The Writings of Robin Woodsworth Carlsen: Part 4 The Sunnyside Drama: The First Three Years of Enlightenment

At the request of some TMFree readers, this is the fourth in a series of eight essays on Robin Woodsworth Carlsen.
This series is provided with permission of their anonymous author.

We at TMFree do not ascribe to Carlsen's 'teachings.' This series is provided for those who wish to review philosophies of Robin Woodsworth Carlsen. Carlsen was one of many Maharishi TM-spinoff gurus.

Part one of this series can be read here. You may then read and follow links through the posted series.


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The Writings of Robin Woodsworth Carlsen: Part 4
"The Sunnyside Drama: The First Three Years of Enlightenment"



Having realized the "summum bonum" of TM, Unity Consciousness, Carlsen returns to his hotel in Switzerland. He then realizes that stress at the level of the nervous system constitutes an intelligent opposition to the force of enlightenment: the demonic, holding the individual in their own "self-definition", God's very resistance to himself.

The Maharishi, arriving later, verifies Carlsen's state of Unity and his status as the first true Governor of the Age of Enlightenment.

Other than His Holiness Bevan Morris and pedophile "Unity Andy", Carlsen is the only other person ever verified by the Maharishi as being "enlightened".

(Many thanks to former students of Carlsen who've been very helpful in these reviews and who all wish to remain anonymous)

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[Excerpts from The Sunnyside Drama: The First Three Years of Enlightenment © Robin Woodsworth Carlsen, 1979, ISBN 09-20910-03-3]

As we reached the hotel, I continued to inspire William with the ongoing reality of my Enlightenment, describing the details of this extraordinary yet infinitely simple, normal way of functioning. And this was such a fundamental truth I became aware of: that Enlightenment was not so much a supernormal state of existence, but was the most normal state imaginable; nothing could be as simple, as plain, as ordinary as Being. Ignorance--the condition of an ego hallucinating itself out of the experience of Being--that was the exceptional feat. As I entered the hotel, however, I became aware as never before, of just what ignorance was. The explanation for the abnormality of ignorance lay in the personal forms of stress and negativity that circled about the rooms of the hotel, and which--more shockingly--embedded themselves in the consciousness and hearts of each of the people I saw. I was given this vision quite suddenly and while being prepared for it by the immovable reality of my being, I was unprepared on the level of expectation. Nothing Maharishi had said, or I had read about, revealed the real basis of ignorance. That basis was clearly visible to me now: anti-divine or demonic entities that subtly were infused within the personalities of each person in ignorance, tenaciously holding each individual within a self-definition, within a sensation of egohood that was powerful enough to confine infinity into the narrowest boundaries, and deprive those boundaries of the experience of their own infinity.

While seeing all this revealed before me, I also experienced the necessity at this time of not discussing this reality with others, and, as I again walked up to my room to be joined by a number of other teachers who had quickly learned of the event of my awakening, the force and intensity of the vision of the demonic diminished to a point that I was able once again to focus on the more obvious facts of enlivening the hearts and expanding the consciousness of those around me. And that is a significant fact: I soon discovered that my effectiveness as an Enlightened individual lay not so much in the reality of my infinite status on the level of Being, but in my deft ability to take on the form, to manifest the response that exactly accorded with the demands for the individuation of the individual or individuals I was with. Instead of remaining as detached on the level of my actions as I was on the level of my consciousness, I became intricately involved with the details of the drama around me and found myself able to maneuvre in the world of ignorance with an agility, a creativity I could never have begun to approach while I was still caught in the boundaries of separateness.

Before awakening to the reality of Being, I had heard stories of various individuals who had been in the state of Unity and then fallen back into ignorance. Such a situation was entirely impossible, as it was absolutely obvious once Being became aware of itself it was not possible to pretend again it was other than itself. Being had found out Being; there could no longer be any deception; the illusion of individuality was a dream. The waking up was forever; one could not dream oneself out of that eternal wakefulness. And so my appreciation for what had happened to me on September 19th at 1:25 PM grew as the days unfolded. On the sixth day after my Enlightenment, my Master, Maharishi, arrived at the hotel to meet with us in the evening. The impulse had come to speak privately with him, but I learned he wished for me to describe my experience to the whole assembly. (The reasons for my not talking to Maharishi alone were to become apparent as the drama of my Enlightenment unfolded once I returned to Canada; for now it was interesting to see how another Enlightened individual responded to the pure computations of my wholeness.)

