Today, Carolyn joined me writing at a coffee shop – a different one than I usually go to. This place is big and airy and gorgeously appointed, full of rich dark woods and kitschy curios arranged with fastidious care. Inside, it feels like the set of a Tim Burton movie. And, rather gloriously, its big outdoor tables are shrouded in the shade of tall, stately trees. It’s the perfect coffee shop, really. 

Unfortunately, as we sat there, three silver-haired, athletic-looking men at the table just to the left of ours were talking incredibly loudly. They were maybe in their early sixties. Serious cyclists or runners, from the look of them. They were arrayed in varying degrees of lordly man-sprawl. Lots of fingers interlaced behind heads and spread-eagle legs. The discussion they were broadcasting to the neighborhood was about boats and boating. Engine sizes. Customizing options. The best lakes upon which to boat. 

Carolyn and I marveled at the startling volume of their speech. At one point I said to her, “It’s like if I were talking to you BUT I WAS TALKING THIS LOUDLY!”  I shouted those last six words. She punched my arm, laughing, and said “Shhhh.” But it actually was the exact same volume with which they were bellowing at each other/the block.

I pride myself on my distance-appropriate, environmentally-sensitive volume of speech. It’s really a thing to behold if I do say so myself, almost like a superpower. Plus, I think of myself as a freakishly skilled listener, a veritable Michelangelo of attentive little head nods and appreciative “mmmm” sounds. Plus I’m superb at narrowing my eyes significantly because that thing you just said evoked such deep reflections in me. All of which might be me protesting too much, suggesting that I harbor, somewhere within, my own white, older-middle-aged, silver-haired, loud blowhard, secretly waiting to be unleashed. 

Two other small things happened today while we were at the coffee shop. One: When I was standing in the socially-distanced line to get Carolyn’s and my beverages, this very large lady exited the coffee shop through what was supposed to be the entrance only (huge signs told people to leave through the other huge door). She had to push very close to those of us who were waiting in line, a real faux pas in covid-19 times. As she wove her way through us, she said, “I don’t think I’m doing this right,” and a wave of affection toward her washed through me. 

“We’ll survive,” I said to her jovially, and I wished many blessings and good things for her.

Two: Later, as we sat at our table merrily writing, the table to the right of ours became occupied by a lady talking bitterly and heatedly to herself for over an hour. She was not on a phone. I felt great fondness toward her, and sadness for her suffering, and I silently invoked the imponderable blessings of my Guru to touch and hold her heart.

Later that afternoon, as Carolyn and I did our kettlebell workout, I thought about the lady who exited the coffee shop wrong and about the lady muttering to herself and about how I had not invoked any love, blessings, or good things for the three men in their sixties spread out all over the chairs and talking loudly about their boats.

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

“In the Way of the Heart each one is responsible to bless all others, therefore, as my devotee, bless everyone and everything with every action, every thought and every breath.  It is not possible to bless another by presuming a position of superiority for yourself or inferiority on the part of another.  To bless another one must worship and acknowledge that one in his or her true form, inhering in the Divine Reality, present as an expressive manifestation of the Divine Being.”

                                                                                                -Avatar Adi Da Samraj

Looking for a fine and practical blessing you could give right now? Why not subscribe to this very blog you’re reading right now!

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…

In the lengthy Adi Da excerpts I’ve included below, he talks about how spiritual aspirants throughout history have often deliberately chosen to live in constrained, enclosed circumstances – not unlike our quarantine situation! – to focus and magnify their spiritual practices. To eliminate distractions. To more intensely observe the “event” of their own being. Monks in their tiny Spartan cells. Swami Muktananda in his small broiling hut. Yogis like Swami Rama or Patrul Rinpoche in their dank caves. 

Traditionally, these enclosed spaces were kept spotlessly clean. Spare and minimal. But I’d like to say this: just imagine how much more concentration you’d have to develop if your enclosed space was cluttered with tons of empty paper bags and boxes, laying all over the floor, in every room of your home…because it turns out empty paper bags and boxes are, in fact, cat toys, and your wife has decided that it is mathematically impossible to have too many of them on the floor, because, after all, each new one is a fresh vista of thrilling kitty discovery, especially when your wife sprinkles gobs of catnip in them, and each one must be decisively and expectantly sat in, by said cats, for enormous stretches of time, like some terrible feline Beckett play.

And just think how much focus you’d have to cultivate if there were also huge stacks of books teetering on every horizontal surface of your home – the floors, desks, dressers, nightstands, coffee tables – books that you want to read, or at least want to have read, or at least want to be able to tell people you’ve read, and having them sitting out in huge heaps and stacks perpetuates the agreeable illusion that you are, in fact, still actively reading them, even if, in most cases, it’s been many months indeed since you cracked them.

And let’s just say – purely hypothetically – that there’s a fair amount of organic refuse, plant-matter, on the floor, too, because, when your big orange cat beats up on your little grey cat, you are sometimes too lazy to get out of your dilapidated couch to intervene, so you and your wife instead throw dinner leftovers at the big orange cat – empty avocado shells, the stems of romaine leaves, organic non-GMO corn chips, or any other reasonably aerodynamic foodstuffs. 

