The longer I spend seeking spiritual realization, the less I have any idea what I’m up to. I’m reminded of what Adyashanti says about the reason for spiritual practice changing. Maybe you begin because you’re curious or because you hope to relieve suffering or maybe just because you want community. Then you do these practices and eventually something happens. Something in you undeniably opens and you feel the possibility of more space, more “you” in yourself. It’s impossible to articulate but you feel it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to you.
Then maybe you spend some years practicing because you want to feel that again. And most of the time you don’t. Most of the time at best you capture little glimpses of it, but as soon as you do you get so excited about it you can’t drop in again. And otherwise a bunch of boredom, self-pre-occupation, anxiety, and the like is what you primarily contact. You keep this up to the point of total frustration and at the point where you can’t take the disappointment anymore and feel like giving up on the whole thing, there’s another realization. The realization that trying isn’t the way. That all this trying is just the same old thing playing itself out.
So then you practice relaxing. And since you’re practicing relaxing and surrender and trust you aren’t nearly so disciplined about it. Soon enough you relax right out of practicing relaxing. You just slip quite gently into your same old patterns. Then you catch it and ricochet back into discipline, overshooting the mark a fair amount, but catching something real as the pendulum passes the zero mark between trust and alertness. And then again, and again, and the pendulum swings between surrender and self-responsibility—between being relaxed and being alert.
What happens over time is that the pendulum swings become smaller. You spend a bit more time balanced precariously between alertness and relaxation. The pendulum keeps moving, overshooting in both directions, but the swings become progressively smaller as the strength to stay with sensation grows and the trust to be gentle with yourself and relax into reality also grows.
Now the realizations come more often, but they’re smaller. Less exciting because you weren’t that far out of ease or clarity to begin with. Now you meditate for a new reason. Because it’s gentle and rich and nourishing to hold yourself in compassion. Because you really want to know what’s going on inside. So there isn’t a “because” at all anymore. Just the doing it.
Of course, this journey isn’t linear. It’s directionally what happens but there are plenty of loop backs and false starts along the way. You come to some plateau of progress where the sitting is just sitting and the pendulum has quieted. But all unknown to you there’s another wing to the building you’ve never visited and in the gentle quiet the locks fall away and suddenly some new experience comes surging to meet you. Or perhaps that experience comes to you from the outer world, like a letter inviting you to feel some emotion you wouldn’t have chosen but now can’t deny. Then the pendulum starts up good and strong again and the whole process plays out in miniature.
The universe is undeniably fractal. Galaxy within galaxy cluster, star within galaxy, and so on to the grains of sands and invisible cells of our fragile bodies. Wave on wave within a tidal pattern. The earth itself waves — in and out of land mass. Rising into mountains. Falling again to the ocean floor. Just the same, realization rides on the cresting peaks and vast undertow of yet deeper knowing. It doesn’t resolve. There isn’t a hero’s journey. Or rather, the hero’s journey happens again and again and again every hour of every day of every life. But there isn’t a happily ever after or all’s well that ends well. Because nothing ever ends. The band keeps playing while all the players drop out.
How is it that I become solid and porous at the same time? How come I stop knowing anything about Alden, and at the same time Alden is here? More here? I explain it to myself that there are parts of the brain involved underneath language. That when they are felt the thinking mind knows its smallness and the felt intuitive body knows its power. That’s a pretty good explanation. But even in explaining it I lost the fact of it. So back in. Back in the darkness. Into the womb. Into the predawn. Into myth and symbol and the chiastic void of the infinite. I guess it all sounds pretty phony until you go there. Or else it sounds very grand. It isn’t either.
It’s just love. A great tenderness of the heart. A great welling compassion that doesn’t need a reason to be there. It came first. It was already here. Texturing the sunlight on the wall and making homely faces beautiful. I wonder how B’s face could be so beautiful. It doesn’t make sense. All that distortion of muscular dysfunction and the saliva dropping when he’s fed. You see your sister turn away and that makes sense. You remember also flinching away and feeling bad about it too. But now there isn’t disgust. You feel his face is beautiful.
How strange it is that we ever believed in the world we see when a change as basic as the moon rising can transform it before our eyes. How much more so, the opening of our body to the breath. How much more so the warming touch of love that wakens choral voices within. The world comes to us by messenger. How good it is to finally receive the world. How good it is to be received. Until there is no difference. No one receiving. No one received. But alas. I wish I could be the first to write about matters of the spirit without enigmas and self-contradictions. This, it seems, is not allowed. Reality does not permit it.