Last night my wife, Carolyn, plunged into a stormy mood. Gazing darkly into the middle distance, she said that her latest novel, the one she’s been toiling away on for the last three months, was falling apart. The novel, she said, is catastrophically flawed. At its very core. All is lost. Also, she added, it wasn’t just this novel; she’d lost the ability to write forever. 

Carolyn is a wildly successful novelist and meltdowns of this kind are a normal part of her novel-writing process. Nevertheless, they freak me out every time. And last night was no different.

I tried to hide my freak out, to do Good Husband Shit. I listened intently. Tried meekly to offer encouragement. Took the front paws of one of our cats, chubby Oblio, in my hands, and moved them around while talking in a funny Oblio voice, as if he was giving her encouragement. Offered to help her work through the structural problems in the novel using my trusty white board. 

But inside I was panicking. Hurtling into an abyss. I felt like I was sliding into a roaring Coen brothers wood chipper.

On the psychological level, I react this way because, when I was a kid, my father was a raging abusive alcoholic. And in that sea of chaos and fear, my mom was my only life raft. I mean, all kids are emotionally dependent on their moms.

But when a kid’s dad can turn into a pyrotechnical maniac, that kid’s Mom-bond turns into much more of a desperate, life-and-death-ish thing. So when Mom would “vanish” into her depressions, it felt absolutely life-threatening to little-boy-me. And Carolyn’s moods, infrequent though they are, activate those exact memory programs in my body. Intensely. Vividly. Some real Pixar-level shit.

But on an even more primal level, what happens when Carolyn plunges into a gnarly mood is I feel completely cut-off—not just from “Mom,” but from Life, from Source, from Fundamental Nourishment. And this is ego stuff.

Adi Da has always taught that the ego is an action, a present-moment activity—not a “thing.” He says that in reality, the Radiance of Conscious Light is all there is. That Field of Infinite Life is our true identity right now and always. 

Sadly, though, we do not know this. According to Adi Da, this is because, on some deep, existential level, we chronically “contract from” the Radiance of Conscious Light, and presume ourselves to be these separate entities, these jiggling mortal bodyminds. And the fundamental “mood” of all separate, jiggling, mortal bodyminds is: “You don’t love me.” Adi Da says, 

“Thus, ‘I/me-apart’ is felt as ‘you don’t love me’ and therefore lives as unlove, as ‘I don’t love you.’… And all of that interpretation is based on the feeling that we are not sustained. In other words, independent existence itself is felt as separation from the ultimate food source.” 

“[The conventional person] is cut off from his food source through the presumptive recognition of his separate existence, of his mortality. He feels unloved. He is a dangerous beast. He is in conflict with himself, struggling, looking for a way to be permanently sustained.”

“All of our conventional efforts in life are searches to be permanently, absolutely, unqualifiedly sustained, to be fed perfectly and eternally and to be simply happy, kept alive by whatever put us into existence to begin with. But until we make our connection with food or with sustenance, we are mad. Since sustenance is scarce, we threaten one another. We live like beasts! If we get a little bit that sustains us, we become anxious about sustenance, we cannot get enough. We overeat, or we overseek. We are always believing the logic that we are not sustained, that we are cut off from the source, that we are not loved, that what essentially and permanently and absolutely can sustain us is something from which we are separated….”

“Thus, we must ultimately deal with this metaphysics, this philosophy that ‘I am not loved,’ that ‘I am separate from what sustains me.’ The whole drama of human existence is about that feeling of separation, and that is all that it is about.”

Adi Da teaches that if we dare to become extraordinarily sensitive we will discover that the feeling of being disconnected from that which sustains and nourishes (and, consequently, the mood of “you don’t love me”), is there, in the background, in every moment. But certain situations can cause it to suddenly flare up more dramatically into the foreground (“These go to 11”). Situations like, say, one’s wife tumbling into a bad mood, a mood from which she can’t be dislodged even by the encouragement of a chubby gesticulating cat.

Adi Da teaches that, having egoically contracted from the Sea of Conscious Light—and, thereby, cut ourselves off from the primordial power of Love-Bliss that, in truth, not only “feeds us,” but lives, breathes, and is us—we then project our existential sustenance “out there,” onto all sorts of goofy shit. People (usually intimate romantic partners), food, and money are probably the most common of these surrogates.

Of course, money, food, and intimate relationships can sustain and nourish us in very real and potentially beautiful ways. But they can never provide the deep, whole-bodily voluptuousness of being continuous with the Divine Spirit Power, the free force of Love-Bliss, the matrix of Radiant Eternal Life.

By comparison to that real sustenance—the nectar of the Living God Light—the sustenance of food, money, and romantic partners is a very simple, functional matter. And happily, the more intimate we are with our real sustenance, the more free, delightful, and playful our relationships with food, money, and our loved ones become. Because we are not burdening them with craven and desperate need. At that point, we can be of actual service to our intimate partners when their novels are disintegrating. 

And I guess it goes without saying that Awakening to our true condition, as the Divine Spirit Power, is what Spiritual life and practice is all about.

“[But] is it true that we are actually separated from sustenance? It is very important to find this out, because everyone simply and mechanically presumes that it is true. The vulnerabilities of childhood reinforced that presumption. All this social habitual learning that comes out of childhood and adolescence and into your later life supports this essential metaphysical view that we are unloved, that we are separated from what sustains us in the absolute sense, that we are mortal.” 

“The more we meditate on being unloved, the less we live as love. If we allow ourselves to feel our Condition, to feel asour Condition, to feel completely our Condition in this moment, can we discover any separation from anything whatsoever? Are we anything that can be separated, that is separate, that is an anything when viewed as a totality?” 

“Obviously this is the essential consideration that I entertain with you through My Teaching. If you could simply feel your Condition, feel as your Condition in this moment without obstruction, without making an interpretation, then you would not any longer be what you already are being. In that case, you would not be in the condition of obstructed feeling-attention, defining yourself, feeling vulnerable, separate, a being. You would directly and intuitively discover the nature of your Condition, which in no sense is separated out, which is pure, absolute energy without qualification, which is sustained absolutely, which was never separated from anything, which does not exist in an inherently separated state.”

In closing, here’s what I can say about this. My therapy, and healing my PTSD, is helping me to open to and trust the Grace and Blessing Power of my Guru, Adi Da Samraj. And that Grace and Blessing Power is drawing me into some sort of new relationship to those “memory states” that Carolyn’s occasional bad moods activate in my nervous system. In other words, those memory states are definitely not gone (as last night demonstrates). But they’re much softer than they used to be. And I have a more spacious sense of humor about them. Because my very cells feel more and more the “hum” of the Mystery in which we all truly rest. That’s plenty. I feel all kinds of grateful.

Subscribe! Just think how nurtured, nourished, and sustained you could feel by subscribing to this nutritious blog! And how nurtured, nourished, and sustained you’d make little ole’ me feel by subscribing! Win-win, baby! Somewhere on this page there’s a subscribing button-ish thing! Just for you!

Most of us don’t know how identified we are with our minds. Or, to use a phrase Adi Da once used, how identified we are with “the chaos of mind.” In this sense, we are like the proverbial fish who doesn’t know he lives in water. Adi Da said that if we could somehow step back and really, nakedly see our situation – of identification with the chaos of mind – we would be terrified. 

Conversely, when our feeling-attention is constantly rested in the Divine, “the mind is quieted. It becomes, to the degree it has to be used, just useful – not endless blah blah like a constant reverie or dream that you can’t do anything about…” 

According to Adi Da (and pretty much every other Enlightened Being in the history of ever) our True Identity is the Boundless Radiance of Divine Being, the Infinity of Living Light. But we’ve forgotten that. On an epic scale. 

