On the face of it, my wife’s and my daily yoga practice doesn’t look especially grim. In fact, it looks like the opposite. We laugh a ton. We make lots of jokes. Like the one about how, if our uber-hip, 20-something selves could have peered into the future and seen us now, in our 50s, listening to this ruinously uncool music, we would have hurled ourselves off the top of the IDS building (or some gloomy gothic church, while Joy Division blasted from a 1980’s boom box) to stop it from ever happening. So our yoga routine doesn’t seem to be particularly serious. 

And yet in truth it is. Because what really makes these moments of humor such bright spots in the day? It’s how they stand out from the backdrop of subtle seriousness that’s otherwise there. The same could be said for the laughter we get from comedies on Netflix or Hulu. It, the laughter, is so notable because of how it contrasts with the ambient serious feeling-tone of the rest of the day. Here are a few examples of the things I took seriously today. 

First there was making our daily smoothies. Making smoothies involves all sorts of sober, triage-like decisions about which pricey superfoods to toss into the blender because I simply don’t have time to add them all. By the way, this sense of time-scarcity is itself, a fretful and serious thing, as are the guilty thoughts of being so privileged I can afford dorky superfoods. Making green smoothies is an orgy of quiet graveness.

Later in the afternoon I felt the addictive craving to indulge in five or 10 minutes of mindless Internet distraction – on a boneheaded MMA website, if you must know – and, as I did so, my whole vibe was positively grim. (Adi Da once pointed out that people indulging in addictions are always extremely serious and, sure enough, the two times I’ve been in strip clubs and the one time I was in a casino, that was the most striking thing – the look of morose, deadly, funereal seriousness on everybody’s faces.)

When Adi Da uses the term “serious” in a critical way, he means that the separative ego is virtually always serious – troubled and fretful on some level, even if very subtle. He has described this egoic vibe as, “the mood of concern” or “the feeling of dilemma in the heart.” 

Conversely, quite often, when he talks about humor, he doesn’t mean ordinary humor. He means a primal gnosis of the radical “non-necessity” of all arising experience; a lack of identification with self or phenomena; a free, wide-open, mindless, Transcendent orientation.

For me, then, this amounts to a handy barometer: A sense of fettered, thought-infested seriousness – even if very subtle – means I’m not practicing (spiritually). Or at least not much, or not effectively. Conversely, a feeling of loose, easy spaciousness means that, at least to some degree, I am. Maybe. 

Here is a bit of Adi Da’s teaching on the matter. 

“While you are alive, everything seems important…Enlightenment is to Awaken from the seriousness of experience…Despair, self-indulgence, stressful effort, discipline, real interest, knowledge, death, sex, food, everything is completely serious. This movement or tendency to survive, to continue in independent form, is profoundly serious, and it is also absurd because it must be understood and transcended. Enlightenment is to be restored to Divine humor…

“We are under the incredibly absurd illusion that there is an objective world “outside” Consciousness and there is a ‘me’ inside this body. There is not a shred of truth in these presumptions. What ‘you’ presume in your everyday consciousness in any moment is the drama of the seriousness of your independent existence. When you awaken, even for a moment to its true Position, which is senior to any phenomena, then the full humor and freedom of necessity to any experience is brought forth. There is only Enlightenment, Divine Freedom. No matter what arises.

“… you are so distracted by [your experience] that you have lost your humor. You have lost your true position. You do not have a right relationship to experience.

“The wrong relationship to experiential phenomena is to presume that you are a separate person, a separate consciousness, in the midst of a world that you know nothing about, that somehow encloses you, that is objective to you, that is separate from you. In that case, you see, experience is a very serious business. You have no option but to submit to it, to be distracted and tormented by it.

“The motive that keeps this sense of ‘reality’ continuing is basic to your sense of existence. Surviving as experience is what you are chronically doing. You are being this body-mind. You are moved to continue as that, and to glamorize it, pleasurize it, protect it, fight for it and all the rest of the catastrophic mindset that goes with it…

“…Therefore, you hold on to your present experience. But if you could give up everything, not through negative, reactive effort, but through Transcendental Realization, then your humor would be restored, and a different sense of existence would quite spontaneously arise. Then you would realize that there is no necessity to this present experience, except that it is set in motion through ordinary causation and will therefore continue for its term…

“The ordinary reactive personality, who is basically in despair and hysterical, can also say that life is meaningless, but such a person is very serious. The Enlightened man, however, Realizes total Freedom. He is no longer serious, but neither is he self-destructive. He has passed into Ecstasy. He has not suppressed or separated from himself – rather, all that he is has been transcended in the Radiant Transcendental Consciousness. 

“Thus, he is full of humor and delight. He is not aggressively opposed to the world, nor is he clinging to it. All the tension in his heart has been released. To speak of Enlightenment without that sign is nonsense. There is no Enlightenment without the release of the heart from all of its seriousness, all of its clinging to phenomena, high and low.”

Wouldn’t it be gloriously unserious, in fact downright silly, to subscribe to this blog?

The other night my wife Carolyn and I had just finished re-watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and were sitting on our couch, basking in the afterglow of Joss Whedon’s awesomeness, when I got a few texts from an old buddy of mine. 

The texts were links to YouTube videos of Trumpers who were devastated by Trump’s loss of the presidential election, but some guy had made soundtracks to the videos. As each person described his or her anguish, the guy played a melodramatic, minor-key piano, tailored exactly to their words. It was pretty funny shit. Carolyn and I laughed. 