Point is, in such a totally imaginary and hypothetical scenario, just think how one-pointed in your practice you would have to become to maintain even the slightest shred of sanity. 

Here are the Adi Da excerpts. The context is that he had just watched a documentary film about an Irish man who’d been held as a hostage in Lebanon for five years. The man had apparently been praying for his nightmarish situation to end, but…

“Then, he said, he stopped praying in those terms. He accepted his confinement and stopped thinking about being released. He realized that his struggle was basically fruitless. There was nothing he could do about his situation, which just continued to be. He began examining the situation just as it was. It was his situation. He was living in that place. Imprisonment was his life.

“Only with that acceptance did he come to terms with his fears and reactions and his suffering in confinement, and he began to realize a process of growth. He learned many lessons over those terrible years, but he came away from the ordeal feeling that he had received an advantage. It was not that he liked being in prison – certainly not – but he felt he had understood something and had overcome something in himself. 

“Fear, for instance. He felt very frightened – for obvious reasons, since he was not only confined but under threat, he could neither deal with his circumstance nor escape it, and he was physically abused. Yet, once he had accepted his situation and was no longer struggling against it, he had a great deal of time to examine his fear. Over time, he said, fear became more and more just this little ‘something’ that he was doing. He made a gesture like this [Adi Da holds up his thumb and index finger about two inches apart] to indicate just that small ‘something’ he was doing. Eventually, the fear vanished.

“This man was suggesting that there are advantages to a situation of confinement. Many people in the past have chosen just such a circumstance of renunciation. When you accept a situation of discipline (even of confinement or isolation) – in other words, when there is no more seeking, no more struggling to escape your situation, and you are able just to deal with the event that you are being in the context of that situation (and your situation need not be as extreme as this man’s), only when you are no longer seeking to escape the confinement, the pressure, the suffering, the limitation, the mortality of existence, then you can just deal directly with your own mechanism of reaction – only then is there a breakthrough beyond the common and petty limitations you are otherwise suffering psychologically and Spiritually…

“… Somehow or other, you must bring a halt to the mode of seeking, of being confused, ‘self’- indulgent, peripheral, superficial. Whether by choice or by circumstance, you must be confined to just the examination of what is, without struggling to get out of it. Then, and only then, do you go through the crisis of breaking out of your limitations…

“The ordinary person, on the other hand, with all the gaming of an ordinary life and a history of adaptation to it, refuses confinement of any kind.  Likewise, you, in your ordinariness, want to be ‘ free’ (to use the common language) – meaning that you want to be able to act without obligation or intrusion….

“Therefore, in summary, at its foundation, all of Spiritual life is just such a discipline – a kind of confinement, or a relinquishment of the arbitrariness, casualness, superficiality, wandering, and seeking of your usual act of attention – to such a degree that you become focused, calmed, and able to deal directly with the suffering that prevents Divine Self-Realization.”

Takeaway

As ghastly as this quarantine is, see if you can frame it differently. Place your situation in the long tradition of monks and yogis who have used “enclosures” to deepen and magnify their spiritual practices. Pretend you’re in a Himalayan cave. But with WiFi and take-out. And cat toys.

Also, in the same talk that I quoted from above, Adi Da goes on to describe how we can duplicate the powerful effects of enclosures through self-disciplines. Self-disciplines, like caves and cells, lessen our distractions and diversions. So if you’re really feeling gung ho, use this time to play with some simple self-disciplines, in whichever way most serves your practice. Maybe around food, alcohol, weed, or internet use. 

If it seems hard, explore why it’s hard. What about it is hard? Adi Da would suggest that it is only our own primal action of contracting, moment to moment, from the Radiance of Being, that could turn just existing in an enclosure (or in the “confines” of self-discipline) into discomfort. Sounds like a decent hypothesis to me.And hey, here’s a handy self-discipline idea. You could take on a discipline to overcome your tendency not to subscribe to enough Adi Da related blogs!

Here’s a passage from Adi Da Samraj:

“People talk about a ‘new paradigm’ – but, all the while, they are actually being the old paradigm…There is no new paradigm until you, yourself, are Awakened…There is no new paradigm until the old paradigm is dead – ‘ground zero’.

All clinging to old ideas is clinging to the old paradigm…As long as people persist in the old paradigm, they are persisting in ‘tribalized’ ego-culture. No matter how they modify their words to sound otherwise, ‘tribalized’ ego-culture is still what they are about.

All of that is finished. It is just that most people have not noticed yet that it is finished.

It is completely finished. It is completely irrelevant and done…The past pattern of humankind is finished. The past pattern of humankind must be shed.It is not that the past pattern of humankind must merely be ended, with nothing replacing it. Rather, the past pattern of humankind must be replaced by That Which Is Supreme – That Which Is Divine. A whole and new global culture and order of humankind must be born from this “ground zero”.