Consequently, we find ourselves in a dream that we are a tiny “capsule of self,” a body-mind, blinking out at the universe, strapped to a tiny computer-like brain – a computer-brain whose “operating system” might as well have been created by a band of drunken Visigoths wearing mittens. These brain-minds of ours have been randomly patterned by quadrillions of arbitrary causes, stretching back through epochs of time. And what do we call this rollicking kaleidoscope of fragments? What do we call this ball of karmic shrapnel? We call it “I!” 

Adi Da says that the verbal discursive mind should be a specialized tool that we use for specific operations, like something James Bond might whip out of his suitcoat pocket in a pinch. It should not be a virtual-reality spacesuit we live in, ‘round the clock, night and day. It should not be a non-stop acid trip that we think we are. 

In the same discourse I quoted from earlier, Adi Da says, “You think all the time, don’t you? [You’re] thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. It’s not that thinking has no function, in your moments of daily obligation. Thinking does have a function, but you all don’t do very much of that. You don’t do very much usefulthinking, that really has a function. You do ‘wandering-of-attention.’ And so the mind just sort of pours out its contents, based on conditioning. It’s just a bizarre display, that makes you even more stressful and confused. If you have a purpose in thinking, some obligation required of you, well do so with clarity! With real intention, straightforward…”     

For me, Avatar Adi Da Samraj is exactly what all true Gurus have always been known to be: A transparent window to the Radiant Silence that Transcends mind (and everything else). And His Grace has given me very real tastes of that Radiant Silence on countless occasions. These “tastes” have given me an pretty compelling revelation of the madness of my usual, every day, “normal” mind-scape – its droning repetitiveness, its incessant fixations on “problems,” its protean moods and dilemmas, its clunky cliches, its mechanical reveries. 

This nascent-but-growing sense of the inchoate craziness of mind feels liberating. It makes me more and more available to the Spiritual Reality, the Field of Radiant Consciousness, in which these bodies and minds are apparently arising. 

Sam gets all advicey

1) Meditate. Mindfulness, mantra, watching your breath, envisioning fluffy rainbow unicorns from outer space – whatever you’re into. Any style of meditation can give us a sense that we aren’t our ordinary cacophony of thoughts. Because, y’know, there you are, ostensibly observing your dreary, screwball thoughts. Like leaves drifting past on a river. Clouds floating across the sky. All of that stuff. So yes, meditation practices can be heading in the right general direction. 

That said, I’m more interested in a deeper shift. And here I’m going to go ahead and break out the old-timey biblical term, repentance…And that brings us to number two.

2) Repentance of mind. Here I’m talking about an emotional realization, or at least a growing tacit intuition, that our conventional thinking minds are, yes, batshit-crazy…arbitrarily-patterned machines. 

Observing our thoughts, or any other strategic meditation practices, can help till the soil for this realization/intuition, so I’m all for them. But that’s all they can do. Because the magisterial “you” that’s observing your thoughts is, deep down, just another tiresome, randomly accumulated thought-creature. As Adi Da has pointed out, one’s “observer self,” still feels itself to be a separate locus of awareness. The observer is, in other words, a part of the same “chaos of mind.” It’s just a deeper dimension of mind, one that Hindu and yogic scriptures call Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of discriminative intelligence. 

But once in a while, during meditation, that Thing happens. The Radiant Silence somehow breaks through and turns you into an impossible openness. Adi Da once wrote, “Touch my heart, and I will widen you to God knows where.” So it’s kind of like that.

Even if this happens only for a few moments, the contrast with your usual state, marooned in the plastic diorama of mind, can drastically recalibrate the ol’ compass. It’s a game changer. 

I’m not saying to “chase” or “seek” these shifts, these openings, these kensho-ish happenings. You can’t. Nor am I saying to cling to them and fetishize them when they happen. But I am saying to know they’re possible, to know that they are a thing, and to be willing for them to be. And when they do happen, notice how insane your normal thinking appears, by contrast. Notice it a lot.

3) Contemplate the first three steps of AA (modified). So it would be like: 1) Admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. 2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. 3) Made a decision to turn our lives and our will over to the care of God as we understood God. 

Contemplate the hell out of these three luminous steps. If you’re not into “God/Higher Power” language, substitute the Radiance of Consciousness, the Force of Being, the Tao, the Heart, Buddhanature, Melvin – whatever you want. If you come to these three steps humbly, in a raw, needful way, they can be subversive indeed (to the ego-mind) IEDs (improvised explosive devices) of the psyche. 

4) Cultivate grave suspicion. Now and again, as you go through your day, stop and question the entire way you’re thinking about, relating to, framing, and orienting to everything. Your whole M.O. Your whole deal. Your whole trip. 

Take all of your mind’s zany madcap antics with mountainous grains of salt. Cultivate a hearty suspicion of the whole world of your thoughts. This suspicion won’t turn you into an amorphous, indecisive, influenceable blob of jelly. Rather it will increase your availability to a vast, free, mindless Intelligence and Power that – according to Adi Da and all the sages throughout time – is much better at living you than you are. 

END

What if the part of you that doesn’t want to subscribe to this blog is the lunatic conditioned mind, while the part of you that secretly longs to subscribe is the spontaneous motion of the Heart of Being? Think about it. And while you’re at it, for God’s sake, leave a comment! All the cool kids are doing it! And by “all the cool kids,” I mean, of course, absolutely nobody.

The question is this: Is there a sun in your lower belly? Do you feel potent, full, and strong there? Like there’s life-force glowing in your tummy, all warm, open, and powerful? 

Last November, as I lay on my couch with the ‘Rona, staring, zombie-like, at Bobby Lee podcasts (both of them) on YouTube, I kept noticing that, in my lower belly, it felt like there was only a wraith-like emptiness. An airy insubstantiality. It was like my belly was two-dimensional. Not from lack of food, but just as an emotional-energetic thing.

Many teachings – yogic, tantric, martial art, and Taoist, to name a few – say that we should center our awareness (or “sink the mind”) in our lower belly (called the t’an tien in China, the hara in Japan). Zen Master Hakuin extolled this practice as well. The idea is that we should cultivate a cool, quiet head and a powerful fire in the belly (we Westerners tend toward the opposite: a busy heat in our busy heads from our compulsive, feverish over-thinking, and a vacuous, ethereal nothingness in our tummies).

As I began to recover from covid-19, I felt drawn to begin to practice Qigong (also spelled chi kung) daily – particularly those Qigong exercises that focus the life-force in the t’an tien. I started, every morning, after meditation, to stand on my trembly legs (from laying on the couch for 4 weeks) in front of our sliding glass doors that face the sunrise, and practice. Now, several months later, I can actually feel a glow of warmth and aliveness stirring in my lower belly when I do these Qigong activities. 

But Adi Da Samraj teaches that there is much more to energy than Qi. According to Him (and plenty of other teachers), Qi, or prana, is actually a pretty homely, elemental business. It is merely the natural, etheric bio-energy. It is conditional, meaning it depends on conditions – planets, cosmos, bodies, plants, sunlight – clunky paraphernalia like that.

Qi, prana, or etheric bio-energy is a crude, “stepped-down” version of the One Divine Spirit Power, the Infinite Sea of Conscious Light itself, which is Unconditional. The entire cosmos arise as an “apparent modification” (in Adi Da’s words) of this One Spiritual Radiance, or Conscious Light. 

Apparently, in mature Spiritual practice, the whole-bodily being opens to that Divine Spirit-Current. In the esoteric Traditions of the East, it is understood that, when the being is radically opened to the Spirit Force, it fills and opens the entire area from the solar plexus down to the base of the pelvis. And it does this so dramatically that actual, physical changes happen. In some Realized beings, the belly region actually gets huge and Buddha-like! Swami Nityananda, revered by millions in India, is one of countless examples. Adi Da Samraj says: 

“Look at Swami Nityananda—He severed heads all His life. Look at His belly—He was stiff with life, Full of life, so much so that His belly became huge with Spiritual Force…”

So why doesn’t energy – either Qi or the Spirit Power – course through most of us and make our bellies potent, happy, and powerful? Because of the ego, of course. 