But at one point this odd thing happened. On the second video, as the guy’s mock-sad piano played, this middle-aged woman was almost weeping about Trump’s loss. And something about the strain in her voice to hold her tears back made a hot ache rise up in my chest. In the next moment I noticed one of her braided pigtails had come a little undone and I thought of her fixing her hair that morning and maybe feeling good or bad about how it looked. I flashed on how I, too, have strained my voice not to cry, and how I, too, have felt good or bad about how my (dorky, quasi-1920s) haircut has looked on any given day. Suddenly I had this feeling of puffiness in my eyes that I get before tears well up.

Later that night, as I flossed, I thought about this response in me. It had bypassed all the obvious rational thoughts about how maybe the woman was a racist, homophobic, Q-Anon bigot, and so in no way deserved waves of pre-tear puffiness or hot chest aches. 

The response just hadn’t cared. It was mindless. It reminded me of film footage I’ve seen in which one monkey reaches out instinctively to comfort the suffering of another monkey, apparently not caring what monkey-ideologies the suffering monkey harbored. 

Here’s another thing it reminded me of. Years ago, I participated in a meditation retreat in this gorgeous old mansion in St. Paul. The retreat was led by the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Sherap Chodzin, and he shared a metaphor about the kind of compassion that comes up in us spontaneously, without calculation. 

Imagine you’re walking down the street in the winter and you see, in front of you, an old woman carrying two big bags of groceries in her arms. Then you see that she’s heading straight toward a big patch of glistening black ice. In that moment, Sherap Chodzin said, you would fly forward to help her, without a single thought. You wouldn’t think about her politics or about how helping her would add to your own good karma. You wouldn’t think about anything. 

You would be gripped by a mindless, primal reflex to help, to serve, because, in that moment, there would be no separation between you and the old lady. What was about to happen to her, would seem, in some indescribable way, like it was about to happen to you, too. Chodzin went on to say that, the more deeply we practiced the Buddha Way, the more situations in our lives will look – to us – like old ladies with bags of groceries heading for patches of black ice. 

So I don’t know. Maybe the way the suffering Trumper in the video hit me was one of those moments. Or maybe I was just being a monkey. 

In any case, it, the moment, whatever it was, passed quickly. We moved on to the third video and I laughed, along with Carolyn. As far as cleverly mean-spirited videos go, they were pretty creative and funny. But now, as I write this, I feel sad that that moment passed, and a subversive thrill runs through my body when I dare to imagine what a ruinous delightful mess it might make of things if my whole life were made of such moments.

Here are two passages from my Guru, Adi Da Samraj, that this moment brings to mind:

“Get straight. Overcome your own reaction… You can still discriminate and know when people are not right and so forth, but you don’t cease to love, you don’t become distorted by reaction. Reaction is ego. But you see, God Realization is about becoming liberated from all of your reaction. It’s not that you don’t know the difference between shit and shinola, but you utterly Transcend reaction, self-contraction – you utterly Transcend it. 

“…Then the infinite disposition of Love, of embrace, of compassion appears. And then it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what anybody ever did…You bless them. You help them to grow. You love them. You are willing to test them in love. You are willing to endure them. You’re willing to shout at them. But you Transcend all the limitations that humanity can animate. 

“Nobody deserves to be reacted to, in any absolute sense. Nobody and nothing. The Infinite Reality is Radiant, Infinite Love, all Free. All must be blessed. All must be treated with compassion. All must be healed. All must be Awakened…you see, it doesn’t make any difference what people do, ultimately. When the Heart is Awakened, then you do a different work. And as long as you’re reacting, you’re suffering the karmic bondage of egoity. And that’s really all there is to it. Freedom from that is God Realizing; dramatizing it is egoity. 

“You can suffer or you can love. You can complain or you can surrender. You can abuse or you can bless. But it’s really just that simple. And true maturity, God Realizing maturity, manifests great compassion, great love, great help, endures greatly…It’s not that I’m a fool and don’t know what people are doing. I’m just working with people to move them out of their suffering, their egoic disposition. …That’s what you’re growing toward, that disposition… 

“People are in a very difficult circumstance here, in a body that can experience delight, but which is gonna drop dead any moment here. And which is suffering all the time and is threatened all around. And they’re confused in their minds and they have no great experience and they’re just trying to work it out and do their best. And fundamentally most people don’t really have bad intentions. They may react, but they don’t really have bad intentions. They have good intentions – they may not do it too damn good, but they have good intentions. This is not paradise. This is a place where beings are in a profoundly difficult circumstance…

“So do not be stupid and cruel people…[Everyone is] fleshily presented, and dying…everyone who lives is dying and is confronted with the most incredible circumstance. All are deserving of your love and compassion, and also of your demand for the discipline of love beyond egoic ‘self-possession’, so that they too can enjoy the intuition of this Happiness.”

                                                                                                -Avatar Adi Da Samraj

You know how you could enjoy a moment of monkey compassion? Why, by subscribing to this very blog you are reading, that’s how! Praise be to you and the camel you rode in on!

Hello dear friends! It’s me again! Can you even believe it? I know I just posted/newslettered yesterday, but I decided this morning, after a lush, aquatic meditation, a meditation that seemingly took place in an octopus’ garden, that I wanted to offer a New Year’s Day blog post about joy.