What does that mean, “the old paradigm is dead – ‘ground zero’”? I used to think the order of the world had ended when, say, my favorite barista at my local coffee shop quit working there. Her name was Grace. Grace played music in the coffee shop like the entire album of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, including the severely non-foot-tapping, second side. Grace might follow this with the Stranglers…the Stranglers! You could see some of the customers scratching their heads at JJ Burnel’s raw, lascivious bass lines.

The barista who replaced her was a wiry, robotic man with a goatee who played music that was bad in ways that I did not know existed. Imagine if Phish, Chuck Mangione, Blues Traveler, the Grateful Dead, and Yanni were all jamming on stage together for hours. On acid. Or if Hootie and the Blowfish tried their hands at 1970’s jazz-fusion. This was full-on, military-grade psi-ops stuff.  

So that, for me, was an example of the destruction of the old order of civilization. 

Another example of the past pattern of humankind disintegrating was if that very same coffee shop had run out of my favorite green tea, the stoically subtle if not downright austere Jade Cloud, making me instead have to suffer with the flouncy gaudiness of Jasmine green tea, a tea so floral it might as well come with a hoop dress from the wardrobe department of Gone with the Wind for me to wear while I sipped it.

For a long time, those were the biggest crises in my life. Those were the kinds of things that used to signal the death of the old order of things. But then the covid-19 thing happened, and the world closed up shop, and my job got eaten up by a stupid corona retrovirus, and I was trapped in our tiny home with our two millennial neighbors, Ashley and Rachel, cranking shitty corporate dance music beneath our apartment floor all day, “nnthump, nnthump, nnthump.”

Then the police here in Minneapolis tortured and murdered an innocent man named George Floyd just eight blocks from our home, triggering a huge and pretty magnificent uprising of the people. This sensitized me, on an entirely new level, to the fact that black people in this country are systematically terrorized, murdered, and hideously oppressed on a scale that I’d only hazily suspected, until there were military Humvees – as well as SUVs full of neo-Nazis with tidily-trimmed beards – rolling through my neighborhood, while Apache helicopters chopped up the air – whap, whap, whap – right above my home, and a bunch of nights were full of smoke, explosions, gunfire, shrieking sirens, and flash-bang grenades. Also the days, at least two of them, were full of us and everyone else on our block hosing down dumpsters, wooden fences, and garbages, because the neo-Nazis in SUVs like to set them on fire.

So all of that caught my attention. 

Aha, thought I, it is much more likely that these sorts of happenings are the real signs of the death of the old order that Adi Da Samraj is talking about. This inspired me explore what white people who spend their lives sitting like little sultans in hip coffee shops without any policemen torturing and murdering them could do to help. It turned out there were many things to do to help. I’d always believed, idiotically, that just thinking racists were fucking idiots was enough. It is not. Here, for one example, is a handy article offering 75 specific things I could do. Bonus: I can do a bunch of them right from my coffee shop.

Then I began to marvel at how oblivious I’ve been about other forms of suffering in the world. This world. My world. Everyone’s world. The people of Palestine. The child sex slave industry. Syrian refugees. On and On. Never mind the unimaginable magnitude of death and suffering we are hurtling toward from environmental catastrophes and climate change. I rather suspect that each of these have their own lists of 75 things we can do and should do. That’s a lot of lists of 75 things we can do and should do. 

How to prioritize? I’ve been finding this to be an overwhelming question. But if we must be overwhelmed by a question, this is probably the right one to be overwhelmed by. There are countless people who do not have the opulent luxury of weighing such questions because they are too busy being starved, raped, wrongly imprisoned, or murdered.

Takeaway

Adi Da Samraj says that existence is arising in what he calls Prior Unity. The sense I get is that, the more we are lived and breathed by this Prior Unity, the more our actions will be guided by the spontaneous, intuitive, perfect, Innate Intelligence of that Prior Unity. 

The go-to metaphor, at least in my mind, is the human body. When the integrity of the whole and all its systems of communication are functioning (the energy field and so on) all the cells “know” exactly what to do to create and maintain health. Similarly, feeling and knowing our Prior Unity – directly, non-verbally – would guide our activism. 

Why does Adi Da call it Prior Unity? What does he mean by “prior?” He means that it’s “always already the case.” And that, in turn, means that it cannot be “worked toward.” Fortunately or unfortunately, you can’t strategically strive for Prior Unity. How can you strive for a condition that is always already the case? 

I think maybe all we can do is start to notice this alleged Prior Unity.

And begin to discover what we are doing to not notice it.

One way I avoid the reality of Prior Unity is by thinking this: “Yeah, yeah, yeah – unity, oneness, non-duality. I know all about that stuff. Big fan. Read about it since I was a kid. Been there, done that.” Obviously this is ludicrous. I have not the slightest idea what Prior Unity is. I have neither “been there” nor “done” anything remotely like “that.” The truth is that, deep down, beneath my bookish concepts, my real presumption is that there is no such thing as Prior Unity. Not in a way that actually changes anything. And this presumption makes it impossible for me to notice it.

