The place in which I was standing can't be described like an earthly location. It was neither dark nor light, neither big nor small. Nor was it a place, nor was I technically standing there, nor was I exactly "I" anymore. I still had my thoughts, but they were so modest, quiet and observatory. Not only did I feel unhesitating compassion and unity with everything and everybody, it was vaguely and amusingly strange for me to wonder how anybody could ever feel anything but that. I also felt mildly charmed by all my old ideas about who I am and what I'm like. I'm a woman, I come from America, I'm talkative, I'm a writer—all this felt so cute and obsolete. Imagine cramming yourself into such a puny box of identity when you could experience your infinitude instead.

I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?"

I don't know how long I hovered in this magnificent ether of union before I had a sudden urgent thought: "I want to hold on to this experience forever!" And that's when I started to tumble out of it. Just those two little words—I want!—and I began to slide back to earth. Then my mind started to really protest—No! I don't want to leave here!—and I slid further still.

I want!

I don't want!

I want!

I don't want!

With each repetition of those desperate thoughts, I could feel myself falling through layer after layer of illusion, like an action-comedy hero crashing through a dozen canvas awnings during his fall from a building. This return of useless longing was bringing me back again into my own small borders, my own mortal confines, my limited comic-strip world. I watched my ego return the way you watch a Polaroid photo develop, instant-by-instant getting clearer—there's the face, there are the lines around the mouth, there are the eyebrows—yes, now it is finished: there is a picture of regular old me. I felt a tremor of panic, mildly heartbroken to have lost this divine experience. But exactly parallel to that panic I could also sense a witness, a wiser and older me, who just shook her head and smiled, knowing this: If I believed that this state of bliss was something that could be taken away from me, then I obviously didn't understand it yet. And therefore, I was not yet ready to inhabit it completely. I would have to practice more. At that moment of realization, that's when God let me go, let me slide through His fingers with this last compassionate, unspoken message:

You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here. Eat, Pray, Love