I could talk about the cozy joy of one of our cats, Tiberius the Mysterious, purring in my lap as I meditate every morning and evening. Or about the silly joy of doing yoga everyday with my wife, best friend, comrade-in-arms, fiendish co-conspirator, and all-around sex pal, Carolyn – that yoga performed while listening to dorky, quasi-Indian, yoga music for which, if our young, cool, hipster selves could see us now, they would leap out of a 10-story building and plunge to their deaths, just to stop it from ever happening.  

Or I could talk about the creative joy of writing in my snuggly little office (the one that used to be my Rolfing office, pre-dumbass COVID-19) while listening to the tragically underrated New Wave band XTC, and DEVO’s critically-hated-but-actually-masterful second album, Duty Now for the Future, and the voluptuous, impish genius of Kate Bush. 

But instead I’m going to focus on these two really interesting meditations I had last week, and on how their unjoyousness was, paradoxically, what made them joyous. 

Y’see, I have this stubborn tendency to view meditation as a stiff martini, in the sense that it’s supposed to make my bodymind happy. I want it to transport me into deep ecstatic peace, vast silence, devotional bliss, stuff like that. In our way, this is the exact opposite of how you’re supposed to relate to meditation. It’s basically the approach of a junkie – self-focused, craven, seeking. All of which my head knows but my emotional self not so much.

Anyhoo, quite often, and despite my wrong-headed orientation, my Guru actually does somehow drag me out of painful emotional states (PTSD flashbacks, whatevs) and into all sorts of love-drenched, chest-melting, face-opening states. Sometimes tears, tidal waves of gratitude, all of that. For which I’m plenty grateful, don’t get me wrong.

But the two meditations last week were, for me, a whole new kind of goodness. Both times, as I sat down to begin meditating, I was in low, hurting moods. And the secretly-hoped-for-shift into overt shiny peace, silence, ecstasy, and fullness didn’t happen. Like, at all.

At some point though, in both meditations, a shift took place. Some part of me decided to not be concerned about my low, hurting mood and to just allow the sweetness of devotion to my Guru to be there anyway, simultaneously. Yes, the bodymind may feel shitty and hopeless, but really, who cares? What does that have to do with anything? I’m going to practice devotion to the Spiritual radiance that shines through my Guru anyway, at the same time. It was very simple and ordinary. 

These two meditations were in many ways different from each other. Each had its own unique qualities. But they could both be described in these basic terms. And in both cases I noticed that “behind” (so to speak) and all around the heavy, complicated joylessness of my bodymind there was a gentle glow of joy. My joylessness was still there, but it was arising in a boundless field of soft, silent joy. 

In a sense, I am more grateful for these tastes of the Happiness that Transcends the bodymind, than I am for the times when my bodymind is, itself, God-Smacked out of painful memory states into ostentatious bliss states. My intention for this new year is to be wide open to this joy that Transcends but also includes and embraces everything. Nom, nom.

Here is what I feel is a fine, fitting excerpt of Adi Da’s words for our new year. (NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with Gurus, Avatars, Siddhas and the like, you might be put off by His saying stuff like “turn to Me” as synonymous with “turn to God.” To us Westerners this sounds outrageous and frighteningly messianic. But God Realized beings have always spoken in these ways (e.g. the God Realizer Jesus said, “I am the Way. None shall enter the Kingdom of God but through Me.” So don’t worry. It’s all good.) Please enjoy. And may you have a blessed and joyous new year unfolding before you, day by day. 

“The Heart is Paradise, regardless of the signs of the times…It is a Divine Happiness, a Heart-Happiness – to be made concrete in your relations with one another…It is a disposition to be manifested in all of your life…As the ‘world’ takes on the color of death, you must more and more take on the color of the Heart…If you look to the ‘world’ instead of to Me, you will have more and more reasons to be depressed and ‘dark’ yourself, more and more reasons to be ego-possessed…[Instead] take God seriously, take the holy life seriously, in spite of the signs of the times.”

“…be converted, like the Scrooge, from Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Convert your life….You must be Happier than the ‘world’. You must be at the center of the ‘world ‘ – ‘knowing’ the ‘world’ as it is – and forget about it, and live for love…

“Never submit to the ‘world’, and never submit to separate ‘self’. Instead, turn to Me, commune with Me, and forget about the ‘world’. That is the life of Joy. And it is the law that must be manifested in every moment of your life, for all the years you live. Understand, then – and do this, for real…Make your life out of Joy…forget the ‘world’, and forget yourself. Love Me, and love one another. Be full of love. Be full of the Happiness That Transcends the ‘world’.”

                                                                        —Adi Da Samraj

A few weeks ago I was hunkered down in my little back-room office in our condo, having my Zoom session with my therapist, Patrick, and, at one point, out of the clear blue sky, he told me I was depressed. Apparently, I’d reported feeling bummed out for a few weeks in a row. Go figure.

Now here’s the thing. Like tons of other people, I had an abusive alcoholic parent. Consequently, I grew up feeling damaged and inferior. And I compensated for that feeling by developing an over-inflated, puffed-up self-image. Somewhere around the age of thirteen or fourteen, I decided I was some sort of advanced, together, “spiritual” guy. I was irreparably influenced by the 1970s TV show, Kung Fu, and began to imagine that I was the serene, ass-kicking, Shaolin monk hero, Kwai Chang Kane.

