surface of the egg before you start peeling the shell away. That is what happened to me in 1993. The shell of the self was shattered completely. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty back together again.
Believe me I tried to put it back together! Instead of embracing the loss of the self and exploring no-self, I was scared and I tried to put the pieces of the self back together again. Instead of accepting the death of the self, and moving on to a resurrection awareness, I tried to pick up the pieces of my shattered self the best I could and carry on.
I retreated back into evangelicalism, which felt safe. I covered the shattered shell of the self with the clothing of evangelical Christianity and pretended I was whole once again. I decorated the shell in Christian colors, just like one would decorate an Easter egg. I thought in doing this that it would keep me safe together in one piece. But of course it didn’t. The shell of the self was damaged beyond repair.
That stage lasted another twenty years until 2012. This third time was a final falling away of the shell and the unveiling of what I really am. Three is also a very symbolic number in the Bible. Everything is confirmed in threes in the Christian Bible. An event was confirmed on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Peter denied Christ three times before the crucifixion, and later affirmed Christ three times after the resurrection. Jesus rose on the third day. This third time was the decisive number for me as well.
Once again without the autobiographical details, on this occasion the shattered shell of my individual self fell away permanently. I did not have the energy to put it back together again for it, to be honest. It had taken a lot of effort to keep the self in place, especially when it was in broken pieces for those twenty years. In the couple of years leading up to this third occasion I began to deconstruct my Christianity. It was like I was taking off the individual pieces of the shell of my self piece by piece, until there was too little left to keep it together.
The self fell away completely. But unlike the first two times, this time there was no fear. It was liberating. It was liberation. It was disorienting in a good way. After the fact I realized that there had never been anything to be afraid of in the first place. The self is only a shell. It is not what we really are. We are not an individual separated from everything else, no matter how much we dress the self up in religious or spiritual garb, making it a spiritual self. Then if we are not a self, what are we?
When I was growing up my mother taught me how to make a special type of Easter egg. They were not the typical hard-boiled eggs dyed with colors. She taught my brother and sister and me to puncture a tiny hole in each end of a raw egg and then blow into it. If you blow hard enough and long enough all the liquid contents of the egg – both the white and the yolk – would come out of the other hole. The end result was a completely hollow egg. Then we would take a little bit of the egg white to apply to the ends of the egg to seal the tiny holes, leaving a perfectly whole hollow egg, which we would then decorate.
That type of Easter egg is said to symbolize the empty tomb of Jesus on Easter morning. It also is a good symbol of what we really are, which is what the story of the empty tomb represents. When that shell of the self fell away completely on that third occasion, I saw there was nothing inside.
That is what I had glimpsed the first two times and the emptiness scared me to death, but this third time it was a relief. No fear. It was joy and peace. When the shell of the self falls away, we see that what we are on the inside is what is on the outside. When the shell is gone the inside is reunited with the outside to be the one whole spacious fullness that we always were but did not realize.
There is no separate entity inside us. That idea of a self in this body somewhere is a fiction. There is thinking and feeling and perceiving going on, but there is no self doing this. There is only one whole. Not a being but simply Being Itself. That wholeness is what we call God or the Divine or the Holy or whatever religious designation you want to call it. The realization of no-self and the realization of God are the same. They are two aspects of one nondual reality.
The moment of realizing the reconnection of the inside with the outside is reconciliation – reconciling the inside and the outside, the up with the down, heaven with earth, God with humans. This is the literal meaning of atonement, which is at-one-ment. Oneness with God comes about simultaneously with seeing through the illusion of the self, the death of the self, which is what Jesus’ death on the Cross points to.
At that time all the language of Christianity made sense. Not in a dogmatic theological way but an experiential way. With the death of the self we are reborn to what we were before we were born. We are unborn, the eternal, the infinite. We have always been this one Reality. It is just that we had constructed a shell between the inside and the outside, between us and God.
The way to what Jesus calls eternal life is to let go, and fall off the wall like Humpty Dumpty. Let the pieces of the self shatter and fall away, and do not try to put the pieces back together again. That is the meaning of the parable of Humpty Dumpty.