In one of Larry Dossey’s books he describes these indigenous people who lived on an island. Somehow, they had managed to never invent a boat. Just didn’t need one, I guess. Also, having not had contact with other peoples, they’d never even seen a boat. Or anything vaguely boat-esque. The whole platonic template of “boat” didn’t exist in their consciousness. Therefore, Dossey said, when a big European boat showed up off their shores one day, the island natives literally couldn’t see it. Like until it was ridiculously close. All but looming nautically over them.

Now I don’t know how big the ship was or how close it supposedly had to get before the islanders could perceive the damn thing. Obviously at a certain point the whole anecdote starts to attrit plausibility badly. But apparently it was a real phenomenon. 

Point being it’s evidently very hard to perceive something if you’ve never allowed for that thing to exist. So maybe it’s possible to open, in a new and real way, to the strange possibility that there really might be an imponderable Oneness, a Prior Unity, that, if known, would irrevocably change our lives and actions. On the other hand, check out this Adi Da passage right here:

“Through the “play” of your life, you must demonstrate the taking on of the suffering of everybody, the conditions of everybody. You must always maintain your sympathy. You must always be free of the tendency to separate from “others”. All (including you) are part of the same pattern of totality. Therefore, in Truth, and in Reality, there is no individual (or separate and “personal”) pattern of conditional happening and tendency…. there is no “private destiny”, there is no“personal righteousness”. All are involved in the same reality – together and individually.”

Adi Da Samraj

Something about that actually sounds a little scary. I mean, “…demonstrate the taking on of the suffering of everybody, the conditions of everybody…”? Wait, what? Gulp. And that raises a discomforting possibility. Maybe the real reason I don’t allow myself to notice – really notice – this Prior Unity, is that…who knows where it would lead? 

The punch line may be that, while we wonder if there’s “any such thing” as Prior Unity, the realization of Prior Unity apparently reveals that there’s “no such thing” as us! For more excellent knee-slappers like that, make sure and subscribe to this scrumptious blog! Also, leave a comment, for goodness sake. Say hi.

“You are all consumers, consumer egos, mythological selves that…have been propagandized—as is the common case in the world presently—into being a believer in a mythological notion of the infinite importance of your own self and of the purpose of satisfying it, of experiencing this and that, indulging in this and that, and being satisfied through the acquisition of this and that thing or experience or relation or whatever it may be.

“The discourse of common society, such as it is at the present time, is something like a carnival barker’s selling some cheap show: “Come on in!” Everything is a sales job about something. You are addressed, in other words, as a consumer, as someone to be persuaded to consume, to acquire, to be satisfied by something or other.”

Adi Da Samraj

Adi Da is fiercely critical of “spiritual consumerism,” and, before this pandemic, I thought that was the only kind of consumerism I ever indulged in. And Lord knows I did. And do. I pursue hits of joy, ecstasy, inner-silence, all of that shit, as cravenly as any meth-head pursues his drug.

But once fuck-head covid-19 took my job and left me with zero income I quickly discovered that, lo and behold, I’m not only a spiritual consumer. I’m also a regular old physical stuff consumer. Like, y’know, a consumer consumer. 

For example, I am a bit of a health-nut. But now, overnight, I can no longer buy my favorite health toys. Like shilajit, an insanely pricey, tar-like mineral pitch, consumed by Himalayan yogis and wild-eyed Russian mystics. It is plundered from remote mountain ranges all just for me and my precious health and longevity.

Or like Dragon Herbs ant tincture. Yes, that’s right. I’m talking about a tincture. Made of ants. And not just any ants, mind you. Not the pedestrian ants that the rabble might make tinctures out of. No, these ants are lovingly raised on a strict diet of super-adaptogenic, immuno-modulating reishi mushrooms. They’re basically coddled in little ant spas where they listen to Mozart all day. The ones who show a bit of natural proclivity might even learn to play Mozart on little ant pianos with eight keys. And now I can’t have tinctures of them. No dinero.

It turns out I am a living embodiment of what Adi Da criticizes here:

“You are grounded in this ‘Western’ collective ideal of the ‘good life’, that imagines you are born to be fulfilled, satisfied, kissed, cuddled and congratulated, and immortalized. No one who has ever Realized has functioned on such a basis. The absurdity of that proposition has to be seen through…You can practice in the context of ordinary living, and in love, and with compassion, and with a sense of humor, and a capability for delight, also — but free of that absurd vision of ‘self’-fulfillment…”

What’s been dawning on me lately is that consumerism is consumerism. It doesn’t matter what arena it’s in; it always has one orientation: What do I get? What’s in it for me? This separate subject wants to acquire that separate object – ant tinctures, physical health, literary excellence, psychological insights, a quiet mind, sexual bliss, spiritual ecstasies, whatever. 

And the thing is, the consumer mind is painful as fuck. Because it always rests on a dissociation – in this present moment – from the Radiant Joy that is “always already” our true nature. And let’s don’t even get started on how hurtful our acquisitive, consumer mind is to the beings around us. Yeesh. 

Good times. 

Takeaway

If this pandemic has curtailed your consumerism, in any arena, make use of that. Notice the craving in you to acquire, to consume. Notice the pain that craving is trying to medicate, and notice how the craving is, itself, painful. 