My Guru has been deconstructing my delusions of grandiosity – with help from my therapist, Patrick – for some years. But these sorts of defense mechanisms are durable little suckers. Like zombies, they can suddenly come back to life when you least expect it. So, insanely enough, I took Patrick’s new diagnosis as an insult to my vanity. I found it embarrassing. Unflattering. Unbecoming for a modern-day Shaolin monk. Kwai Chang Kane could not be depressed. 

Him telling me I was depressed was also…well…depressing. I mean, I’ve already been clawing my way up out of developmental PTSD for the last nine frigging years, and it’s improved a gazillion percent. But now depression? Seriously? I argued with him. “But what about the whole ‘flat affect’ thing? I thought depressed people were supposed to have a ‘flat affect.’ I don’t have that.”

“Yes, that’s a symptom of moderate-to-severe depression. You have mild depression,” he reposted. Eventually he said, “The depressed person is usually the last person to know that they’re depressed.” Hmmm. Touché. Well played, therapy man.

He added that my “mild depression” was understandable given the pandemic, the election craziness (this was the week after the election), my lack of contact with any human beings except my wife, and the beginning of winter, which means no more sitting outside writing at my precious coffee shops.

Immediately after this therapy session I burst dramatically out of my office and stormed across our condo to my wife, who was typing at her treadmill desk. “Patrick said I was depressed! Can you believe that?” I sounded like a child coming home from school and telling his mom about a kid who was mean to him on the playground.

“No, you’re not! That’s ridiculous.”

“Right? That’s what I said!” 

This display of allegiance on her part was all the more touching because she, too, sees Patrick for therapy, and we both think he’s pretty much a genius. In fact, that’s usually the exact thing we exclaim right after therapy. One of us will say, “So how was your session with Patrick?” Then the other one will proclaim, “He’s a genius!” So, typically, Patrick’s views carry way more gravitas for her than do mine. And that’s putting it charitably.

At our next session Patrick convinced me of the depression business and talked me into reading the Henry Emmons book, The Chemistry of Joy. So I’ve been doing some of the stuff in that book. Plus a couple of Wim Hof techniques every day – his wacky breathing routine and three-minute icy showers. And the depression has been dramatically improving. Kind of shocking, really.

The coolest thing, though, is that seeing difficult truths about ourselves – “insults to our vanity” – is excellent for spiritual practice. Because wherever I am denying or disowning, truths about myself, I am contracted – hardened in my living being. That means the God Force cannot get in. And when I say “God Force” I’m not being cute or poetic. At least not usually. I mean an actual, tangible Power that feels nectarous, rich, and alive in my body.

This is one reason the Guru has always emphasized that we must be willing to face anything about ourselves. Here, in talking about His own early years of sadhana (spiritual work or practice), Adi Da says: 

“… I never cared one whit what was ‘wrong’ with the body-mind. I did not have the slightest inclination to dissociate myself or protect myself from whatever I might notice, whatever might be the case, whatever I might have to discipline or overcome. There was not the slightest limitation on that process. 

            “So you must be. Why should you care what the particular impediments of your own egoic design are, and what its contents are? Why should you be hiding about any of that? Why should you resist criticism? Why should you care one whit about what your ego-patterning contains and what you are required to discipline about it? As my devotee, you should have no concerns whatsoever.”

The takeaway: When the Spirit is not breathing us and living us, it’s because we have not made any room for it. And that’s because we have not dared to feel our terrible need for it. We’ve buried the wounds within us that would make us know this need. I’m pretty sure this is what the first step in A.A.’s 12 steps is all about. Admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable. Seeing mortifying realities in ourselves tenderizes us, makes us porous, available, teachable.  

Adi Da said once that, traditionally, when seekers showed up at ashrams and monasteries: 

“Their heads were required to be bowed. You were expected to be crushed within, in a humble state, reflecting awareness of your habit of living. You were expected to arrive on your knees…”

Sometimes Adi Da spoke of this principle in terms of “losing face:”

“Satsang [spiritual company] with Me requires everything of you. It requires you to absolutely lose face. You must lose face in relation to the Truth. It is quite a different thing from being caught naked in the subway. You lose face by being absolutely vulnerable to God…”

As I write this, I’m getting the eerie feeling that I may have posted on this exact topic before. Sorry. I just find so much beauty in this particular bit of wisdom. I am deeply grateful that the very wounds that have hurt me so much throughout my life can be turned into God Communion, almost like alchemy. It’s a blessing beyond belief, and I bow down, again and again, at the Feet of my Radiant Guru.

Whether or not you feel absolutely vulnerable to God, you could perhaps take a baby step in that direction, starting by being absolutely vulnerable to getting a new newsletter in your email box! This one! 🙂

So get this. In the second ring of hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the people are consigned to spend all of eternity split into two sides, trying to roll huge boulders at each other. While doing so, each team shouts ragefully. (If I remember right, one team is made up of people who, when alive, were hoarders; the other side had been spendthrifts.)

You’d think the two sides would come up with more effective ways to attack each other. Especially given the ungodly amount of time they have on their hands for brainstorming. But, nope. Rolling huge boulders it is. 