Adi Da Samraj often calls the ego the self-contraction. That’s because the ego, He says, is not a “thing,” not an “entity.” It is, rather, an activity. It is the activity of contraction from the Divine Conscious Light. It is the contraction into being a fictional, separate “me.” And that self-contraction is manifested throughout our entire body, in a tangle of physical, emotional, energetic, and spiritual knots. 

Basically, if I identify with a separate locus of inner awareness (aka a “me”), I am making white-knuckled fists throughout my body. I’m unconsciously constricting in my head, in my throat, in my solar plexus, in my pelvic floor (the notorious first chakra), and, of course, the hydraulic, steel-plated super-clench at the heart. 

In this state – collapsing, like a black hole, in and away from the Spiritual Radiance of Being – the Spirit Current cannot move through me and let my belly become full, powerful, and alive. 

In a few talks, Adi Da calls this egoic contraction “vital shock.” Vital shock, He says, is,

“…the awakening of Consciousness Itself into apparent identification with the form of life…Birth is that shock, not merely the original physical event that may be remembered, but every moment’s cognition of being alive…[meaning alive as an apparently separate, discreet, dying entity].”

And, He adds, we feel that vital shock most acutely in the belly and solar plexus region.

“This vital center is like the shutter of a camera. Like the shutter in a camera, it curls in on itself in order to close, or else it unfurls in order to open. It is like your hand. If you clench your fist and hold it together as tightly as you can, it begins to become painful. Just so, this vital center is alive, sentient, and when it contracts, like your hand, it causes a sensation. It causes not only a physical sensation, but also many other reflections in life and consciousness. Therefore, when this contraction occurs in the vital, you not only get a cramp in the stomach, but you have a whole life of suffering…Every aspect of vital existence is controlled by this image, this state, this vital shock…what people are suffering is…this original shock, in the form of a primary reaction, this contraction…”

Sam gets all advicey

From what I understand, there are no cute energy tricks or techniques that can undo the deepest psycho-energetic knots of our egoic contraction. Contra to consumer, pop-spirituality, there is no amount of diddling with our chakras or monkeying with our kundalini that will open the being at the core. Such opening requires the undoing of the entire ego-illusion itself. And that requires the odyssey of whole-bodily surrender to the Living Divine Conscious Light – a whole life of one-pointed Spiritual practice and an ocean of Grace. Which, by the way, I heartily recommend – to you and to myself. But there are groovy things we can do in the meantime.

First, simply learn to relax your belly throughout the day. Notice when you’re gripping and holding there, and let it go. Over and over. This, all by itself, can be a game-changing practice. As you do, you’ll notice your breath naturally starts to move in your tummy. Two thumbs up.

Second, start to “sink” or center your awareness more and more into your lower belly – your t’an tien or hara – rather than in your head. Feel yourself as living and orienting from there, rather than living “in your skull.” This practice, diligently applied, grounds us in a much more spontaneous, intuitive, instinctual mode of being. 

Third, you, too, might want to play with Qigong…deliberately bringing Qi, prana, or etheric bio-energy into your lower belly. There are a gazillion excellent YouTube videos on Qigong. Over time, energy will grow and gather there. Learn to radiate and circulate it throughout your body. This can make your body more resilient, quiet your mind, and strengthen your immune system. 

Coolest of all, remember a couple paragraphs ago, when I mentioned the whole life of surrender to the Living Divine? These three humble practices can be a very real part of preparing for and supporting us in that.

Subscribe! One nifty practice taught by legendary Qigong Master, Mantak Chia, is to “smile into your belly.” Well, one thing that might make your belly smile is to subscribe to this nifty blog! And then, if THAT doesn’t make your belly smile, maybe UNsubscribing will!

People keep saying, “I hope 2022 is better than the last two years.” Usually, they’re talking about “big picture” issues. News headlines stuff. And yes, of course, I, too, hope 2022 will be better in those macrocosm ways.

In the meantime, though, maybe we can do more than just “wait” and “hope” for good things to happen “out there in the world community.” Maybe we can create our own healthier community. And maybe if we do create our own healthier community, that healthiness can spread out, like the proverbial ripples spreading out in a pond. The microcosm affecting the macrocosm. Holograms. Butterfly wings causing tsunamis and all of that.

What comes to mind, specifically, when I hear people (including me) express their hopes, wishes, and prayers for a better 2022, is this chunk of Adi Da’s teaching. 

“Instead of waiting for action from “sources” out in the world somewhere – government sources, media sources, inter-planetary sources, mystical sources, or whatever it is that you wait for all the time – you must, yourself, become involved in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily human society.”

Adi Da’s vision for cooperative community is not idealistic. That’s one of the things I adore about it. It is not hippie communalism. This is especially good news for me, because I am an old-school, die-hard punk rocker at heart. Everybody knows punk rockers are both legally and cosmologically required to hate the ways of hippies. In Adi Da’s teaching, community is a discipline. And the purpose of it is ego-transcendence – not Utopia. Ego-transcendence is hard, messy, and just generally a royal pain in the ass (though not nearly as much of a pain in the ass as non-ego-transcendence). 

When taken on as a serious spiritual discipline, real community requires truckloads of tolerance, cooperation, self-responsibility, creativity, pliancy, and human maturity. It requires us to consistently show up in daily life with strong relational and participatory energy. It requires us to live in the disposition of service. I am woefully unskilled at these things.

When, long ago, I lived in a Zen household, I grew to hate one of my roommates. He’d eat his Corn Flakes or pass the salt or hang up his coat in this geologically slow way. To him, that meant he was being all mindful and “Zenny.” I found it pretentious, and it made me crazy. 

Another roommate, the woman who owned the house, became obsessed with getting me to dust this little Buddha statue every day. I, therefore, became obsessed with not dusting the little Buddha statue, ever.

A third roommate, a guy who mercifully only lived in the house for a few months, was into the Ayurvedic practice of Amroli – drinking one’s own urine. This would be fine, but he was also an itinerant Zen nomad. He didn’t own anything. That meant that he used my frigging coffee cups to drink his pee. They would always have this tell-tale sheen on the bottom, almost rainbowy, like oil in a puddle. I would proceed to throw these coffee cups straight into the garbage, an act of pure Seinfeld-ness.

My point is, in this household, none of us approached living together as a counter-egoic practice. It never even occurred to us. And here’s the thing. If we don’t engage intimate, human-scale community as a discipline of self-transcendence, we will inevitably duplicate the exact same ego-politics that create the daily headlines. The blithe presumption that I won’t duplicate the same craziness I see “out there in the world at large” – just because, y’know, I’m such a good person – is wildly naïve and arrogant. 

Sam gets all advicey

Maybe you’re lucky enough to already have an intimate circle of good friends. If so, maybe you’d find it interesting to engage with them as a practice of self-transcendence, if you don’t already. Here are three ways you could play with that. 

1) When you’re with the people in your life, see how much “free, available energy and attention” you can manifest. See how fully engaged you can be with them, energetically, emotionally. 

For me, Adi Da’s phrase “free energy and attention” conveys more than the idea of merely “being fully present” with someone. Whenever I try to just “be present” with a person I tend to make some sort of effort with my head, with my pointy mental attention. Also, “being present” has, in my mind, a placid, quietistic vibe. 

Adi Da’s Wisdom on having “free energy and attention” requires me to take responsibility for my own emotional-energetic-somatic contraction and to release it in feeling-Remembrance of the Heart. This disposes me toward a rounder, juicier, livelier, fuller presence – one that both gives and receives love or life-force; one that risks and communicates any and all emotions; one that plays, improvises, and responds, beyond my usual comfort levels. For me this is an excellent discipline. 

