This morning, sitting at a sidewalk table outside of my neighborhood coffee shop, I decided to meditate on my Guru. I don’t just mean in the internal way that devotees of Gurus are always supposed to be doing, all day long, even while stuffing kale into their blenders or breathlessly telling their wives about yet another aspect of the genius of Joss Whedon which perhaps they had overlooked.

No, I mean I actually busted out a small, laminated photograph of my Guru, propped it up on the black metal table against my green tea, and fell into Communion with the Spirit Radiance for which my Guru is a window.

This is not a normal thing to do. Typically, devotees commune with their Gurus using outer images (photos, paintings, statues) only in sacred, set-apart environments – formal meditation halls, temples in ashrams, before altars, places like that. But I don’t know. It was very early in the morning. The streets and sidewalks were completely empty. An eerie, covid-19ish silence was in the air. I was the only person out there. Plus the sky was blanketed in low, thick, grey clouds which, for some reason, added to the clandestine feeling. So I figured what the hell. 

But here’s what I noticed. Every time I started to soften into the joy of my Master’s spiritual presence, I would suddenly catch myself, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was approaching. I’m not sure why I did this. It’s not like I was making funny faces or weird noises. 

Then I’d start to meditate again. The tension in my heart would start to unclench, my thinking would start to get diffuse, drifty, remote, wispy. But again, I would snap myself back into ordinary consciousness, glancing furtively up and down the sidewalk. It felt like I was doing something obscene. How dare I consort nakedly with the voluptuous Feeling of Being, right out there in public?

This made me think of Adi Da’s words. He said our culture had a taboo against ecstasy. Our culture supports pseudo-ecstasy, the kind you get from drugs, shopping, entertainment, and addictions of all kinds (as long as they don’t get too out of hand). But real ecstasy – meaning the delicious freedom of self-transcendence – is subversive.

Real ecstasy makes you way less inclined to buy unnecessary shit. It makes you way less inclined to indulge in unhealthy, addictive processes. It makes you way less inclined to cooperate with whatever causes suffering in other beings. It grows you up so you are less childishly dependent on authorities (corporate, state, religious, or even your own Guru).  Real ecstasy, in short, is bad for business.

Here’s an absurd quantity of Adi Da’s teachings on this topic, but, as the Four Tops said, I can’t help myself:

“True meditation is the transfiguration of the body-mind in the Radiance of Communion with God. That process is love, the release of all contraction and all limitations to the native radiance of the being. When you are in love, you are truly meditating. The mind is attentive, the body is full, and you feel blissful. Therefore, to be in love is the paradigm, the architect, the metaphor, of true meditation. However, love is the process that we are all seriously trying to avoid. To be in love is embarrassing and awkward. Our faces change, and we become foolish, not so ready-made, buttoned-down, cool, and strategic. We consent to be in love only on very rare occasions, usually when we have realized some romantic sexual association. Yet, to be in love, to be submitted into the Radiance of God, is the native state of Man. God is love. That is true enough…

The reason you are obsessed with desire to be released and consoled by experience is that you have fallen from love. You have become contracted and self-possessed. Therefore, you want to be satisfied, whereas if you could be released, if your heart could cease to be hard, then the whole body would become full of light, full of bliss, as it is from time to time. Every now and then you catch a glimpse of real Life, and the Grace of the awakening to love is actually received and felt in those moments. But to become responsible for love at all times, under all conditions, in all relations, is the discipline that obliges you….

You must enjoy the capacity to be much more exaggerated! The situation in the world suppresses our feeling. It makes us want to be released, to go to heaven, to be elsewhere, to dropout, to stop creatively influencing the circumstances of life. The more news you read, the more desperate you become. Therefore, you should continue to read the news, but you must also constantly consider the Teaching of Truth, and you must come to Life, you must Commune with Life and be enlivened by the Living God. You must begin to enjoy the capacity to be love, and, with others, you must create a human cultural environment in which you can be love.

In the ”downtown” world of popular culture, we cannot look and feel and be happy; we cannot be lovers. We cannot be free and full of Life. We must be very serious, strategic, cool, ironic, and grown only to the level of the navel. You can observe, in all of your relations, the downtown, retarded, unexaggerated, self-possessed, lifeless quality, your own fear of motion and emotion, gracefulness, and happiness. You are afraid to express happiness, and you are afraid to be happiness. In the conventional world, you must always be on guard, affecting immunity…True God-communion is communion with the Living God, not just prayer to some abstract deity for help. The Living God is Present, absolutely Present, Radiant as your own feeling, Conscious as your own consciousness.When you begin to awaken to this feeling-intuition and enter into God-Communion bodily, then all this puzzling about life and death, the meaning of the universe, the laws of nature, all the problematic wondering comes to an end.”