Okay. So first of all, just…weird, right? I mean, two teams pushing boulders at each other. As far as eternal punishments go, that’s some objectively random shit right there. Whatever else he was, Dante was plainly one trippy dude. Either that or Satan is, if Dante was just doing straight reportage. 

Second of all, though: I’m astonished by how many people in my country, meaning the good old US of A, are split into two sides, shouting ragefully at each other, doing more or less the exact same thing as the damned souls in Dante are doing. Except – and this is key – no one is making them do it. No one has consigned them to it. 

Millions of Americans are literally choosing what amounts to Dante’s second ring of hell. They consign themselves to it. (I even saw some footage of a recent protest, Lefties vs Righties, where the two sides of the crowd were struggling to shove a huge dumpster at each other, pushing it back and forth, shouting ragefully…almost an exact re-enactment!)

On the other hand, these people are just doing an exaggerated form of what, according to Adi Da, all of us un-Awakened people do. He says that to presume to be a separate, subjective someone – a “me” – is to be inherently in conflict with all so-called “others.” It’s just that some of those others, at least for a time, please and flatter us enough that we’re nice to them.

Similarly, in the Upanishads it says, “Wherever there is an other, fear arises.” And once we’ve pulled off this idiotic ontological stunt – presuming to be a separate “self” trapped in a madhouse cosmos of separate “others” – the rolling of the huge boulders and rageful shouting is never far behind. All of which reminds me of this passage of Adi Da’s (try to get around the unusual usage of upper-case letters…long story…suffice to say Adi Da uses capital letters in this odd way in a few of his Source Texts).

“Every ego-“I” (or ego-Possessed body-mind) Is Involved In A Passionate and mortal Struggle With The Force and The Forces and The Parts and The Patterns Of conditional Nature.

Every ego-“I” Is Active As The Opponent Of All Opponents, but There Is No Final Victory—and Every Opposition Is An Irrational (or Fruitless) Search For Equanimity, Peace, and Love-Bliss.

Every ego-“I” Always Tends To Desire and Seek An ego-Made Refuge From Irrational Opponents. That Strategy Of self-Preservation Is Entertained In temporary pleasures and solitary places, but It Is Not Finally Attained. Only the ego-“I” (the Separate and Separative body-mind) Is Opposed and Opposing—and Every Opposition Is An Irrational (or Fruitless) Search For Freedom.

The ego-“I” Is Inherently, Always, and Irrationally (or Meaninglessly) Opposed. The “other” Is Always An Opponent (In Effect, If Not By Intention). The ego-“I” Is Confronted Only By Binding Forces, and it Is itself A Force That Is Tending To Bind every “other”. The “other” and the ego-“I” are mad relations, Always together in the growling pit, Bound By conditional Nature To Do such Nature’s deeds To one another.”

The idea that every opposition is an irrational (or fruitless) search for Freedom stopped my mind for a moment. I’d never thought of it that way. But I can feel something primally true about that. For some reason, it makes a wave of compassion for all of us go through me.

So I guess the prescription, as always, is to plunge into some sort of wild, juicy, lively, ruinous spiritual practice, and, thereby, start to have this grim-assed illusion of subjective-selfhood washed off of us with the Holy Firehose (not to be confused with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, for which the number of the counting shall be three). Or, if you’re already so plunged, pray ferociously for more plunging.

‘Ever feel like you’re trapped in the growling pit, pushing boulders around and shouting ragefully? Why not get swell emails there by subscribing to this very blog? I mean, as long as you’re in hell anyway.

“Everybody is like an archaeological site…each individual is possessed of very complex ‘subjectivity’ that is made of archaic moments of adaptation. When confronted by the circumstances of life, you resort – at random, very primitively and very automatically – to these ‘solutions’…”

“Memory is just an impulse to dramatize a certain archaic disposition. Thus, you are always thinking and remembering: ‘This looks like that. That looks like that. This reminds me of that.’…”

                                                                                    —Adi Da Samraj

On any given day, I see in myself endless examples of what Adi Da is talking about here. For instance, this morning, before I even meditated, I shuffled up to my computer to check my email. I craved the notorious dopamine hit. This was basically a reenactment of my adolescent self, craving hits of good feeling from my legendary electric bong with its badass, gatling, one-hit bowl. 

A little later in the morning I was making our smoothies, swirling around my kitchen, tossing exotic substances into our blender, like a mad, health-nut, Sufi dervish. As always, I thrilled inside imagining the shocking health benefits these substances would confer upon me and my wife and pretty much any carbon-based organisms within a two-mile radius of us.

In this case, I was recapitulating my boyhood obsession with comic books. In my mind, each magical element I threw in the blender was essentially a Marvel superhero. The antioxidants from the amla powder zoomed through my wife’s and my body in gleaming yellow costumes, zapping hapless free-radicals. The chlorophyll of the chlorella looked like the Hulk, glowing with bright healing green light, blasting life-giving oxygen into our cells. 

Last example. With our US presidential election just three days away, I can easily lapse into fear about what might happen. I don’t need to enumerate the dark and heinous things that could transpire with a Trump victory. They are all obviously very real.

At the same time, whenever my mind imagines those awful scenarios, there is a highly specific way my nervous system lights up. It is precisely the circuitry that lit up when I was a boy, anticipating my alcoholic father’s next explosion of rage. When I get into fear about this election, it feels exactly the same, in my body, as my terror of him used to feel. Exactly the same. In both cases, my amygdala shrieks that a colossal psychotic force out there is going to annihilate me. The Guru again:

“When you are at your weakest, or when circumstances impinge upon you most heavily…the models (and the impulses to action) of the past take you over. You conform to them, you dramatize or incarnate them, and you find yourself acting as you did at an earlier age. Everybody does that.”