2) Be vulnerable. Adi Da Once said that, although the phrase “come out of the closet” means publicly revealing one’s homosexuality, there is a very real sense in which all of us must come out of the closet – with our hidden wounds, fears, and secret insecurities. This too can be excellent ego-transcending practice, while simultaneously facilitating connection, trust, intimacy, empathy, and tolerance. 

Groovily enough, this kind of vulnerability or coming out of the closet doesn’t always have to be done with words. It can be an unarmored disposition you manifest in your way of being, a soft openness in your presence, in your face, in your eyes, in your body language, and in your tone of voice (curious note: chronic “over-sharers” rarely show any of these non-verbal signs of actual, whole-person vulnerability).

A couple years ago I was on a healing arts retreat in my spiritual practice and I got partnered up with a man who radiated this kind of profound vulnerability simply through his presence. And what struck me the most about it, about him, is how much deep, mountainous strength this gentle presence conveyed. Paradox-o’-rama. 

3) The asana of service. Here we’re not talking about service in that codependent, people pleasey way, because in the codependent, people pleasey way, the focus is actually always on oneself, on one’s own anxiety to be approved of, to be liked, to not displease. There’s also often rage lurking right beneath the surface of most people pleasers. It’s exhausting. 

But in the real disposition of service, we forget ourselves. Real service energizes us. As Adi Da once said to a devotee, if it’s real service there’s a glow all over your body, your face is rosy and bright. All of which is majorly contra the ego. 

If you’re not lucky enough to already have a close circle of intimate friends, you could do what I’m starting to do (because in recent years no less than five of my old dear friends have moved out of state; a couple others have simply grown in very different directions, meaning they’re both really into weed and seething darkly about politics, neither of which are my thing). That is to put some actual time and work into meeting new people – Meet Up gatherings, classes, workshops, 12-step meetings, whatever. And then play with those three counter-egoic relational disciplines with the new people you meet.  

Here, by the way, is a fuller excerpt, from which I took that chunk above:

“For the usual person, politics is merely a matter of listening to the “news” every night. Politics in this “late-time” (or “dark” epoch) is either a childish or an adolescent reaction to the fact of being controlled by the “news” of the world and by the abstract, all-controlling politics of the State. One individual plays the “system”, and the other is a revolutionary. The child buys the “system” and expects it to work, and the adolescent is a perpetual revolutionary, whose childish expectations were not fulfilled. Both types are merely relating to the world as a parent like “thing” that controls them.

“If you stop listening to (or, otherwise, believing in) the “news”, and if you simply observe what is really going on, you, inevitably, become depressed by the feeling that your life is not under your control. However, “depression” is only a very minimal insight. Obviously, everybody is (both naturally and humanly) controlled. The typical response to the observation of the controlling forces of life is to react by joining a revolution, getting drunk, kicking a couple of bad politicians out of office, having a war, getting “high” on popular illusions, becoming “against” a political “something”, or becoming “for” a political “something” – but reaction is obviously not the way to directly transform real politics. What is needed is to establish a completely different principle of human culture and politics. What is needed is a principle of human culture and politics that is not based on reaction to all the bad “news”. 

“Fundamentally, there is only bad “news” in the ordinary, ego-based, un-Enlightened, chaotic world. Instead of waiting for action from “sources” out in the world somewhere – government sources, media sources, inter-planetary sources, mystical sources, or whatever it is that you wait for all the time – you must, yourself, become involved in intimate, cooperative community with other human beings. In a responsible, mutually dependent, cooperative, tolerant, peaceful, and intimate relationship with other human beings, you must create and protect the basics of a truly human culture and of a truly intimate daily human society.

“…You can and must create your own politics – in intimate, cooperative association with your fellow human beings…Regardless of the larger politics, or the state of the “news” – the truly human (and humanizing) politics of intimate, cooperative living can (and, indeed, must) be done. And, therefore, the ego-transcending discipline of intimate, cooperative living is the only true “radical” politics – or the only genuine “realpolitik” for ordinary, or truly human, men and women.”   

You could create some instant community (albeit virtual fake cyber community) by – you guessed it – subscribing to this very blog and/or commenting! 

Imagine a guy who’s been a raging health nut for decades – refrigerator full of kale, kitchen counters teeming with exotic superfoods., the full catastrophe. A guy who has only been sick once in the last 20 years. A guy who has obnoxious amounts of gonzo energy pretty much always, and maybe sometimes feels a little smug about it. Imagine this guy secretly harboring a fantasy that his health nuttery has rendered him kind of, sort of indestructible, health-wise. I mean, of course, not literally indestructible, I mean he’s not in a mental institution or anything…but, also, in some twilight part of his mind…literally indestructible. Now imagine that this very same guy gets Covid-19, Delta style. And not just a little bit. This guy is, of course, me. 

The night after last Thanksgiving my wife and I were at a restaurant and I started to feel peculiarly low energy and a strange emotional malaise. The next morning I woke with a sinus infection that made an ominous gurgling sound in my left inner-ear. I got the Covid test. The result came back positive. Over the coming days, the new symptoms began to show up. And they kept showing up. One after another. And each one filled me with indignant shock and disbelief. 

First there was the fever, 101.6. (Wait, what?! I shrieked to myself.) Then came the nausea. (Seriously?!) Then all my muscles started to ache. (Are you fucking kidding me right now?!) Then the evil cough began. (No. Fucking. Way.) Then the sharp sore throat. (Get the fuck outta here!) Then my senses of smell and taste vanished. (Okay, that’s enough! I command you to stop this craziness immediately!) I was also afflicted by this icky depression and, always, the notorious coronavirus fatigue. Fatigue-o’-rama. Fatigue gone wild. (This can’t be! This can’t happen…not to me!) I was like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. At the end of his fight with King Arthur, both of the Black Knight’s arms and one leg hacked off by Arthur, the Black Knight still yells insanely, “I’m invincible!”

So how long, you ask, did the “indestructible health nut” lay ignobly, like a sack of sad cabbages, on his couch, watching comedian Bobby Lee podcasts (Tigerbelly and Bad Friends)? Three days? Seven days? Nope and Nope. Try three solid weeks. It was not only uncomfortable – it was humbling, embarrassing, and, most of all, sobering. 

And I can’t help but suspect that it was also, in some part, the mysterious spiritual handiwork of my Guru, Adi Da Samraj. 

Here’s the deal. From time to time, my fellow students in my spiritual practice have tried to help me see that I do, in fact, cling – ever-so-subtly, not quite consciously – to magical fantasies of health invulnerability. The reason they do this is simple: Believing that you are invulnerable, health-wise (or any other wise) makes spiritual practice – serious, real spiritual practice – impossible. Profound spiritual practice can only unfold from being radically in touch with our terrible vulnerability. 

This notion is alien to many Western seekers. But in Eastern spirituality it is front and center: You absolutely, positively will not truly throw yourself into spiritual practice unless and until you are profoundly sensitized to your own fragile, fleeting, mortal condition. In other words, unless you have the precise opposite of my attitude.

That sensitization awakens the great heart impulse to Realize our True Nature as the Infinite Conscious Light that utterly Transcends conditional reality and our eminently killable body-minds. (For those keeping score at home, “conditional reality” = the manifest cosmos, time and space, universes, worlds, stuff; the “Unconditional Reality” = the Transcendental Reality of Infinite Conscious Light. In Adi Da’s words, the conditional reality is only an “apparent modification” of the Transcendental Reality of Infinite Conscious Light. Quiz in the morning.)