And from another book (no, I’m NOT done!):

“Sex (or bodily pleasure), laughter (or genuine, and heart-open, humor), and Real-God-Realization (or Most Perfect Identification with the Divine Reality Itself) are, each and all, forms of ecstasy (or of ego-transcending enjoyment). For that reason, all three are, in various ways (and by various means, both personal and collective), suppressed, manipulated, prevented, falsified, and culturally excised from your daily lives.

Sex is an obsessive concern in human societies. Human beings are always seeking pleasure, including sexual pleasure in particular, but, for reasons they do not understand, they are also always tending to be involved in the suppression, manipulation, and non-enjoyment of sex, or of the bodily pleasurableness of existence altogether. As a result, life is not lived as an intentionally (and truly) pleasurable event. Whenever there is enjoyment to the point of ecstasy, to the point of no stressful concern whatsoever, to the point of ragged pleasure, it is threatening to the ego-“I”. In the circumstance of such ecstasy, you (as the ego-“I”) feel that something is coming into the world that is going to destroy your life, or destroy the order of society! Thus, you do not consistently, truly, and freely allow ecstasy to appear except in the double-minded (or ritualized yes/no) moments that you have (generally, according to relatively sex-negative and pleasure-negative social and religious conventions) fitted into your life.

Along with the fact that every individual is socially conditioned to suppress, control, and manipulate the sense of bodily pleasure and the animation of bodily pleasure, there is the presumed necessity of being “serious”, being humorless, being a stressful seeker, being someone in dilemma in other words, being the “usual” (or “normal”) person. Thus, whenever there is the suppression of bodily pleasure, there is also the suppression of genuine humor. And, where there is no bodily (or psycho-physically allowed) pleasure and no genuine (or heart-allowed) humor, there is no Real-God-Realization!

In Truth, and in Reality, Divine Self-Realization is not possible without true pleasure and true humor. Because of your egoic (or self-contracted) orientation to life (and your indoctrination by all of the ego-based illusions and control-signals of the collective ego-world of mankind), you tend to presume that Real-God-Realization (or the Realization of Truth Itself, or of Reality Itself) must be pleasureless, humorless, lifeless, silent, and “elsewhere”. The mental images you have of traditional saints and mystics are all, most characteristically, pleasureless and humorless. These images carry the implication that such beings are involved in some “thing” somewhere “else”. Therefore, from the conventional point of view of ego-“I”, if any Realizer (of whatever degree, or stage of life) is seen to be laughing, dancing, or bodily enjoying himself or herself here, he or she immediately becomes suspect. That is why some people have, sometimes, become (it seemed) very (and very humorlessly) “offended” by My “Crazy” Manner.”

Nope, still not:

“Everything in the sacred domain is about ecstasy. Everything in the social (or secular) domain is about control of ecstasy and using the principal human faculties (of body, emotion, mind, and breath) for other (generally, non-ecstatic—or ego-based) business in the moment.

The basic taboos of the secular social domain are against sex (or bodily pleasure altogether), laughter (or genuine humor, and mental freedom), and Real-God-Realization (or ecstatic identification with the Divine Reality). From the ”point of view” of the secular social domain, sex, laughter, and Real-God-Realization must be controlled, because they are forms of ecstasy—and because the social-personality world feels threatened by the lack of social ”self”-control implicit in ecstasy.

Within the context of the secular social domain, such “self”-control is appropriate, and even necessary, for the purposes of conducting ordinary human business. There should be certain forms of “self”-control (or social “self”-discipline) in that domain of practical interaction between people. It is just that the world of human activity and experience must not be reduced to being only that practical (or secular) domain.

The sacred domain must be the core of life, and all kinds of activities and experiences belong there that do not belong in the secular social domain—but you must be able to enter into the sacred domain, readily, and be there when you get up in the morning, and freely enact there all the forms of ecstasy that you do not enact in the common (or secular) daily domain. 

The sacred culture determines how the forms of ecstasy are accommodated in human life, whereas the secular social world always wants to exclude them. If you have nothing but the secular social world, then ecstasy in all its forms—even sexual —becomes suppressed, its integrity destroyed. Then life becomes nothing but a ”self”-conscious exercise in which you merely preserve social rules, extending them even into the bedroom and the prayer room—such that you never turn ecstatic, you never ”go native”, when you are outside the common social(or secular) sphere.”

And I ask you, what could possibly be more ecstatic than subscribing to this very blog? I mean, I guess a great many things could. Almost anything, really. But still. Maybe, against all odds, subscribing would be pretty damn ecstatic. Only one way to find out…