Simultaneously, check this out: Adi Da says all beings have a primal heart-response of attraction to the Divine, the Absolute, the Transcendent, the Good Thing, the Bamboozling Mystery of Isness. We’re attracted to It because It is what we are, but we have forgotten that, and on an epic scale. This attraction-response is not acquisitive, consumer seeking, because it’s as mindless and spontaneous as a plant turning toward the sun. And because it is thought-free and hence non-strategic. And because it’s always only in this one opulent moment. And because it draws us into forgetting all about the royal me and its endless demands. 

So slow down, soften, and be open to noticing that naked heart-response in yourself. It’s in there! Notice how, if you feel it deeply, a flowering happens. In that flowering, you forget all about yourself as a customer in life. You forget all your fist-thumping demands to speak to the manager. That flowering is called devotion. Yum. It’s what your heart is made for. Notice how it moves you wordlessly toward stuff like service, humility, self-surrender, letting go, self-giving participation, and gratitude. Notice how these characteristics are the opposites of the consumer mindset. How subversive! I’ll tune myself for the same noticings. We’ll talk.

Okay but here’s the question: Is it good to consume things that remind you about the pain of being a consumer? Because if so, you should totally subscribe to this unbearably profound blog. Then, whenever I put up a new post, you’ll get it in your email. Nom nom. 

If you’re like everyone I know, this covid-19 crisis has made you feel like that guy holding his head in that Edvard Munch painting that everyone used to have prints of on their dorm room walls. But what if we could extract some incredible benefit from our suffering? What if our misery contained, hidden within it, a diamond the size of a Buick? Here’s what I’m thinking.

Traditional spiritual wisdom has always taught that, before we will engage a spiritual practice in a deep way, we have to face the pain inherent in conditional life – meaning unAwakened life. We have to be penetrated by the truth that egoic life – life lived as the mythic, separate, subjective “me” – is a kind of hell. 

That’s why the Buddha’s First Noble Truth is: Life is suffering. The ancient sages taught that we have to really get that, before we’ll do any more than tinker with spiritual practice. (Contemporary popular spirituality doesn’t talk much about this, because we Westerners tend not to like this message. Total buzzkill. We’re more into living happily ever after, and the whole “we can have it all” and “the world is our oyster” thing.)

Ordinary life is suffering for a lot of reasons. But one notable one is mortality. In speaking about the body, Adi Da once said: 

“It’s going to die. That’s all there is to it. It’s not only going to die, it has the potential for unbelievable suffering, and will inevitably experience all kinds of varieties of suffering, and is now suffering, lollipop or not! You’re suffering just feeling that you are alive here, in this time-bomb lump of flesh, this exploding shit-machine, that’s going to drop dead at any moment now. What a terrible situation.”

I used to love it when Adi Da (or other Spiritual Masters) talked like this. “Yeah,” I’d snarl in my gloomy black Levis, black motorcycle boots, and black leather jacket, “preach it, brother man,” like I was right there on the same page. In fact, I had simply adopted a stance, a pose. My “confrontation of death” was nothing but a fashion choice. I had an image of myself as a hard-edged, punk rock type, who was all about facing harsh truths, with a Johnny Rotten (or at least a Billy Idol) sneer curling my lip.

Then, in early 2011, the traumatic memories from my childhood (raging alcoholic father etc.) erupted into my awareness and ruined my life for several years. In the process, I was disabused of many of my favorite illusions – including the adorable notion that I had in any way, shape, or form, faced the truth of my own mortality (never mind that I’d faced the potential for mind-bending suffering that can happen before we die). 

Here was one clue that I had not faced these hard truths: my spiritual practice was a total snooze fest. Here’s Adi Da again:

“People…are all kinds of dummied up by the doctrines of the world, the mummery language of ordinary living, the TV mind. They actually are deluded by it. 

It is ceaselessly amazing to Me that people become occupied and actually diverted by the purposes of ordinary living. They just do not understand where they are, what their actual situation is. They are not sensitive to it. If they were, they would be on fire with the disposition to realize [the Divine], to be free of that binding illusion that is consoling them in every moment with something that could disappear in a fraction of a second.”

Hmmm.  You say they’d be on fire with the disposition to realize the Divine, huh? Yeah, that did not describe my disposition well. Not much evidence of the whole “on fire” thing. I was too busy chasing Bruce Lee-ish indestructibility through martial art, obsessing about when Joss Whedon would have a new TV show, and fretting about whatever was going on in my therapy that week.

When my dad was not exploding in alcoholic rages, he talked a lot about how “God made the world,” and, therefore, the world was holy and beautiful. For proof you needed look no further than glowing sunsets, azure seascapes, majestic mountains, the perfection of snowflakes, and googly baby smiles, basically the images you see on inspirational posters near the water cooler in middle-management offices.

No word from him on how the holy, beautiful, God-made world also included the Holocaust, the child sex-slave industry, the tsunami in East Asia in 2004 that murdered 225,000 people, Pol Pot’s regime killing nearly 2 million people, the 5,000 children per day who starve to death before they ever get to see a single azure seascape and so forth. I know this because, when I was about sixteen, I asked him. He said, “I don’t pretend to understand the mysteries of God’s plan.” 