Stories about this sensitization to our mortality and fragility are everywhere in the great spiritual traditions of the East. Read Ramakrishna’s biography and see what Ramakrishna’s Guru, Totapuri, put Ramakrishna through to get Ramakrishna to face his mortality (fun fact, it included making Ramakrishna chomp on the forearm of a dead guy). Read the story of Milarepa, the great Tibetan Buddhist sage. When he returned home and discovered the bones of his mother and sister it catapulted him onto one of the most arduous ordeals of spiritual practice ever recorded. 

The Buddha made his monks spend countless hours imagining their own bodies rotting and decomposing. Yogis meditated in graveyards, sitting atop piles of corpses. The point? Get severely hip to impermanence, down in your bones, so that you practice fiercely and, thereby, Awaken to your True Identity as the Deathless Divine Consciousness. 

Probably the most archetypal of all these stories is the tale of young Gautama himself. When Gautama was just 17 he took one look at illness, old age, and death and was utterly shattered – so shattered that he dropped his entire princely life right there on the spot, vanishing into the forest to pursue Enlightenment (he succeeded, to become the Buddha).

I’m not about to drop my life and run into any forest. I have a punch-card at my favorite coffee shop that’s almost full and it’d be a shame to waste it. But the fact that I got Covid, and for as long as I did, has put very real cracks into my quaint fantasies of indestructibility. I feel vulnerable – vis a vis health – in ways I never have before. I am not enjoying it.

But, as advertised, my attitude toward spiritual practice has indeed become more focused, moment-to-moment. It’s also making me much more open to the sweetness of the Divine shine that suffuses everyone and everything, because when I armor myself against the reality of mortality, I also armor myself against the Radiant Spirit. For these reasons, as miserable as I was during those three weeks on my couch, I am now feeling grateful for all of it.

Brief sidebar: To cover my bases, I should mention that, according to Adi Da, there are TWO great sensitivities that lead one to profound spiritual practice, not just the one, not just the sensitivity to death, impermanence, and suffering. In this regard, Adi Da Samraj speaks of the Dual Sensitivity. The Dual Sensitivity is, yes, on the one hand, the sensitivity to death, impermanence, and suffering. But, that sensitivity, on its own, might only lead one to despair. So it must co-exist with the other sensitivity, and that’s the sensitivity to the tangible existence of the Divine, the Transcendent, the Spiritual Reality. The whole-bodily feeling-intuition of That Which Transcends Mortality. Adi Da Teaches that, if you feel both at the same time, you absolutely will hurl yourself into intensive spiritual practice. I believe Him.

In closing, here’s a fun little exercise for the whole family. Close your eyes and try to imagine the jaw-dropping magnitude of denial it would take to cling to one’s fantasies of invulnerability when one has a Guru who – very frequently – roars stuff like the following: 

“In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the fundamental communication – the first communication, the continuously repeated communication – is ‘Death! Death! Suffering! Everything ends! You are going to die! Everyone is going to die! Everything is going to come to an end! Everything you want to establish here will, at most, be brief!’ This, rather than all kinds of ‘light’ and ‘salvation’ and ‘dancing in the streets’ – is the fundamental message. This! Then comes some other things [by this Adi Da refers to the Spiritual Way that can Awaken one] – but the fundamental message, the principle that one is expected to grasp, is this understanding of the transitory nature of gross conditional existence.” 

“But you are going to die. The body is going to die. No two ways about it. And you never know when it is going to happen. It could happen tonight. I mean, you could be sitting there, and in the next couple of minutes start having incredible pains, clots in your brain, heart attack, stiffening convulsions. It could happen anytime tonight, any day, any moment.”

“You know you are mortal – but, until you hear the exact date of your death, you will tend to keep indulging yourself…”

“Death makes your entire life bullshit. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. The body is going to die, every relation of the body is going to die. You can’t even depend on it continuing for another moment…That’s the situation you’re in, but you use fabrications of mind and so forth, individually and collectively, that distract you from the fact of it, so that you won’t feel it profoundly. And so you build up this whole lifetime of endeavors, of attachments, of things you own, things you do, things you’re known for, things you know, things you know about — on and on and on. And it all passes. But in the meantime. . . you bullshit one another…human beings keep getting sold a bill of goods that does not tell you about the bad news of change and death…”

Remember, life is unspeakably delicate and brief… if I’m not mistaken, that means you should waste no time in subscribing to this glorious blog! 

When I was in kindergarten I was taught the Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) by gentle hippies in a duplex in South Minneapolis. They gave me a special, customized, top-secret mantra. My parents practiced the technique, too. They did TM while sitting in comfy chairs with their eyes closed. But since I was only six, the TM people taught me to repeat my mantra with open eyes and while walking. I would tread, round and round, in slow circles in my bedroom, stepping over Legos, GI joes, and little, green, plastic army men.

A few years later, at age nine, I got ahold of a book that taught techniques to learn telekinesis. I would place paperclips on a little table in my bedroom, and squint really hard at them trying to move them with only my mind.

Not long after that, in sixth grade, I got a book on self-hypnosis to help me in my desperate quest to find a girlfriend. The technique was to record my own voice on audiocassettes. I counted slowly backward on the tapes, talking myself down into a drowsy, suggestible state. Then I gave myself post-hypnotic suggestions. I told myself that whenever I was around Lynn Smith or Gail Swanson – two of my very cute classmates at school – I would act as charming and sexy as Hawkeye Pierce on the TV show M*A*S*H.

During this same time period I would often hide out in the woods from my ragey alcoholic dad. Sitting amidst the cattails and milkweed, my two dogs laying by my side, I would practice Krishnamurti’s technique of Choiceless Awareness. I remember trying to look at trees without the filter of thought. 

In 2011-2014 (ish), when my PTSD first blew up my life, I would sit in bed using every flashback-managing, amygdala-taming, nervous-system-down-regulating technique known to man, and I was damned grateful to know about them. 

Point being, I have a long and storied relationship to techniques – spiritual techniques, self-improvement techniques, healing techniques, paperclip-displacement techniques. All kinds of techniques. Consequently, I was none too thrilled when I first ran into Adi Da Samraj’s criticism of techniques in spiritual practice. 

Techniques, He said, may be able to modify the ego, to tinker with the meaty and dying body-mind, but techniques can never radically Awaken us. Because the fictional dream-of-me that we must Awaken from, is the fictional dream-of-me who is strategically deploying the technique. Trying to Liberate ourselves with do-it-yourself techniques is like trying to reach down and pick up a board on which we ourselves are standing.

According to Adi Da Samraj – and countless other God Realized beings before Him – the Way of Liberation unfolds when our heart, the native core of our being, responds to the Divine Reality. This response is primal, as mindless and spontaneous as a plant turning toward the sun. It is a love response. And then you make your entire life out of that response. In many Traditions, and certainly in Adidam, that is what sadhana, or spiritual practice, is.

Traditionally, the way human beings contact that Divine Reality, tangibly, unambiguously, is through the direct Agency of the Sat Guru, the God Awakened Being, who functions as a sort of “laser-like focusing mechanism” for the Radiant Conscious Light in which the whole damned universe allegedly floats. In 1974, Adi Da gave an ecstatic talk, in which He said:

“The Guru is not a human being. The Lord is the Guru. When the Guru appears in human form, it is the Lord…When His devotee surrenders, then the Guru enters His devotee in the form of Light…there is no Yoga if the very cells do not begin to intuit the Divine. 

“Surrender to the Lord, night and day. Think the Lord, speak the Lord, act the Lord, receive the Lord in your body and in your cells, in every function of life…Not as a “technique” – it is the same as when a woman receives her lover. When a woman receives her lover, there is no doubt about it – and she does not have to consult her textbooks. 