The evening Maharishi came I was of course filled to the brim with Being, and the radiance of my presence was obvious to all those around me. Once Maharishi had spoken and asked if there were questions, I put my hand up, and watched as Maharishi purposely ignored me until the perfect moment--which happened to be the moment when he was just about to stand up and leave. Throughout the whole evening during his talk to us and in his answers to the questions posed by the other teachers, I sensed how every word, every topic, each piece of knowledge he gave out was directed to me, conferring as it did the most exquisite subtlety of feeling that seemed on some level of my being to warm me in the fullness of how I was to fit into God's Creation, what the full meaning of my Enlightenment was. This amounted to what in Sanskrit is called "Mahavakya"--the stroke of knowledge of the Master which is traditionally associated with the stabilizing of the state of Unity. But it was when I spoke to Maharishi about Unity--he had coincidentally been discussing Unity for the duration of his talk--even declaring that henceforth cosmic consciousness and God-consciousness were now obsolete, from now on we were only to think of Unity--it was at the point of my uttering the words "About six days ago, Maharishi, I awoke from the spell of ignorance, and I have been living the simple life of Unity ever since" that I received the full grace of the Master, the grace seemingly beyond the grace of Unity, for at that instant as Maharishi turned towards me I experienced a vitalization of love in every cell of my Being that I knew had come from the secret power of the Master, specifically this Master, and as Maharishi responded "Congratulations, you are the first governor of the Age of Enlightenment, we'll talk about it later when the cameras are here" (several days later), I knew then the intimate link I would have with Maharishi and that Maharishi himself had been on that mountain with me, had indeed been subtly collaborating in the whole saga of my Becoming right from the moment I first saw him in front of thousands of people in Kingston, Ontario, five years before.

I left the meeting hall with a carnation given to me by a jubilant teacher who joined in with a number of other individuals to express their joy that the reality of Unity was now embodied in someone other than just Maharishi, someone who was merely a meditator and teacher like themselves.

The next day Maharishi announced the beginning of a new phase of his teaching: the Sidhis, the special formulas devised to push wholeness into each aspect of the physiology. After several days of experiencing the many flavours of wholeness made available by the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (the basis of the Sidhis)--I experienced the relative parts of me, the parts now governed by the infinity of pure consciousness--undergo a subtle but nevertheless significant change. My Enlightenment--my awakening into the wholeness of Being--was complete at the moment on the Alps when "the last stress" (what I now know as the demonic entity) was released; however, in practising the Sidhis, a level of purification took place that appeared to make whatever was still experiencing itself as Robin, even more unified with God. I can express it this way: it was as if the balance between God within me and God without was perfect at the moment of Enlightenment, and yet somewhere the oneness became more one, so that now the wholeness of myself perceived itself, and the wholeness of the environment was the wholeness that was perceiving itself. Maharishi had talked about "leshavidya", the remains of ignorance; here was the evidence that it was still possible to experience a level of refinement even after one was completely liberated. For me it was as if the molecules of myself which now beheld God had been so purified that a totality of change had taken place on the level of my perception such that those molecules were now closer to the quality of the Beingness which they had become--the structure of the nervous system had surrendered itself to the reality of what had created it. The I of ignorance had been a fiction but that fiction had left a faint impression on the fact of my Beingness. The Sidhis removed a significant layer of that impression, changing not the fundamental reality of the unmanifestness that I had become, but having induced a shift in the play of relationship between what was now manifesting as Robin out of that unmanifestness. The unmanifestness was playing within and on both sides of what still had to appear as manifest within the illusion of Creation.

It is hard to imagine levels of Enlightenment, since, in the most profound sense, once the false boundaries of egohood dissolve, and one is in the deathless unboundedness of Being, one cannot become more deathless, more unbounded than Being; however having become one with that infinite ocean of consciousness, one is now able to be used and refined by that consciousness, the element of separateness, of unnatural interference, the false ego (created by the entity of anti-Being) now having disappeared. And this was my experience: the wholeness of myself perceiving the wholeness of the object, all in the wholeness of Being, now seemed one wholeness, and, as it happened I was able to describe my experience to Maharishi on camera.

I approached the microphone, this time standing right beside the couch upon which Maharishi sat cross-legged, and began my description of the change that had taken place since I last had announced to him my awakening into Unity. As the words flowed out Maharishi responded with warmth and joviality, smiling, laughing, then listening in rapt silence as I distinguished between the fragility of Unity--the delicacy and quietness my nervous system and personality felt in relation to this new dimension of wholeness--and the robustness of a warrior. I also added how utterly natural and normal the whole experience of Unity and "Unity plus" (the name I coined to categorize my recent experience) seemed, and, being played as I was for the benefit of the whole group as well as within the special relationship that exists between the enlightened disciple and his Master, I asked "Where am I now, Maharishi?" The reply "Oh, somewhere within the layers of wholeness" conveyed with the utter blessing and confirmational tone that would satisfy the most doubtful person in the audience that I was indeed established in God. (Maharishi several months later added the word "established" in answer to a question regarding my status.) As I left the microphone I felt the pure connection he continued to have with my heart and mind, how he was, for the remainder of the course, to devote his subtle attention to educating me in the secrets of my role as an Enlightened being. The manner in which he had uttered those final words to me--"Somewhere within the layers of wholeness"--was as a divine father anointing his most beloved son, and I sensed then the destiny of Maharishi had reached a level of fulfillment in the Enlightenment of myself.

[Part 5 introduces excerpts from "Letters from an Enlightenment Man."]