Dear Sanga
I’m rebooting this blog.
Shortly after I stopped writing I met my wife, and we started a family.
I already lived a double life if you will, in that I was also interested in Churchianity, as a hope to get external support for my inner experiences, and also, primarily, to feel less lonely. Church at the time and place was disproportionately good. I connected with a few fellow contemplatives, and in many ways got to externalize, or birth, my spiritual life. Been born and raised an atheist, having hardly ever met anyone but atheists, in a 100% secularized country, meeting others was a powerful thing for me at that time. Of little surprise to this congregation it eventually dried up. I had gotten the important connections I needed up front and the rest of it eventually seemed like little more than a sort of day care center.
I started investigating the more hard-core alternatives, such as the orthodox church and certainly thought I got something out of reading the mystics and the church fathers. But I couldn’t, and cannot, bring myself to convert and adapt all that religious behaviour. And I can’t help thinking they don’t teach the real stuff.
I also ended up spending quiet some time in 12-step fellowships, coming from a dysfunctional family and at one point needed to stop over-use of alcohol and cannabis.
I think that both of those adventures in the end was more about loneliness than anything else.
That taken together with the family life I gradually drifted away from my daily meditation practice. I knew when Jhanananda wrote up above that what remains now is keeping it up, that I would not be able to. I don’t know when I stopped. The charisms never left me. The inner silence never ceased. Or, the at least it was always accessible to me.
I think perhaps that I was not done with life. I would look at even some of the worst of my friends, a no-good divorced father comes to mind, and think that although most of his life is one big mistake, he gets to spend time with his son every other weekend. He had someone to love and care for, and live for. I think I put out the intension to the universe that I also wanted to make such mistakes.
And traversing and investigating the religious belongings available to me might seem like a strange step for this sangha, but my first real major break-through experience did have very distinct and intense Christian themes, so I felt obligated to investigate. And the 12-step movement does, supposedly, claim to be about meditation and surrender. And the insight and intuition that follows from what rigorous contemplative practice I had had up to that point, allow me to see the truth in much of the symbol space, and the good ideas behind the form. I thought I could navigate that without falling asleep but I’m not sure I was able to.
When I met my wife she thought I was so pleasant to be around because at that point I was doing an hour, at least, of meditation morning and evening, and was spacing out often during the day as well. I recently read a thread here on the forum about how things turns out serendipitous for the practitioner of Jhana-meditation and so it was for me as well, to her amazement. I realized I needed a job if we were starting a family, and right after a friend came up to me and offered me a job. I wanted a better job, that had some of this and that, and I was offered a job that matched exactly. That last job had the added benefit of bringing me to the US. One of my many reasons for writing now is to reconnect with this forum in the hope of catching a retreat and get to sit with Jhanananda in person one day. I hope it will play out.
The years went by and all my clinging after belonging and religious ritual eventually has plunged me to a state where just reading about my previous accomplishments on this blog is something I both cringe and dread doing.
Just before the big lock-down of COVID my wife was diagnosed with Cancer. A bad one. Our marriage was already not in tip top shape, but this challenge made things way worse. She went through enormous amounts of treatment and suffering and none of us handled it very well. I started over using THC again and eventually all type of inner work faded away and I would cry every night at what had been lost and about my powerlessness to do something about it. I was on the receiving end of much of my wife’s frustrations, especially after having decided to focus on keeping the kids afloat, as I saw that they were not doing great under our circumstances.
At the very bottom I decided to start praying and meditating again, despite the challenging circumstances. As life slowly got less intensely painful, a little bit of maneuvering space allowed me to start the awakening negotiations again, to re-evaluate.
Churchianity had been almost completely useless during this time as they all seem to be stuck in a chess game between various non-fruitful activities and perspectives. But this one time I felt a tug to go to a service. As per usual I sat in the back meditating, when I realize I had been called there because some discarnated (? - no longer living among us) spirits of people was hiding under the church. It was as if there was a portal to the under-world under the benches ahead of me, in the back. A little girl reached out to me and I reached up to the light and helped guide her home. Some sprits in the light above came and greeted her and the delight they felt to be re-united still gives me goose-bumbs and makes my heart sing. My body was pulsating with that energy all the way home. That has happened a few more times. But I can’t help feeling sad that no one in the congregation had picked up on it.
After that I had absolutely no desire to go again so I figured my adventures in Church is over. Even the fathers I liked to read talk and talk about the purification of the soul and all the do’s and don’ts, and oh me what a sinner I am, and fasting and all of that. But they don’t mention all of that fruit is a consequence of a skillfully navigated contemplative life. Probably because they don’t know. They get the cart before the horse. Or at least the teachings that reaches us has not made me much smarter.
