*
“What is burning? The world is burning. The trees are burning. The rivers are burning. The people are burning. Everything is aflame.”
*
I begin my days, as you know, with prayers and meditation. I wake from sleep, take a piss, make a cup of coffee in the dark, go as silently as possible out to the lair. I open my big plastic bin that holds all my meditation crap, my cushion and blanket and my pouch for my malas, my Sadhana texts, incense, lighter, little cloths I use for sliding my hands during prostrations, I open that up and set my cushion down in front of the altar, lay out the wool blanket, take out the lighter and incense and go kneel in front of the altar, light a candle, light the incense, bow, sit down. Arrange the blanket around me, set the coffee cup in front of me, begin.
The transition from the dream world to waking life is much more fluid than it used to be for me. Waking up is now more like a continuation of dreamtime. It’s still dark and silent and my mind is in that kind of dreamlike state before the world starts up. This effect is exacerbated by my dream yoga practice. It feels to me like I shift from one dream to another. During the coffee making and setting up time I come close to breaking through into “normal” waking, but as soon as I sit down then that hyper-clarity of the meditative mindset arises and I’m in a state somewhat different from what used to be “normal.”
There is a richness in practice that is difficult to describe, or even to understand. How something so simple, so empty of “doing” can open the door to, well, everything. Being new to practice and not understanding much, I’m at the point where I tend to get kind of astounded and worked up about what’s going on. I have these rich and powerful experiences and I get caught up in them, captured by them to a large extent, and it can be difficult to maintain my equanimity. It’s relatively easy for me to not follow the negative emotions and experiences, it’s relatively easy for me to recognize them as the reflexive churning of the mind and let them go, come back to the breath, bring my attention back to the moment. But when the moment gets all luminous and clear, blazing with powerful emotions of bliss and peacefulness and love, I tend to run after that. I tend to think that something wonderful is happening to me.
And this is where grasping and clinging can arise and kind of corrupt practice. I know intellectually that I shouldn’t grasp, should see these experiences as just as empty as anything else that arises, but it’s very easy for me to want to make them solid and “real” because they are so much what I was seeking when I first entered the path.
And this is just one of the experiences you can have on the path. There are many, many mistakes to be made as we learn. And luckily we have the instructions handed down from all of those who have gone before, made the same mistakes. We can refer back to the instructions for guidance and go back and sit some more and learn to make a new set of mistakes. Mistakes that you couldn’t even make before because you didn’t know enough to make them. And really, it isn’t exactly correct for me to refer to them as mistakes, they aren’t that at all. But there’s this constant process of fine-tuning, of going off a little bit in one direction, correcting, drifting the other way, correcting. There’s a lot involved in doing absolutely nothing.
The whole endeavor makes me very happy. The better my awareness gets, the more I can see my habitual patterns in action, the less I’m interested in protecting my ego, the more I want to just keep dissolving everything I’ve built up over the years. I believe that there is a way to do just that and I’m committed to doing it.
I love this path. I love my teachers and my fellow practitioners and everyone else, too. I feel as though I have fallen into a way of being that reflects my true nature, that is in harmony with how things really are, and the rewards are astounding.
And empty, yes- that too.
*
Lately I’ve been having the experience of the universe conspiring to give me exactly what I need exactly when I ask for it. Like the world’s most perfect English butler, silent, invisible, ever at my elbow, putting a needed book in my hand, introducing to me someone, opening a door, pressing my suit, shining my shoes, whispering the name of the person approaching me, putting a cool cloth on my forehead when I get overheated.
It’s an interesting experience.
Also, my family. As if everyone suddenly burst into flame, flowered, opened up, unfolded, got born into wild happiness. Marriage plans afoot. Babies and dogs under foot. Everywhere you look someone is smiling at you, in love. Ease and comfort, hard joy, blissful craziness, happy despair and longing, everything all the time.
A goddamn miracle of love is what.
*
Also, swimming in a sea of devotion. Exactly like the deepest, most powerful and vast ocean, profoundly impersonal, wind-swept, shocking in its scale and limitless seeming scope, absolutely overwhelming. Not something to reject or accept, really, it seems too vast for that. I could shut up and swim, but I don’t know that there’s anywhere to go and it feels like maybe its better to just lie on my back, float, and look up at the sky.
Devotion. Compassion. Wisdom. Awareness.
A strange county to enter after fifty years of wandering the deserts of loneliness, self-hatred, rage, despair, anxiety, bitterness, boredom, itchiness, ignorance, plain meanness and generalized angst.