“The same is true of True Yoga. When the Lord enters His devotee, there is no doubt about it. There is no “technique”. There is only the continuation of the life of the devotee – because the Lord is the Light that Transcends this ‘world’…There is no meditative “technique” for you to acquire. The Lord must meditate you. The Lord must enter. And when the Lord enters you, He makes you ecstatic. He sifts you out of all your individuality, all of your separateness…He makes you Conscious in the Divine, so that you live your ordinary life aware of the fact that there is only Real God.”

By His Grace, I have tasted these things. They are game changers. Nevertheless, I am a rank beginner as a spiritual practitioner, and my addiction to techniques remains mighty. I constantly try to twist aspects of the Way of Adidam into techniques. Because techniques allow me to remain in control. As if they’re little, green, plastic army men. Egos love control, because egos think control equals survival. Luckily my Guru somehow draws me back, again and again, into the Formless and Unknowable Wilds. And the times in-between are becoming more and more painful to me every day.

There is, however, one technique about which you can definitely celebrate! The technique of subscribing to blogs that rhyme with zion shmabove the grind. And the tangentially related technique of commenting! What’s your relationship to techniques? 

In the book, Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da Samraj writes that humankind is, “chronically depressed by the frustration of the ego-transcending deepest and most profound impulses that are the inherent characteristics at the heart and root of every living being. The ego- ‘I’, whether individual or collective, is eventually reduced to sorrow and despair (or chronic life-depression), because of (and as an experiential result of) the inability of life (in and of itself) to generate Happiness and Joy and Immortality.”

He continues: “Gross materialism (in science and politics) gives human beings no option in the mind except that of the trapped and threatened animal. Therefore, a fiery mood is abroad – full of gross desire, frustration, fear, despair, and aggressive reactivity.” Adi Da goes on to state the obvious, that the prevalence of this “fiery mood” could, quite possibly, lead to the destruction of the planet – if we do not create a profound shift in our individual and collective disposition.

For proof that our world is heading in a bad direction, there are many indicators we could cite: Mental health statistics, wealth disparity, tribalism and polarization, the (Internet-fueled) isolation and atomization of people, the state of the environment, the grotesque power of multi-national corporations…the list, sadly, goes on and on.

But personally, nothing makes me more frightened and depressed about the state of the world right now than the existence of modern corporate pop music. 

From early Spring to late Fall, I write outside at a neighborhood coffee shop that sits on the corner of a busy intersection. Cars waiting at the red light frequently have their windows open, music blaring. About 45% of the time, that music is hip hop, much of which I like. The other 45%, however, is modern corporate pop (the remaining 10% is “classic rock”). And the modern corporate pop fills me with unspeakable despair for humanity. 

Because this is the first time in history in which music is being made purely by corporate formulas and computer algorithms – algorithms that seem to be created by accountants who, one is forced to assume, were hated by their parents, and by all the other children their age, as well as by puppies, kittens, and large-eyed woodland creatures of every variety. 

This is the first time in history in which music is literally made by soulless douchebags in cheap suits – soulless douchebags who, just a couple of years ago, you know, for certain, were drunken, pink-faced, frat boys, roofying girls on Spring break at Florida beaches. In the music, you can almost hear the Rohypnol entering the bloodstream of the young women. You can almost hear the guardian angels and totem animals of these corporate frat boys swinging from the ropes – squeak, squeak, squeak – with which they, the guardian angels and totem animals, hung themselves. And now these same soulless douchebags churn out heinous computerized songs that sound like shitty plastic robots having fake orgasms inside the shrieking engines of Boeing 747s.

Warning: The next several paragraphs (4 to be exact) are just me ranting about what makes modern corporate pop music so ghastly, so you might want to skip to the last few paragraphs. I could not control myself.

For years I’ve been unable to describe what exactly is so hateful about this generic, dystopian, musical abomination, in technical terms. I’d just stand there, sputtering apoplectically. So I can’t begin to express how grateful I was when I discovered the YouTube station of Rick Beato. Rick Beato is a veteran record producer, and several of his videos go into deep dives about what it is – exactly – that makes modern corporate pop music so deeply hideous. 

First, of course, and probably foremost, there is the monstrosity of auto-tune – the software program that makes vocal tracks pitch-perfect, mathematically perfect, and simultaneously makes those vocal tracks sound like the inhuman crooning of whiny, pubescent androids trapped in the air ducts of a Berlin rave. 

But it’s not just that. The soulless corporate douchebags use similar technologies to also make the beats digitally perfect. Even if, on the rare occasion, they use a real, flesh and blood, mammalian drummer, playing actual, old-timey drums, they still, once the track is recorded, dive back into the homogenizing, pasteurizing computer and sync-up the drum track to a flawlessly computerized metronome. Beato explained (and showed, visibly, on the graph-thingy on his computer) that when real people play real drums, there are constant slight variations – “imperfections” – in the beat. Our unconscious picks those up and goes, “Ah! Human beings! Organic life!” just as it does with the human voice. 

Beato points out numerous other aspects of modern corporate pop music. The way that it rarely allows any space, any air, any pauses or silences in the vocal tracks. Every nano-second must be a concussive onslaught, packed with the bludgeoning assault of the auto-tuned teenage androids trapped in the air ducts, and always multiple-tracked for that full-on seizure-inducing effect. Beato also points out, that (perhaps needless to say) the chord progressions themselves are breathtakingly crude and devoid of even the faintest gesture toward originality – pretty much the same three or four chords, over and over and over. 

Here’s where I return to my more adorable and delightful and less-ranting bloggish self

But here’s the thing. It’s not the face-melting, soul-rotting, existential terribleness of the product itself that most frightens and depresses me. The peddlers of this stuff are, after all, inhuman corporations, and they’re just doing what inhuman corporations have always done, giving the customer what the customer wants. 

No, what frightens and depresses me is when I dare to imagine: What must be going on in the hearts and souls of the young people who actually, willingly listen to this stuff? 

What frightens and depresses me is when I wonder: How much emotional deadness, internal vacuousness, and sterility would have to be in a person for him or her to not just tolerate this music when it’s playing at Starbucks or Target wherever, but to actually seek it out?

I always blame human degeneration on egoity, plain and simple – the self-created and self-enforced illusion that we are separate from the Radiant Sea of Conscious Light. Adi Da Samraj once made a reference to human beings being “driven mad by mortality.” He was referring to the suffering and insanity that results from being cut-off (or rather, seemingly cut off) from our own Hearts, our own tangible Divine Reality. 

So plainly we must hurl ourselves urgently into the Great Odyssey of authentic Spiritual practice, so that, through the Unitive Field that binds us all, we can begin to Awaken our planet from its dark slumber of painful separative egoity, and, thereby, eliminate the scourge of modern corporate pop music.

Subscribing to this blog = supporting your Spiritual practice = ending the pestilence of modern corporate pop music. Just connecting the dots for you. Extra credit: leave a comment! Maybe you think modern corporate pop music is awesome, and no pink-faced frat boys roofying girls are ever involved at any stage of its creation! Let me know!

I’m sitting outside at the coffeeshop, chatting with my old friend, Jack, when an old acquaintance comes barreling up to us on her bike. She stops in front of our table, legs spread wide as a sumo wrestler. Apropos of nothing whatsoever she announces, with Spanish Inquisition zeal, that she has been “working ceaselessly to shake white people out of their complacency around race issues.” Her exact words. Naturally, she herself couldn’t possibly be any whiter, with her freckly Peppermint Patty face, not if she were listening to Lawrence Welk, the Carpenters, and Vampire Weekend all at the same time. 

My friend Jack is African American. He doesn’t say a word in response to her proclamation. Buries his nose in his book, The Lotus Sutra, a classic Mahayana Buddhist text. The poor man is exhausted by guilt-racked white liberals craving some sort of ill-defined forgiveness and absolution from him, like he’s some sort of grand representative for all African Americans. I, too, say nothing, which makes everything suddenly feel awkward. Plainly, from the point of view of this old acquaintance, poised pugilistically astride her bike, the onus is on us to respond in some very specific way, to show that we are sufficiently down with the cause, and awed by her heroic activism. 

