Just returning from 5 days alone at the humble cabin in the UP, realizing I did not speak to anyone but the trees and bugs for all that time. It is not much in the annals of silence - no Himalayan records were set for living undisturbed on air and sunshine alone - but it was an experience.
It had been some time for this, since last autumn, and the first two days showed it. At one point, waking from an afternoon nap, the difficulty rose suddenly and strongly. It felt as if I were in prison, wasting away my precious time, and I wrote an essay on it in longhand, having no laptop or electrical outlet (odd with that, too - writing longhand changes the perspectives considerably. The essay was much shorter and much more passionate. In my college days, an English professor asked me to start writing my papers on the typewriter to remove the intensity and inject more objectivity. He was right. Our literature, whether we know it or not, has been changed forever by the computer, an even more objective instrument than the typewriter. I'll post the essay after entering it in the computer, either Thursday or Friday).
It turned out to be a revelation: discovering that there was nothing important that I was missing AT ALL. I had experienced this same feeling while doing fieldwork in the tropical forest, even though it was the most significant adventure of my life. We value, see as real and living, the life to which we are accustomed; yet we know that we have to get away from it for some reason. The reason, I think, is that we know that the daily grind is indeed a grind, a formulation of life that makes it easier and more comfortable for the complacent ego, but that misses much of the point of life. The point to living for the human is not simply to live comfortably, if monotonously. It is to explore as deeply as we can the possibilities of our lives. With this understanding, the last few days were excellent. There were the mosquitoes and sand flies and black flies and heat, then rain, then chill. Always changing, always different, the weather showed the way and the reason for exploration.
As did the book I began reading at this time, Runaway Realization by Almaas. What a mind-blower, almost two much for the personal austerity of the cabin. Very heavy, with no relief from his rich and difficult view of reality, it still drew me in. He spoke of the ordinary spiritual realizations, of the astonishment of non-dual reality, and then, more - way more, for there are different modes of the non-dual as well. For instance, there is the more typical experience of timelessness and everything-ness at once, but then there is this experience where there is no recognition of time or non-time at all; and then, where there is no witness at all - pure being, but without being. Pure nothing. It is, says Almaas, where we live at all times but cannot recall it because we live by categories and cannot remember it, even as it is right now. Further, even this is not the end of experience, this experience without experience. Even then, Being is at work at more impossible possibilities.
The upshot is, he says, that life is Being living through us to experience its unlimited creativity; that we are ourselves, but then not - that "our self" is only one way Being experiences itself; and that as Being ( a poor word - Being is beyond being, but hey...) we continue to explore, without end.
It is a fine day outside, sweet smelling and sunny and full of green, and I have lost the touch of the essence of his writing, but on the last night of my stay, it came - as often, in the middle of the night. I was in a fuddle of near panic, one that reminded me of my crazy experimentation with psychedelics in my youth, where the personality and other personalities and all of society revealed themselves as a paper-thin sham, one that we play with while inwardly we are aware of the shallowness. It was in this near panic that it came to me that we truly are nothing, are everything; that we are essentially UNPROTECTED by our normal lives, even as we think we are. We live with our walls of protection, but they are as ephemeral as sea foam.
Now home, this has helped me understand something more about faith. Faith is not just the unquestioned acceptance of a dogma, which many of us are rightly suspicious of. Rather, faith is a way to get beyond protective shells, to open up to what Being requires us to do - to explore. Faith in this way is to accept the rightness of the universe. It is to expunge our fears of loss and pain so that we might explore the potential that we have. It is fearlessness without the bravado.
That night, I felt that the right path necessarily traveled though this dark terror. And I realized later that it is faith in Everything that is necessary to seal the deal, to follow the path, our destiny as humans. To do so is impossible, really, but then again, so are we.
"Freedom is nothing left to lose," says Chris Christopherson through his song (and Janice Joplin), and that is right, but not complete. Freedom is also fearlessness, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. What a 5 days. FK
It had been some time for this, since last autumn, and the first two days showed it. At one point, waking from an afternoon nap, the difficulty rose suddenly and strongly. It felt as if I were in prison, wasting away my precious time, and I wrote an essay on it in longhand, having no laptop or electrical outlet (odd with that, too - writing longhand changes the perspectives considerably. The essay was much shorter and much more passionate. In my college days, an English professor asked me to start writing my papers on the typewriter to remove the intensity and inject more objectivity. He was right. Our literature, whether we know it or not, has been changed forever by the computer, an even more objective instrument than the typewriter. I'll post the essay after entering it in the computer, either Thursday or Friday).
It turned out to be a revelation: discovering that there was nothing important that I was missing AT ALL. I had experienced this same feeling while doing fieldwork in the tropical forest, even though it was the most significant adventure of my life. We value, see as real and living, the life to which we are accustomed; yet we know that we have to get away from it for some reason. The reason, I think, is that we know that the daily grind is indeed a grind, a formulation of life that makes it easier and more comfortable for the complacent ego, but that misses much of the point of life. The point to living for the human is not simply to live comfortably, if monotonously. It is to explore as deeply as we can the possibilities of our lives. With this understanding, the last few days were excellent. There were the mosquitoes and sand flies and black flies and heat, then rain, then chill. Always changing, always different, the weather showed the way and the reason for exploration.
As did the book I began reading at this time, Runaway Realization by Almaas. What a mind-blower, almost two much for the personal austerity of the cabin. Very heavy, with no relief from his rich and difficult view of reality, it still drew me in. He spoke of the ordinary spiritual realizations, of the astonishment of non-dual reality, and then, more - way more, for there are different modes of the non-dual as well. For instance, there is the more typical experience of timelessness and everything-ness at once, but then there is this experience where there is no recognition of time or non-time at all; and then, where there is no witness at all - pure being, but without being. Pure nothing. It is, says Almaas, where we live at all times but cannot recall it because we live by categories and cannot remember it, even as it is right now. Further, even this is not the end of experience, this experience without experience. Even then, Being is at work at more impossible possibilities.
The upshot is, he says, that life is Being living through us to experience its unlimited creativity; that we are ourselves, but then not - that "our self" is only one way Being experiences itself; and that as Being ( a poor word - Being is beyond being, but hey...) we continue to explore, without end.
It is a fine day outside, sweet smelling and sunny and full of green, and I have lost the touch of the essence of his writing, but on the last night of my stay, it came - as often, in the middle of the night. I was in a fuddle of near panic, one that reminded me of my crazy experimentation with psychedelics in my youth, where the personality and other personalities and all of society revealed themselves as a paper-thin sham, one that we play with while inwardly we are aware of the shallowness. It was in this near panic that it came to me that we truly are nothing, are everything; that we are essentially UNPROTECTED by our normal lives, even as we think we are. We live with our walls of protection, but they are as ephemeral as sea foam.
Now home, this has helped me understand something more about faith. Faith is not just the unquestioned acceptance of a dogma, which many of us are rightly suspicious of. Rather, faith is a way to get beyond protective shells, to open up to what Being requires us to do - to explore. Faith in this way is to accept the rightness of the universe. It is to expunge our fears of loss and pain so that we might explore the potential that we have. It is fearlessness without the bravado.
That night, I felt that the right path necessarily traveled though this dark terror. And I realized later that it is faith in Everything that is necessary to seal the deal, to follow the path, our destiny as humans. To do so is impossible, really, but then again, so are we.
"Freedom is nothing left to lose," says Chris Christopherson through his song (and Janice Joplin), and that is right, but not complete. Freedom is also fearlessness, with nothing to lose and everything to gain. What a 5 days. FK
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