The point is, no matter how scary the actual, real-world possibilities are, what’s going on in me is – unmistakably – a trippy reenactment, an ancient program looping in my body mind. Adi Da goes on to say that:

“Your obligation is to recognize that the entirety of your ‘subjective’ life amounts to nothing but signs of old adaptation, and that is all it is.”

For me, it is wonderful medicine to become more and more aware that I – ordinary everyday “I” – am basically a chaos of old automaticities. Because the more I notice this, the more simply and directly I so-to-speak “repent” of the whole idiot repetition-machine of self. This softens me into whatever Unknowable Mystery it is that Lives and Breathes us. And in that disposition (to whatever degree I allow myself to fall into it), I am certain I will be of much more use to the world and my friends, no matter what happens with this election. 

Do you usually not subscribe to odd little blogs? Why not play with a new adaptation, by subscribing to this one?

I think I over-bond with coffeeshop baristas. I keep it well-hidden, of course. Outwardly, I have impeccable boundaries. I never do any weird oversharing. I like to think I am a commensurate and equilateral sharer of the highest order, my repartee almost painfully appropriate.

But it’s all an act. Deep down inside, I’m all over the map. This morning, for example, Suzy was working at my favorite neighborhood coffee shop. We chatted for several minutes, as always. Then I judiciously wrapped up our small talk with a note of formality, all but adding a curt bow and a crisp Prussian click of my boot heels.

Emotionally, however, I didn’t really want to end our chat. Some hidden part of me longed for more connection – to laugh about our favorite TV comedies, exchange life philosophes, and world views. It’s not the least bit sexual or romantic. I have the same latent urge with my favorite men baristas. 

For example, there used to be, among the baristas, this young but haggard- looking, weather-beaten, chain-smoking guy. He was probably in his mid-twenties, but he always appeared like an old hungover Walter Matthau. I can’t recall the guy’s name. But he was awesome. And, magnificently enough, he’d always spin my kind of music in the coffee shop – the Clash, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Television, Lou Reed. 

I’d get so excited. If he wasn’t busy helping a customer I’d bound up to the counter and he and I would talk about whatever music he was playing. And again, just like with Suzy, some part of me secretly yearned to plunge into long discussions over afternoon beers, discussing the minutiae of these musicians – why DEVO’s cover of Satisfaction is the best cover anyone has ever done of anything; David Byrne’s bubblegum pop influences; the incomparable bass-lines of Bruce Thomas in Elvis Costello’s first band, the Attractions. 

Now, I am a reasonably functional grown up, so in actuality I do know that if one of these baristas were to actually ask me to grab a beer, I would think it was bizarre. And I know that we’d have nothing in common and, as we sipped our beers, we’d bore each other to death. The whole thing would be awkward. But the yearning remains. 

It’s not that I don’t have close, dear friends – including, front and center, my amazing wife. They and I share with each other vulnerably and exuberantly. But still, there’s this other part of me, a part that feels a naked and insatiable longing for contact. And apparently, it cannot, at least at present, be appeased by actual human intimacy. It’s just sitting there, frozen in the shadows, hungering for connection, waiting to be opened to by me, and held by the Nectarous Love-Juju of Being.   

The thing is, it can’t be touched by the Nectarous Love-Juju of Being while I am busy disowning it, suppressing it, dissociating from it. Which I tend to do. Unconscious parts of us are places in our body-minds where we are contracted, constricted, recoiled, clenched. And then the Nectarous Love-Juju of Being (that I access through my Guru) can’t get in. 

“By tendency, ego-bound individuals invest only a portion of themselves in practice of the Way. They bring to school only the most superficial aspect of themselves–their social, outward character. Behind that superficial character is a hidden personality…You must become sensitive to this hidden personality and oblige yourself to go to school with your whole personality.…you simply cannot practice any better than you practice at the feeling level, in the emotional domain of your hidden personality…

…[you have a certain level of self-understanding]…but another dimension is almost entirely untouched. It is almost virgin insanity…It is like an anchor lying in the sea while the ship is trying to move at top speed. You must bring yourself to school at that level…it is a terrible ordeal. I acknowledge this….It cannot be avoided. There is no way at all that we can set it aside and say that spiritual life is just a pleasantry. Spiritual life is not meditation, seeing visions, and going to heaven at death. It is a very, very difficult ordeal…

                                                             —Adi Da Samraj

What, you ask, might bring YOUR unconscious shenanigans more into the light of day? Why, subscribing to this blog, of course! How could it not? Go ahead! You know you want to! Eets only wafer-thin!

One day last year, I was sitting outside at my neighborhood coffee shop, and three different friends all came up to me, one after the other, and told me they were having hard weeks. It was uncanny. I mean, that’s weird, right?

One was Bill, an indestructible heroin addict with the erect posture of an Archbishop and enough raw vitality to light up Houston. “Everything just feels so epically fucked up,” he said, laughing with sheer astonishment. 