This aggressively white woman has, since the murder of George Floyd, gone batshit crazy with wild-eyed, mouth-frothing, hyper-wokeness on steroids, and, though I myself am a Chomsky-devouring Lefty, I find it unbearable. 

The very next pronouncement out of her mouth, without so much as a sporting nod toward a segue, goes as follows: “We have to recruit men to help dismantle the patriarchy.” I shit you not. She looks at me and Jack, her eyeballs almost vibrating with expectation and, again, some mysterious but menacing demand. 

Addressing race inequalities and dismantling the many toxic elements of the patriarchy are obviously worthy and urgent causes. But there is something terrifying about this kind of certainty of rightness, no matter how good the cause for which it is ostensibly deployed. This level of self-righteousness never ends well. I have the inescapable sense that this acquaintance of mine, given the power, would round up those people she decreed to be non-woke infidels and, without batting an eye, have them (us) burned at the stake.

I also feel certain that, as she’s bombing around the city on her crusade, she is unwittingly converting scores of normal, everyday liberals into full-blown Trumpers. 

Freshman psych texts, and plain old common sense, tell us that glassy-eyed certainty of one’s own moral virtue always masks buried inner-demons. When these inner-demons are unfaced and unintegrated they must be projected “out there” onto the world, onto “bad others.” Our intolerable shame becomes a “hot potato,” that we are always compulsively trying to “throw off” onto others. Some primal part of our brain thinks that if “they” are bad enough, that’ll finally make me feel okay. 

I believe that activism only becomes right action – action that contributes to deep change, action that is enduring and resonant with people, action that changes hearts and minds, action that keeps spreading out in ripples of woo woo, hippie goodness – when it, the activism that is, comes from profound humility, from knee-wobbling knowledge of our own homely, if not to say mortifying humanity…just like those “bad others” who are “out there.” 

Here are a few passages of Adi Da Samraj I am reminded of.

“The only way to solve the current world-situation is for everyone to ‘lose face’ – instead of everyone demanding to ‘saveface’…

“…only by everyone ‘losing face’ together will the collective of human beings be able to regenerate the moral strength and authority that is necessary if human beings everywhere are to require cooperation and tolerance of each other – and only when there is first such a regeneration of universally equalized moral strength and authority will there be a universal agreement to create and maintain a truly cooperative and tolerant global human community.”

“People talk about a ‘new paradigm’ – but, all the while, they are actually being the old paradigm. In that case, any ‘new paradigm’ tends to be just some sort of ‘costume’.

As long as people persist in the old paradigm, they are persisting in ‘tribalized’ ego- culture…There is no new paradigm until the old paradigm is dead – ‘Ground Zero’…A whole and new global culture of humankind must be born from this ‘Ground Zero’. 

“Taking the frightening facts of the world into account, one must deal with them in an entirely different manner than by egoic reaction. One must undermine – rather than directly confront – negative forces. The only security is in harmlessness. Harmlessness obliges one to open one’s face – and, indeed, to lose face! …One must always thoroughly understand and transcend the egoic role of being an opponent, and (on that basis) always actively and responsively undermine the oppositional pattern-energy that is in the opponent…”

“All have suffered. All are equally full of nonsense.”

Have you always felt unassailably certain and right that you should not subscribe to a blog such as this one? What if you’re not? Think about it.

I’m writing outside at the coffee shop and, sitting at a table a couple feet behind me, is a 20-something white woman in black hipster clothes (combat boots, yada yada) and half a head of jet-black hair. The other half of her head, the shaved half, has a five o’clock shadow. She is on the phone, and from her phone conversation, which it is manifestly impossible not to hear, I gather that she’s in a band. At some point, whoever is on the phone asks her if she knows of any available drummers. 

As it turns out, I myself have been itching to play a little recreational reggae lately (I play guitar, more or less). So, when she hangs up, I crane my head over my shoulder and say, “Excuse me, miss, sorry to bother you, but I overheard your call just now and I’m actually looking for a bass player around my age who likes reggae. Do you know of any?” 

She lifts her gaze from her phone. She looks at me. At first I can’t quite decipher her facial expression. I only know I suddenly feel oddly uncomfortable. “No,” she says, “I don’t know of any.”

It is then that I realize what I am seeing in her face. It’s an unmistakable phenomenon. I am seeing my own complete non-existence. What is being reflected back at me in this woman’s eyes is the empty void that she sees in a late-50s man. 

It isn’t contempt but I feel sure it could turn into contempt on a dime if, for some unimaginable reason, by some monstrous impertinence on my part, she was forced to take keener note of my entity-hood. To be clear: I’m not talking about being seen (or not seen) as a sexual object – simply as an extant human person. 

Ralph Ellison’s novel, The Invisible Man, was about many aspects of the oppression of African Americans. But one of those aspects had to do with white people plain old not seeing African Americans. I think a similar invisibility thing happens, in this country, to older people.

I feel like this young woman with the half-shaved head was a pure product of our youth-worshipping culture. In other words, it wasn’t just the hormonal swagger injected into her by evolution, the tiara of self-importance placed on her head by Mother Nature due to her brief ability to breed. Rather, it was the cartoonish magnification of that biological importance by an (according to me) adolescent and youth-obsessed culture. To be fair, I know plenty of people in their 20s and 30s who do not look at me the way this woman did. But I’m just saying: When you get a dose of this stuff, it is chilling.

Here’s a related anecdote from the trenches of the very same coffee shop. It was observed by a friend of mine, as he sat in the coffee shop working on his computer. Apparently, a man in his mid-to-late 50s stepped up to the counter to place his order. 

The particular barista who was helping him is covered in tattoos. Lots of spooky skulls and bloody daggers and whatnot. She’s got kind of a “Satan-lite” thing going on. Satan-adjacent. Satan-curious. In the summer she almost always wears shorts and tank tops, so you see lots of her tattoos, even when you try not to. After placing his order, he said to the barista, “Great tattoos.” 

Evidently, upon hearing this compliment, she spun around, pointed an accusatory finger at the man, and said, “Don’t you ever say that!” 

The man was visibly shocked. Bewildered, he said, “I wasn’t hitting on you…it wasn’t sexual…” 

She cut him off: “No! You don’t ever say that!” 

Now obviously, her reaction is fucked up on way more levels than I have the time, or the stomach, to go into in this post. Here I just want to call attention to the role of age in this interaction. I believe that this barista would never have taken that psychotically imperious tone if the customer had been a man her age (she’s probably in her late 20s). Plainly, in her worldview, older people are benighted, subhuman, vaguely yucky creatures shuffling around annoyingly on her planet – a planet that belongs to the glorious young. One chastises these older people as one pleases, as if one is the emperor Nero. 

Despite all appearances, this is not actually supposed to be a post about “ageism.” The term ageism would sound like I’m laying claim to a species of victimhood. And okay, fine, I guess I do sometimes feel hurt by the phenomenon – but that’s my own little jukebox number and I try to take responsibility for it whenever it starts up. I’ve read that ageism can have real economic consequences for many older people. Older people are often unable to get (or keep) jobs for which they are objectively well-qualified and so on. 

I’m just writing this post because I think it’s extremely important to be aware that, if you’re “older” – whatever that means to you – you are definitely receiving, from younger people and from the entire culture that adores and dotes upon them, very clear and specific messages about your value. And they are not good messages. The more aware you become of this dark and icky voodoo, the more you can let it bounce off you. 

