The Golden Moment 3
There comes a point in our mindfulness journey when something remarkable begins to show up. For many of us, that journey began not with a search for wisdom but with suffering. We were looking for relief from stress, anxiety, grief, trauma or the countless other challenges that life inevitably brings.
As our mindfulness practice deepens, however, our relationship with experience begins to change. Then, sometimes unexpectedly, we find ourselves crossing what I think of as the wisdom threshold. Not because we have suddenly become wise, but because we are developing a new capacity for mindful presence in complexity. It’s here that the training wheels begin to come off. It is here that Golden Moments begin to emerge. We don’t arrive somewhere new so much as begin seeing the same world with greater breadth, clarity and nuance. As our perception becomes richer, a much clearer sense of how everything fits together naturally begins to emerge.
The Golden Moment is a manifestation of choiceless awareness, sometimes called open awareness. Open awareness is acknowledged both by Buddhists and leading secular mindfulness practitioners such as Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mark Williams. In many Buddhist traditions, one-pointed concentration gradually matures into open awareness. Rather than becoming distracted as our attention widens, we become increasingly able to remain fully present with whatever enters awareness. We can watch the mind as different objects come into awareness—thoughts, sounds, body sensations, emotions, visual input and more—without becoming stuck on any one of them.
Open awareness is a beautiful place to find ourselves. It is associated with a sense of calm, presence and even joy, regardless of whether what enters our awareness is a beautiful sunset or a memory of trauma. This is not a disconnect but the opposite. It is a deep connection with our experience, but experienced in a radically different way from our usual way of being.
At this point, open awareness may sound like something reserved for highly accomplished meditators or the almost enlightened. In reality, however, most of us have already had a taste of it through experiences of awe.
We experience awe when we encounter a magnificent natural phenomenon like a forest waterfall or an ocean sunset, or when we are deeply moved by a piece of art or music.
Awe is not the same as open awareness or a Golden Moment, but it shares many of their qualities and gives us a glimpse of what they can feel like.
When we experience awe, or find ourselves in a Golden Moment, time seems to fall away and the usual barriers between ourselves and the world begin to soften. Our perception feels less interrupted by the mental static that normally fills our minds. Many of these qualities were beautifully described by the first astronauts who looked back at our fragile blue planet from space. They spoke of an overwhelming sense of unity, perspective and connection. We feel at one with our experience while, at the same time, clearly remaining an observer. That is one of the paradoxes shared by both awe and the Golden Moment.
When we experience a Golden Moment in our everyday lives, our openness allows insights to emerge that often feel surprisingly complete. It is as though our usual habits of thinking temporarily go offline, allowing a deeper intelligence to make itself heard. If we are genuinely experiencing a Golden Moment, these insights often surprise us because they are quite different from our usual ways of understanding ourselves, other people or the situations we face.
We don’t experience the Golden Moment by chasing it. It’s rather like trying to catch a soap bubble. The harder we grasp, the more likely it is to disappear.
Instead, we cultivate the conditions in which it is more likely to arise. We gradually develop attentional stability. We learn to remain present with our experience. We become increasingly open, curious and grounded in reality. Then, one day, often when we least expect it, something shifts.
Curiously, we don’t often recognise the Golden Moment while it is happening. We are simply too immersed in the experience. It is only afterwards, when we reflect on what unfolded, that we realise we responded with an unusual clarity, creativity or compassion. Looking back, we sometimes find ourselves wondering, “Where on earth did that come from?” Something within us reorganised itself. We are not quite the same person we were a few moments earlier.
When these moments begin appearing more regularly, we can become a bit like an adolescent experiencing the surge of sex hormones. A new world opens up to us and we feel both confused and powerful. We suddenly discover capacities that weren’t available to us before, yet we have not fully developed the wisdom to use them well. Like adolescents, we may feel as though we have discovered profound truths about ourselves and the world, only to realise later that our enthusiasm sometimes exceeded our judgement. Most of us can probably remember a few moments we’d now prefer hadn’t been accompanied by quite so much absolute certainty.
This experience can deepen our everyday mindfulness substantially. It invites us into a richer relationship with ourselves, with other people and with life itself. However, if we grasp at it, we can become inflated and delusional, mistaking random fantasies for special insights. Just as adolescence can produce both extraordinary creativity and spectacular mistakes, the Golden Moment can become either the beginning of genuine wisdom or the beginning of self-deception. Which path we follow depends less on the experience itself than on how we relate to it afterwards.
Ironically, the very experiences that can deepen wisdom can also inflate the ego. Unfortunately, profound insight and mature judgement don’t always arrive on the same day.
Throughout history, highly accomplished meditation practitioners and spiritual teachers have sometimes displayed remarkably poor judgement in other parts of their lives. Tibetan teacher Sogyal Rinpoche inspired many Westerners, yet he also abused them physically and sexually. Rajneesh likewise attracted devoted followers while fostering a community that promoted dangerous misinformation about AIDS.
I have also seen similar tendencies emerge in some Western consciousness-based approaches, including Family Constellations and, at times, therapies involving psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and MDMA. None of this diminishes the value of these approaches or the profound experiences they can sometimes evoke. It simply reminds us that profound experiences should never be mistaken for profound maturity.
For open awareness and the Golden Moment to remain not only inspiring but genuinely helpful, they must remain grounded in reality. That is why, in Mindful Representations, we place such a strong emphasis on respecting the facts.
The Golden Moment opens us to experience in powerful ways, but it does not make us immune to the powerful influence of our emotional lives. Quite the opposite. If we become captivated by feelings of joy, excitement or power, or if we spend our lives trying to avoid fear, shame or vulnerability, our perception gradually becomes distorted. We stop seeing things as they are and begin seeing them as we want—or fear—them to be. Learning to understand and process our emotions is therefore not separate from developing wisdom. It is one of its essential foundations.
Fortunately, the open awareness that accompanies the Golden Moment allows us to develop profound emotional intelligence when it is combined with critical reflection. As part of this process, we learn to recognise and sidestep performative humility, gradually replacing it with a more authentic humility.
Open awareness gradually becomes woven into everyday life. The extraordinary begins revealing itself in places we once walked straight past.
The Golden Moment still arrives unexpectedly, but over time we become better at recognising the conditions in which it emerges, trusting what it has to reveal and integrating its lessons wisely into everyday life. We no longer grasp at it, inflate it or fear losing it. Instead, we learn to meet it with openness, authentic humility and a deep respect for the facts.
Perhaps this is what adult mindfulness looks like.
The Golden Moment trilogy
Explore related ideas
- Mindful Presence in Complexity
- Wisdom Beyond False Certainty – A Sufi Story About Wisdom, Curiosity and Critical Thinking
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