I happened to live in these end-times when there was internet. And my friends happened to find the GWV. And this guys says that he doesn’t loose consciousness when he sleeps. Or ever. That is still the most amazing thing I know of. That it is possible, and that the road to that is made clear. So clear.
Throughout these years, all of the GWV has for me boiled down to two teachings. “The Joyful Home of the Way”. And the parable of the good chef. Or whatever it is called. The idea of being able too “cook” or “work on” ones inner experience seems so trivial it’s almost mundane. It’s so “given”. Yet people not only resist it, but pretend like it’s not a possibility. But it is a possibility, so what is the recipe to cook with then? Well, it starts with joy. It’s the Joyful home of the way. And supposedly it ends in a humorous nothingness.
I started lurking on the forum again. A tad anxious of the harshness of the teachings here. But I’ve come to agree. I tried to save religion. I tried to save some of society. But it’s all rotten to the core. And that is a blessing, because what remains standing becomes more clear. Even though I hope a time will come when the path will be less lonely.
After making it my daily reading to lurk here, I started picking up some good ideas I hadn’t heard before. And then after a while, while reading through a thread of one such idea, someone references me being part of a discussion of something. I found that comical and I realized that someone had gotten something out of me writing here. So perhaps I should start participating again.
And just reading a little bit up in this thread, Jhananda points out how his dark night of the soul ended. The insight discussed there, although cloaked in my confused ramblings, and his confirmation of it, that’s major stuff. It is as if things are just where I left them. I picked up that insight and am trying to saturate my daily life with it. I truly can separate from, or transmute, negative emotional states by meditating on where they are in the body, while reframing my thoughts. That ability and many, many more is a gift from practicing these meditation techniques taught here, and I’ve come to learn that the doors that are opened are not accessible to all. Or, they are if they would practice. But they are the fruits of meditation and a “rigorous contemplative life”, that no one seems interested in.
So I started practice more rigorously again. My body is not used to the longer sits, and it took a while to remember what height of cushion works best. But the Jhanas are where I left them. And the charisms. The “oil” floating down the temples. The top of the forehead cracking open. The unification of the various qualities in to one. The unified sensory experience becoming one and suddenly popping into a distinctly more fine tuned one, as if from begin a landscape, to gravel, to dust. The coming and going of the depth of the Jhanas, like waves. The transmuting of caffeinated stress into almost an elongated orgasm.
But I don’t have the time or space. I have two small kids, a sick wife and a very busy company. I have not skillfully navigated this. Jhanananda says “dumpster living” at a certain point. And I go fill up my calendar for 20 years to come. I’m a tinge ashamed, and this is in part a confession. But there is peace and surrender at the bottom. Even if I have to live many more life-times I will make this one count. Even if I end up in the depths of hell, the prescription is the same. I will meditate.
Because I don’t have much time, I’m trying to prepare for the next steps by way of insight in between sessions. Prepare to see this body as something other than me. Prepare to the best of my ability to not get sucked into the beauty of the temptations of this world. I try to live at peace even with the cockroaches in my kitchen. But I also do not want my discipline to backfire so I’m trying to walk the middle path and play the long game.
And my game have to be saturation. I meditate while putting the kids to bed to have a good groove going before sitting down on the cusion. I meditate in secrecy standing up many, many times a day. Just drop in to the ecstasies and soak a little, then on with my day. Seclusion is not an option for me, but stability is. And I’ve noticed that since I rebooted this practice, that the Jhanas start coming to me without my volition as well.
I want to learn more about what the Buddha said, and perhaps one day try to become a meditation teacher of the GWV. But I’ve tried so hard to keep an intact idea about religion alive in myself, that now I cannot bring myself to become a serious student of Buddhism. I seem to have fully embraced both a dualistic and a non-dualistic world-view and I don’t have any issues with that. I think I’m too confused for religious studies, and I really don’t want to learn new things. But I am thinking about the whole of the system he thought, and I wish I could get it to me on a single page or a book that wasn’t too terribly corrupt. But for now I’m re-reading all the GWV texts and I am content with that, as I read very slowly. But I would lie if I said the Noble Eightfold Path wasn’t on my mind. The phrase I mean. I wonder what it is. I guess I have to start study at some point.
I’m depressed and disillusioned and probably a bit bitter. Maybe even angry and sad. But that’s superficially, and I almost don’t care bout it. It is almost as if it acts as a shield to world. And inside of it I am ecstatic and happy and at peace, and have no clue what is going on.
But I know how to survive if my wife dies. I will meditate, an hour both in the morning and in the evening, and all will be well.
Forever (seriously) grateful to Jeffrey and the GWV.
I guess this blog is officially rebooted. This is my recommitment to the life of the mystic.