Less than an hour later, my dear old friend, Jack, showed up. He’s a yoga teacher who lives by old-world – in fact almost Homeric – codes of honor. Truth, valor, protection of the vulnerable, all of that stuff. He is also a master of pop culture trivia. Imagine if Achilles was a Zen monk who also had an encyclopedic knowledge of Frank Sinatra, Jimi Hendrix, and John Wayne. That’s Jack. He sat down, looked off into the distance, corrugated his forehead, and said something about life feeling so difficult. I could see the muscles working in his jaw. It was disconcerting. If Zen monk Achilles can feel that bad, what chance do the rest of us have?

The third friend who dropped by was a Falstaffian giant with a hoary beard and hieroglyphic tattoos on his beefy forearms. His name is Craig, and he’s usually as exuberant as a Russian Cossack. On this day, however, he stood, towering over me like a mountain, and wondered whether life was worth the trouble. All three of these, I remind you, were in one day. Meanwhile, oddly enough, I, too, had been feeling struggly that week, even by my standards.

After Craig lumbered sadly away I thought: That’s kinda weird. These three guys, plus me, all having really brutal weeks, for no discernible reasons. Then, like a good little Westerner, I thought, well that’s obviously just a coincidence. 

But, I then thought, what if it’s not? What if the four of us were having tough weeks because we’re all connected in some invisible way?  All “tuned in” to something or other. What if there really is a unifying Field of Consciousness and there’s been, I don’t know, like, some kind of “disturbance in the Force” that people are affected by? 

I know most people would say that – even if it wasn’t just a coincidence – there was surely some other nice, non-woowoo explanation. Something in the headlines that day. Or maybe a low-pressure front. Or a kind of pollen in the air. Or a new 5G tower zapping us with Martian death rays. Astrology buffs would no doubt say that Mercury was, yet again, as always, in fucking retrograde.

Here’s the thing though. Imagine if the world’s most prestigious scientists suddenly announced, with Viennese accents and everything, that there is, in fact, a unifying Field of Consciousness. The whole damn universe is floating in it, like an idea in God’s mind. They’d scientifically proved this. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. All of existence is brilliantly alive, and all separation is a superficial illusion. Newscasters were talking about it on the news every night, even grudgingly on Fox.

My question, then: If this happened, would I notice way more signs of this now-officially-sanctioned Oneness? Would I observe far more trippy synchronicities, strange correspondences, mysterious patterns in my life, psychic voodoo, and tacit feelings of connection with all beings…for the simple reason that I was, so to speak, allowed to? For the simple reason that authorities and pundits on TV had formally ratified the possibility?

And that question leads pretty unavoidably to this question: Where, or from whom, do we get permission to notice what we notice, and to know what we know, to presume the paradigm we presume, and, therefore, to live how we live?

Here’s a piece of Dharma from my Guru that this reminds me of.

“The fusion of scientific materialism and scientific method is a very destructive force that is overwhelming world civilization. And it’s forbidding human beings from entering into a depth of involvement with Reality that has been used since the most ancient of days, for tens of thousands of years…to be entered into the sphere of Reality beyond the merely gross appearance of things. No authority, scientific or religious or of any other kind, has a right to make declarations that enforce belief or prevent getting to know the Truth. No such right exists, and no such right should be allowed to be presumed.”

                                                – Adi Da Samraj, from the CD, Science is a Method, Not a Philosophy (Note: I transcribed this from the audio, so punctuation is all completely made up by yours truly.)

By the way, I hereby grant you full permission to subscribe to my blog! And to comment, too! You’re welcome!

“All the while, what you want, and what you would give up everything for, is Happiness Itself, Utterly Free and Eternal. And this is, in fact, what you are all seeking. But you suggest that you are seeking all kinds of this-and-that.

What you are really seeking is the Divine Love-Bliss-Happiness – Prior to ‘objects,’ Prior to illusion.

And I Am here Showing you how to Realize That.”

                                                —Adi Da Samraj

One of the “this-and-that’s” I seek each day is the blob of shade at my neighborhood coffee shop. Thanks to fuckhead covid-19, when I go to coffee shops I only sit outside. The sun gets hot quickly, and the sidewalk in front of my neighborhood coffee shop only has one, small, coveted blob of shade, thrown by an elfin tree. (Note: I wrote this post when it was still hot out.)

Amongst we regulars, there is much jockeying to stake out the blob of shade. And the blob of shade, for its part, behaves as blobs of shade have behaved since the dawn of time, sliding very slowly along the ground as the sun glides across the sky. That means you have to keep moving your chair and table. You also have to keep your eyes peeled for the woman who comes every day with Cecil, the adorable puppy.

Today the woman with Cecil the adorable puppy placed her chair in the hot sun…but in precisely the spot where the blob of shade would be in, say, thirty minutes. I did not notice this. So then, while I was hunched over my notebook, madly scribbling away, the blob of shade slowly inched its way off of me and moved onto her and Cecil. And then, thanks to social distancing, I couldn’t move back into the blob of shade without encroaching on her six-foot perimeter with my pestilential self. Well played, woman-with-Cecil-the-adorable-puppy. Well played.

Sometimes, however, I don’t feel like negotiating the complex geopolitics of the blob of shade. On those days I trundle over to another walking-distance coffee shop. Its sidewalk tables are blessedly on the shady side of the street. But this coffee shop, too, has its challenges because, in addition to shade, I also look for a dynamic energy coffee shops. It is another of the this-and-thats I’m always seeking – a boisterous social vibe.

