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!