Adi Da quotes I am reminded of:

“The usual human being, even by virtue of birth itself, has or acquires ‘psychological clocks,’ tacit beliefs regarding how his health and vitality are supposed to develop or degenerate according to his age. These clocks are generally an ‘age mythology’ that tends to perpetuate itself from generation to generation. Our habits and conditions of living tend to reflect our psychology and beliefs, and human beings do in fact become, develop, and degenerate in accordance with their subjective clocks. But the ‘clocks’ may be changed, if they are arbitrarily established and negative in effect…”

“If an individual lives a spiritual life, founded in truth and love, and practices a vitalizing or regenerative regimen of diet and life-activity in general, then he can change the clocks that are set by conventional beliefs and habitual reactivity. To begin with, he must simply and intelligently release all belief in the old clocks – the assumptions of necessary disease and degeneration…”

“Part of the belief psychology of these ‘clocks’ is that the body necessarily loses its vitality with aging. Life, like sex, is felt always to move toward a crisis of emptying, or the discharge of life….We are psychologically predisposed to expect and experience the progressive failure of experiential life as the years progress. We are convinced that aging will manifest a progressively degenerative cycle until death. And we can point to the experience of generations of human beings as proof that we are only being ‘realistic’ in our depressed convictions.”

“The degenerative crisis and its progressive cycle are, however, not necessary. They are likely, unless there is a complete change in the disposition and habits of the individual, but they are not necessary.”

If you ask me (you didn’t), one excellent way to reject debased cultural “norms” about aging is to subscribe to a new blog! How about this one?

Adi Da Samraj Instructs his devotees to “be love,” an admonition probably made, in one way or another, by virtually all Spiritual Masters, Gurus, Sages, and Saints. Here, now, a brief sampling of my failures to be love in a typical day. 

I’m in the produce section at the co-op. I want to grab some celery. I cannot, however, grab some celery, because a woman has installed herself directly in front of it for a leisurely conversation on her phone. She appears to live there, now, she and her phone, in front of the celery. I roll my eyes with infinite, exasperation. 

In truth, I guess it’s not really a “leisurely” conversation, so much as it is just a conversation. A regular old one. And actually, she doesn’t stand there very long at all. But can’t she see that I’m in a hurry? And that me-in-a-hurry is vitally important, certainly way more important than whatever inane nonsense is going on in her trifling existence, and hence, all lower-order life forms, vis a vis herself, should scatter out of my way like bowling pins? How is this not obvious? What part of “I am Sam Guthrie” does she not grasp? 

Moments later, as I tromp through the aisles, everyones’ covid-related behavior makes me angry and judgmental. The ostentatious double-masker parading through the frozen section. Despite a complete lack of evidence, I feel certain that he radiates a smug self-righteousness. I find it all but impossible not to see the 8,000 selfies he’s taken of himself in his hyper-compliant, virtue-signaling-gone-wild double mask, selfies no doubt slapped up on Instagram – and always with captions explaining how he does it all out of concern for others…the elderly, the vulnerable, the puppies. Ugh, I think. Shoot me now. 

Next, I’m kneeling down in the bulk section, scooping walnuts into a bag, when some dude, ignoring even the tiniest gesture toward social distancing, starts bumbling around in a bin directly above me. His skeevy, covid-panting face is about 2 feet away, as he shovels, into a bag, whatever idiotic food a cretin like this eats. Some kind of Stupidity Noodles. Privileged white male freak, I mutter to myself (without even the remotest sense of irony).

When I get home, arms full of groceries, the millennials who live right below us are cranking hideous corporate pop music. Mmthump, mmthump, mmthump. Compressed, auto-tuned, technified, adolescent vocals croon through a thousand computer filters and studio effects. It sounds like teenage robots faking orgasms. A wave of revulsion passes through me. I snarl to myself something about how anyone who could listen to this inhuman computerized dreck – made by ghastly algorithms and douchebag executives in business suits – is a soulless husk of a human being with a heart of plastic polymers made in Chinese sweat shops.

So, you get the idea. Not exactly hitting it out of the park when it comes to the whole “being love” thing. The real problem, though, is not simply that I fail to be love; it’s that I keep going about the whole be love project all wrong. That is, I try to be love. I try to be or feel loving, towards others. Usually because I’m trying to live up to an ideal of a good, evolved, spiritual person. Some days I’m more successful than others, but, in any case, the whole endeavor to be loving in order to fulfill some virtuous image is, on the best of days, absurd.

Once in a while, though, this Other Thing happens. I’ll be at the coffee shop or walking down the sidewalk or waiting to get to the celery. And, somehow, I’ll remember the feeling of my Guru. Lately, the feeling of my Guru has been a feeling of a wide, open spaciousness that’s as vast and silent as the sky. But it’s like a nectarous honey-ish silence. Or like the air is suffused with a rich, soothing, earthy incense – except it’s emotional rather than olfactory. So a nectarous silent emotional incense. You totally get it.

Anyhoo, when this happens, who knows how I behave? It’s always spontaneous and never pre-known. It conforms to no ideal or image. But I’m pretty sure it’s a lot closer to “being love” than anything else I do. 

Adi Da occasionally referred to the quote from the Bible, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Adi Da said that the order of these two injunctions is the key. The calling to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, comes first for a reason. It’s because that’s how the transformation of the living being happens. And if you truly do that – love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind – then the second injunction happens spontaneously. Thy can’t help it. 

But, according to Adi Da, we in the West typically reverse the order of these two callings. We do this because culturally, the West has a tendency to reduce religion to mere positive social behaviors (and, of course, the opium of consoling beliefs). A system to keep social order, as Marx and armies of bookish atheists have pointed out. 

In the West, we often give lip service to the first injunction without ever really facing what it could possibly mean…the ruinous ramifications of actually loving the Divine with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. The Divine Chaos that would actually create. Then we run around just trying insipidly to be “really nice.” Or, as in my case, trying to “be love.” And failing abysmally. 

Here are three relevant Quotes from my Guru, Adi Da Samraj:

“Love is Unqualified Divine Self-Radiance, without center or bounds. Since it is without center (ego-self) or bounds (body, thought-conception, perception, world), Love may not be willfully presumed or generated. It is a Process Realized by Grace, progressively, until it is altogether True.”

“…you cannot idealize the great love-feeling you discover in My Company and say that from now on that is how you are going to live. You will discover, as you may have discovered on countless occasions previously, that you do not do that. The heart is bound until energy and attention are free from the motive of the egoic self-knot, and that motive is essentially a contraction at the heart, or in the feeling-dimension of the body-mind.”

This last one I transcribed from a video, so all punctuation weirdness is mine:

“There’s no magnification of the capacity for love without self-transcendence, without self-understanding, therefore. So it’s not just a matter of ‘wanting it to happen’ and [Adi Da makes a face of effort, scrunching His shoulders up toward His ears] ‘trying to love.’ That’s a rather silly business anyway, because if you could do that, you would do it immediately. And you notice that you don’t do it immediately. And what does that mean? You don’t want to do it, that’s what it means. 

“It’s your own limitation, in other words. You want to do it and immediately notice you can’t. What does that mean? That there’s some uninspected part of you – apart from this idealistic motive – there’s another part of you, more or less uninspected, that doesn’t want to do anything of the kind. So that’s why idealism is not enough. Belief is not enough, and so forth. You must observe and understand yourself, and be willing to make self-understanding into a tool, for growth. Well, that means a real process, in the midst of real life, day by day, moment by moment.” 

[That process, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Adi Da’s Teaching, is basically to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind – which devotees access in, as and through our Guru, just as Jesus’ devotees accessed It through Him – and to also make great use of the self-understanding that then comes about, spontaneously.]

If you scour the lost Essene Gnostic Dead Sea Scrolls of Nag Hamadi, you find there was actually a THIRD injunction in that iconic Biblical quotation. The full version, hidden until now, goes: “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and they neighbor as thyself, and also make sure and subscribe to this blog.” It will be in Umberto Eco’s next novel.