Now, during the pandemic, only two kinds of humans come and sit at this coffee shop’s sidewalk tables. There are mentally ill people, sometimes hauling huge suitcases piled high with stuffed garbage bags. And there are young, clean-cut Christians with great skin who talk unceasingly about their ministries and their missionary expeditions to Africa. Also, I’ve noticed that they talk a lot about how to figure out what exactly is and is not a sign of God’s plan for them. 

At the end of their discussions the young, well-scrubbed Christians always close their eyes, bow their heads, and one of them will launch into a long, chatty prayer. One time a young bearded man with crucifixes tattooed on his calves delivered one of these prayers. At the exact same time, a mentally ill man, sitting at a table nearby, spoke animatedly to himself about secret rays from the government that interfered with your cells’ ability to uptake calcium. 

I had stupidly forgotten my earbuds, so the two monologues competed for my attention. (For the record, the mentally ill guy’s monologue was way more interesting and believable.) Despite the excellent shade, the whole vibe at this coffee shop was very desolate and grim. These things happen when you forget what you’re really seeking. 

Could you find Love-Bliss-Happiness by subscribing to this blog? Seems highly unlikely. But worth a shot!

Last week, when I was writing outside at a coffee shop, I took a break to chat with this guy I know from around the neighborhood, James, who’d walked by with his amiable and faithful pitbull. While we were talking, a young man with friendly, thoughtful eyes came up and asked us for money. I guiltily explained that I had no cash because now, in covid-19 times, who carries cash anymore. 

James, however, had a whole different vibe with the guy. “No man, I can’t help you,” he said, in this super chill way. “I appreciate your hustle, though, brother.” He spoke with this languid, unhurried rhythm. Then he casually fist-bumped the guy, said goodbye to him and me, and strolled off, his pitbull waddling happily alongside him.

James had once done 20 years in prison and I think that’s where he learned to relate to people in that loose, easy-going, but firm way. To me, it had been like a scene in an early Martin Scorsese movie.

The very next day I was sitting and writing outside a different coffee shop and a severely drunk man was teetering from table to table, asking people for money or cigarettes. At one point he wobbled up to the table next to mine, where a bald, stern-looking, Ethiopian man in stylish clothes sat smoking. The Ethiopian man made an angry flicking away motion with his hand and said, in this thick accent, “Get out of here, go away.” He was so forceful that he almost made me get up and scurry away.

The day after that I was at my neighborhood coffee shop – home base, as it were – talking to my friend Jack, when a man suddenly materialized next to us asking us for money. He made incomprehensible mutterings and quoted the Bible, something from Romans. He wore a blue T-shirt and he had the physique of a child.

This time I had some cash on me, four quarters in the bottom of my backpack. To maintain social distancing I set it on this planter ledge-thing and then went back to my seat. He pocketed the change.

 Jack didn’t give him any money. Instead, Jack got up from his chair and said, authoritatively, “Come over here for a minute, I want to talk to you.” He sounded like the guy’s dad. The man instantly obeyed. The two of them went across the street and sat on a wooden bench. “Sit right there,” Jack commanded, pointing to a spot on the bench. I couldn’t hear the rest of their exchange and resumed my writing. A few minutes later Jack came back.

“What on earth did you say to that guy?” I asked.

“I just laid a little Advaita Vedanta on him,” Jack said, happily. Advaita Vedanta is an ancient spiritual philosophy of non-dualism from India. Jack worked for almost two decades in a violent psych ward, so he is a mentally-ill-person whisperer.

All three of these instances were wonderful lessons for me about being in relationship. James had been so laid-back and collegial with the man who’d asked us for money, whereas my guilty apology had been a distancing wall between me and that dude.

My giving a buck to the mentally ill guy who’d come up to me and Jack was tainted with the same guilt. Guilt can be a useful indicator of having done something wrong that needs to be rightened. But it can also be just one more expression of “the mood of you don’t love me,” which Adi Da says is the fundamental mood of the ego. It is the chronic ego game of avoiding relationship. Jack, on the other hand, engaged with the dude, even offered him a little lecture in Eastern philosophy. I’ll bet the guy remembered Jack’s offering more than my dollar.

I don’t want to make it sound like I’m always some sort of freakish guilty dork with panhandlers. Sometimes I engage in rowdy, garrulous ways with strangers asking for money. But sometimes I don’t. 

Even the Ethiopian man’s disdainful shooing away of the drunken man was wonderful in its way. It was simple, direct, honest, not the least bit condescending. In that sense, it was vibrantly relational. I believe that, on some level, the drunken man appreciated it and was served by it, a gruff sidewalk benediction.

Here’s some Dharma from my Guru that this reminds me of:

“The ego-“I” is the avoidance of relationship (or the contraction of feeling-attention). The life of the ego-“I” is separation and separativeness or the reactive pattern of “you do not love me”. 

The avoidance of relationship is a contraction or separation at the primal center of life, at the origin of consciousness and energy, the Heart…This contraction is a folding away, a compulsive solidification which…creates “me” (identification, the point of contraction)…

Nevertheless, it is possible to be converted, transformed, and rightly adapted and, thus, to no longer live as the ego-“I” (or the separate and separative self-sense).“

Just think how relational it would be for you to subscribe to this blog! And/or leave a comment! It boggles the mind.