*
May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering.
*
Namaste.
***
This probably has nothing to do with anything but I am reading a book right now (Silver Linings Playbook, to be exact) and in it, the guy is doing a sort of practice of his own and one thing he keeps saying is that he would rather be kind than to be right and this is something I’ve been doing sort of unconsciously for awhile, especially in my marriage but it’s just been happening and to read that, those words, really struck me. What the hell does “being right” even mean? Kindness is a lot more at hand and easy.
Isn’t it funny how we can go through life and think we really have a handle on it all and then BOOM! some pocket of truth gets burst open and it all spills out and what it makes me realize is that there are untold pockets of truth.
Also, one more thing- whenever I talk to parents who are going through hard times with their kids for one reason or another I just say, “Keep loving them. That’s all you can do.”
I think that’s a truth. I think you and Ms. Yolie have proved that one.
I really think you’re on to something with that idea of “untold pockets of truth”, something that I believe is built in to the structure of “reality” itself. Always there will remain the undiscovered country, that, once stumbled upon, opens the door to a completely new understanding of things- one that is also wrong.
or at least incomplete.
and this just keeps being how it is.
which is, you know, just wonderful, just fantastic I think.
You are a walking around, visible, in the flesh saint. The fact that you’d poo-poo me saying it only confirms my stance.
yrs-
Scott
It’s wonderful to read these missives from your present state of consciousness.
Thanks for saying that. I feel more than a little self-conscious about these posts, so hearing back that you get something out of them is helpful for me in deciding what direction this whole thing is headed. To keep going or not.
So thanks!
OMG, please keep going, don’t stop! I have been seeking and intellectually wrestling with these truths for literally years, like since I was a barely-teen and now I am almost old and it is finally, for brief moments, beginning to penetrate my thick skin of “intellect” and “thought,” the deeper knowing of these things. I am actually, for the first time in a lifetime of grief, rage and bitterness, beginning to see my pattern, the endless crap-factory that is my mind, the way my precious thoughts play with my emotions, the way I can simply choose to go a different way.
When you say “May you be happy, may you be at peace, may you be free from suffering,” believe me, that intention has a destination, an effect in my being.
-invisigal
Thanks, Invisigal!
I’m so happy that you are starting to see your own pattern at work and seeing how you actually can choose a different way going forward- that’s a huge gift.
I’m happy to know that you’re getting something from these posts, too, that’s helpful for me to know.
And, yeah, may you really, truly be happy!
yrs-
Scott
Beautiful! That sea, the ocean…
beautiful it is, and an ocean I never knew existed!
we are so blessed.
hope you are well and happy and that your practice is rich and sustaining.
yrs-
Scott
Q: What burns but doesn’t burn?
A: The inside of Rebecca’s head.
ps. More than one answer the best kind of riddle.
xoxox
Your head is radiant with light and heat, it makes sense that it kind of hurts sometimes.
Sending good thoughts your way, always.
I came here from not sure where and read this post and thought, yes, this is what I’m looking for, what I’ve been looking for but I’m too messed up, too old to get there and then I read this paragraph,
“A strange county to enter after fifty years of wandering the deserts of loneliness, self-hatred, rage, despair, anxiety, bitterness, boredom, itchiness, ignorance, plain meanness and generalized angst.”
and realized I’m not too old, not too messed up. I’ve spent a life being angry and I want to let go of that anger and apparently it’s possible and apparently the universe does give you what you need, when you need it. Thank you.
Deb-
Welcome! I’m glad you found your way here and that you found something that speaks to you, that gives you some hope and some sense that things really can get better.
I think you are right that it isn’t too late for you. I think that real and lasting happiness is possible, if that’s what you want.
I hope that you find the universe giving you just what you need. You have your eyes open and that’s the real key right there, watch what is happening and you’ll see it without fail.
If I can ever be of any help, I hope you will reach out to me. I’m at tearfuldishwasher@gmail.com.
Namaste,
Scott
You give me so much to think about and I’m so grateful for it. Yes, let me echo it, please keep sharing. No need to feel self conscious about any of it. We need to read what you write. I sure do.
Thanks, Angella. I get tangled up about it from time to time, but I’m afraid I enjoy this place, this process, the friendships and connections far too much to stay away from it for long. With people like you here I’d be nuts to ever leave.
We all need each other, is what.
yrs-
Scott