So often, this conversion experience or enlightenment experience lasts for a period of time. After that, it has changed your life but the old patterns, mental patterns, and the old ways of perception come back, but not exactly as they did before, maybe not as powerfully as they did before. But you’re no longer in that first fervour of conversion as St Benedict calls it. And indeed, maybe it’s similar to the experience of falling in love. When you realise that the falling in love is mutual, there is this explosion of a new way of being and seeing and feeling; and an explosion of energy as well as many of the characteristics of enlightenment could be identified in falling in love.
( Enlightenment by Laurence Freeman OSB )