I replied, “God’s plan includes hundreds of thousands of children being sold into sex slavery? Well, that is mysterious. God sounds like a full-on, hockey-goalie-mask-wearing psychopath.” Well, I didn’t actually say that. But words to that effect. To which he said,

“Well, you’re just talking about the question of evil, and I leave that question to the theologians.” 

Adi Da makes it clear that, weirdly enough, to allow oneself to be shattered by the suffering inherent in egoic life – like Siddhartha or Milarepa – does not have to lead to despair.

“Disillusionment with psycho-physical existence is not the same thing as despair. Disillusionment is the beginning of Wisdom. It gives integrity, one-pointedness to the Way. What you achieve or develop is never going to make any difference, one way or another, even at any stage of life. It is all still an exercise by a mortal…

This should tell you that – basically, fundamentally, heart-deep – an offer has been made to you here that you cannot refuse. You can surrender – and that’s that! [Adi Da laughs.] If you really examine it, that is the position you are in. It is not despair that this observation calls for – not if it is entered into as profound ‘consideration’. Despair is merely a reaction.

You are not in charge. Therefore, you must surrender to That Which Is.”

The suffering of ordinary egoic life, if we dare to become exquisitely sensitive to it, can catapult us into our spiritual practice with profound wholeheartedness. Because, according to all the sages – including Adi Da – Transcendence of the separate ego-self is the only freedom from our suffering. That Transcendence is the discovery that you are not now and have never been the mortal meat-body. That Transcendence is God Realization, Enlightenment, Awakening. And, for the Awakened person, life is not suffering. On the contrary, Adi Da says that, for the Enlightened being…

“Existence is a vast Happiness. Life is not suffering. Life is Happiness. Existence is Happiness. It is pristine Beauty–Absolute, Self-Radiant, Self Existing, never diminished. Yet you believe something else about it. You are superimposing a belief on this vast display of light, a belief you must outgrow…”

The authentic Enlightened person knows that:

“The Great One Is your Very being. You inhere in the Love-Blissful, Forceful Being of the Starry God—the Mystery, the Person of Love. This is your Situation and your Destiny.”

“The Great One has Magnified Itself in the form of sexual beings, human beings, sexless beings, Earth-‘world’, form and fruit and wood and wall and space and star and sky and cloud and tree and life and death. The same Great One takes on all these forms—completely Indifferent, completely Free, completely Happy in all these excesses. This Is all the Great One. The Great One creates nothing. The Great One Is everything! What a Paradox! What a Mystery! What a Magnificent God!

“This is My Message to you: How Magnificant is this obscene, absurd, ridiculous, paradoxical Being That Is everyone.”

Takeaway

So you see where I’m going with this. What if, instead of just waiting for the epic shittiness of this covid-19 crisis to end, we used the epic shittiness of it as a big, epically shitty goad to practice?

In my case, for example, what if I related to my sudden unemployment, and my sudden lack of my beloved coffee shops, and the missing of my friends, and the wash of weird, ambient despair and dread that sometimes comes over me as I write in the mornings, and my freaked-outedness about all the crazy conspiracy theories, and my simultaneous freaked-outedness about the frenzied demonization of anything that looks like a conspiracy theory, which seems almost as pernicious as the crazy conspiracy theories themselves…what if I let all of that act as a cosmic public service announcement: Yo, ego-life is always and inherently about epic shittiness – this pandemic has just sensitized some of us to it a little more. 

In other words, why not allow our suffering, whatever forms it takes, to hurl us into moment-to-moment communion with the luminous field of love that always surrounds us and lives us and breathes us…but that we can’t fully notice, won’t fully notice, until we really, really want to, like way more than we want anything else? Imagine how much better we can be of use. And, at the same time, happy.

By the way, yes, hopefully positive disillusionment inspires us to throw ourselves more passionately into our spiritual practices. Plus, maybe another thing it can inspire one to do is to subscribe to this blog. Just saying.

Each morning I clamber out of the quarantine of our tiny condo, climb into our old Honda Civic, and drive the five blocks to the quarantine of my even tinier Rolfing office. What I do there now, instead of Rolfing people, is slouch in the one chair and scribble in spiral-bound notebooks for four to six hours.

I do this so that Carolyn and I do not strangle each other. Also, Carolyn needs a lot of solitude. As in, time away from me. Usually I don’t take this personally. I mean, like, a fairly heroic percentage of the time.

Yesterday, however, was different. It had snowed. And it had iced. It had snow-iced. It’s a Minnesota thing. I glanced out the window down at our car, and it looked like an igloo on wheels. Plus, moments before, when I was meditating, I’d heard people down on the street scraping the ice off their cars. It sounded so loud and violent, like they were scraping stucco off the side of a house with a shovel.

Now you have to understand: I am profoundly lazy. Gazing down at our tundra-entombed car, I thought, no way am I scraping that off. Plus the sidewalks were covered in ice. I could see, down the block, a person tottering along like a drunken two-year-old wearing roller blades. Nope, I thought.

