What we are seeking is right here. Transcendence doesn’t come from looking for something that isn’t already present. In other words, we don’t escape from experience. We escape into experience. Into a sound. Into a conversation. Into a simple, mundane thought. Into our lives. Our relationships. Our work. Our path.
With rare and fleeting exceptions, deep practice is unremarkable. It doesn’t dance and shimmer and trip out. Altered states do. But the practitioner is ordinary. The presentation is ordinary. The experience of life is ordinary. The arising and passing of the experience of self is ordinary. Disidentification from emotion is ordinary. Whatever that thing is that you’re expecting, some day you may notice that it’s just another ordinary part of the way things are, and you don’t even remember when you gave up searching for it.