“I think maybe I’ll stay at home today,” I said to Carolyn, after I finished meditating.

“Oh,” she replied, distractedly, apparently transfixed by something on her phone, “okay.”

Now here’s where things got complicated. The problem was that her response did not contain nearly enough joy at the intoxicating prospect of a whole day with my luminous, self milling around the ole’ homestead. Obviously, if she loved me, she would have swooned with delight at the merest whisper of my presence. Her response, by contrast, was a little on the muted side.

I commenced sulking immediately.

I launched into full-on pout-mode, bustling around our condo, noisily packing up my backpack, putting on my coat, sighing melodramatically. Whatever was on her phone must have been incredibly captivating because she seemed unaware of my entire performance. Finally, all suited up, backpack slung over my shoulder, I hovered near the door. “Well, I think I will go to the office after all,” I said, struggling to say it in a neutral way, the way I imagined a normal, non-pouting grown-up might say it.

“Oh, okay,” she said again, still bewitched by her phone. Then she looked up quickly, flashed me a smile, and said, “Have a nice day, baby!”

It wasn’t until I had sulkily smashed the stalactites of ice from our car, sulkily driven through the empty roads, and gotten sulkily set-up in my dystopian office building (dystopian because I’m now the only person in the whole building), that I finally saw what I was doing. (I’m a little slow.)

Adi Da, my radiant Guru, said that the fundamental mood of the ego is the mood of  “you don’t love me.” (The following quotes come from one of Adi Da’s Source Texts in which he employs a unique use of upper-case letters; try to bear with it.)

“The egoic (or self-Contracted) individual Is…Chronically Bound To The Ritual Of Rejection. The emotional (or emotional-sexual) Career Of egoity Tends To Manifest As A Chronic Complaint That Always Says, By Countless Means, “You Do Not Love me.”

Once the mood of you don’t love me – or the mood of betrayal – really gets rolling, my attempts to pretend I’m not sulking, my attempts to act cheery, by sheer willpower, fail badly.

But every once in a while I actually crowbar my attention off of myself and notice the everywhere-presence of my Guru, which is the everywhere-presence of the love-radiance or the Holy Spirit or whatever you want to call it, of everything.

And then I get silent and happy and the whole weird betrayal-sulk-drama thing is gone. In fact it’s so gone I could swear it never happened. And then, without even trying, I’m behaving almost exactly like a normal adult. I mean, the similarity is almost spooky.

Takeaway

Stressful situations – plagues, pestilence, locusts, things of this nature – can exaggerate our egoity, including this egoic mood of “you don’t love me.” Being trapped in a quarantine can make anyone want to strangle anyone, which can exacerbate the mood of you don’t love me even more.

Here’s what Adi Da has to say on the topic. 

“The egoic Ritual Calls every individual To Defend himself or herself Against The Wounds Of Love and The Wounding Signs Of Un-Love (or egoic self-Contraction) In the daily world. Therefore, Even In The Context Of True Intimacy, The Tendency (Apart From Spiritual Responsibility) Is To Act As If Every Wound (Which Is Simply A Hurt) Is An Insult (or A Reason To Punish).”

Instead, we should do as follows.

“For those who Are Committed To Love (and who Always Commune With The One Who Is Love), Even Rejection By others Is Received and Accepted As A Wound, Not An Insult.”

He goes on to say,

 “As A Practical Matter, You Must Stop Dramatizing The egoic Ritual Of Betrayal In Reaction To The Feeling Of Being Rejected. You Must Understand, Transcend, and Release The Tendency To Respond (or React) To Signs Of Rejection (or Signs That You Are Not Loved) As If You Are Insulted, Rather Than Wounded. That Is To Say, You Must Stop Punishing and Rejecting others When You Feel Rejected. If You Punish another When You Feel This, You Will Act As If You Are Immune To Love’s Wound. Thus, You Will Pretend To Be Angrily Insulted, Rather Than Suffer To Be Wounded. In The Process, You Will Withdraw and Withhold Love. You Will Stand Off, Independent and Dissociated. You Will Only Reinforce The Feeling Of Being Rejected, and You Will Compound It By Actually Rejecting the other. In This Manner, You Will Become Un-Love. You Will Fail To Love. You Will Fail To Live In The Sphere Of Love. Your Own Acts Of Un-Love Will Degrade You, Delude You, and Separate You From Your Love-partner (or Your partners In Love) and From Love Itself.”

Therefore, the thing to do is…

“To Enter Fully Into The Spiritual Life-Sphere Of Love…By…Entering… Into The Company Of The Divine Person…and (Submitting) To The Divine Embrace Of Love, Wherein Not Only Are You Loved, but You Are Love Itself. Then You Must Magnify That Love-Radiance In the world of human relationships.

“If You Will Do This, Then You Must Do The Sadhana (or Concentrated Practice) Of True Active Love and Real (True and Steady) Trust.”

Easy enough, right? (Totally kidding! Not easy!)

Want to stop me, your faithful blog author, from collapsing into the mood of you don’t love me? I know just the thing! Subscribe to this blog! Then, whenever I put up new posts you’ll get ‘em right there in your very own email box. How fun is that?

The first time the covid-19 crisis threw me into a state of face-melting terror was at one of our local Minneapolis co-ops. It was during those very first couple of days, long before grocery stores had started limiting how many people could be inside shopping, long before masks, social distancing, or fucked up words like “aerosolize” had become part of our daily lexicon. My wife had started expressing concerns about this new virus, but I, like a dork, had just been rolling my eyes and mumbling, “whatever.” Then I walked into the co-op.

The place was a mosh pit. Mobs of people ransacked the bulk bins, everyone trying to maintain a thin sheen of “Minnesota-nice” politeness while pushing in front of each other with murderous expressions on their faces. You could feel the panic in the air. Many of the bulk bins were empty, something I’d never seen.

The thing to understand is that I’ve been working through PTSD since 2011. So when I saw this spectacle I freaked the fuck out. One thought gripped me: Must hoard food! Now, in non-armageddon times, my wife and I almost never eat lentils. But in that moment, for some reason, I seized maniacally on the idea of lentils. 

Surviving this apocalypse was all about lentils. 

Wild-eyed, I looked at the few remaining lentils glittering, jewel-like, in their clear plastic dispenser. I looked at the throngs of frantic people between me and the sacred, life-giving legumes. There were an awful lot of skeletal vegans and scrawny, brittle-looking, old hippies with knobby elbows. Surely I could take out a dozen, easy. Give or take a vegan. I’ve trained for decades in demented, jungle-warfare martial arts. It would be like the scene in Enter the Dragon where Bruce Lee lays waste to wave after wave of cannon-fodder prison guards. Except in this case my opponents will have been enfeebled from a diet of estrogen-laden tofu and gluten-free muffins.

I drove home without breathing, my car full of second-tier, loser grains and lame, non-lentil legumes. In the car I listened to the earliest installments of NPR covid-19 fear-porn, which, back then, was just getting revved up. When I got home I ran straight into the bathroom and scrubbed my hands to a scalded, soapy pulp, like I was Lady Macbeth. ‘Popped online to discover that, yes, as a matter of fact, you can get a shotgun, or even a lot of shotguns, many as you want, from Amazon.

My wife, Carolyn was out of town (people were still flying; that would end in a scant few days) so essentially I just curled up on our couch in a fetal position, rocking gently and sucking my thumb, much like Jim Carrey in the truck-stop bathroom stall in Dumb and Dumber. Occasionally I’d glance at my computer – why yes, as a matter of fact I would like to know what people who viewed the Smith & Wesson 12-gauge shotgun also viewed! And if you must know, yes, you can find You Tube DIY videos on how to saw off a shotgun. Just like Mel Gibson’s in Mad Max.

That first week these sorts of fear-seizures took me over a lot, and they were no joke. They were like demonic possessions. Heavy shit. My big problem was that, to get myself out of those fear-spasms, I kept trying to analyze my way out of my terror. Try to figure it all out, hunkered down on our dilapidated couch, scribbling fiercely in my spiral-bound notebook.

I know this is idiotic but fear makes you stupid. It makes you forget what you know, because the part of you that knows what you know is offline. What’s online is your reptile brain, a psychotic Komodo dragon who lives at the base of your skull, smoking rock.

Since “figuring it out” never works (to put it mildly), I’d always end up just doing Muhammad Ali’s famous rope-a-dope, leaning back in the ropes, covering up as best I could, and letting the Komodo dragon wail away on me until he got tired. Komodo dragons have horrendously underrated cardio.

Eventually I started remembering, mid-freak-out, that fear – and getting out of it – is not a head game at all. I used to know this back in 2011, 2012, 2013, when my whole life was a gruesome war with PTSD flashbacks. But somehow I’d forgotten: shifting out of fear is a feeling and a body thing. Sometimes cuddling with my wife worked (while Oblio, our chubby orange and white cat, tried to pry his way between us). More often, though, I began actually trying to follow my own Guru’s instruction. Imagine that. First I’d try to feel the fear as a simple bodily sensation.

“The mechanism of fear is a contraction, like the reflex that occurs when the hand touches fire. The mechanism of fear is as useful to the body-mind as the reflex that keeps you from getting burned. But it is an arbitrary mechanism, not deep in your consciousness somewhere, but just a superficial little mechanism at the peripheral levels of the nervous system to save you from being attacked by a wild lion…”

 

“Fear is just an ordinary mechanism that you must master, an attitude of the body. It is something that you are doing. It has no ultimate philosophical significance.”

Then, from there, I’d feel “toward” my Guru.  That is, I would try to feel, with my physical body, the Radiant Spirit Power that I sometimes know is always shining everywhere (that devotees of a Guru contact in and through that Guru, but that you can contact through whatever way or ways you like to). 

“You can breathe and feel and relax beyond [fear]. You need take nothing into account philosophically. Just breathe and feel and relax beyond it…”

 “Observe the cat, for instance, who uses fear to control threatening events. The cat is neither addicted to fear nor existing as fear, as you tend to be. In contrast to the cat—and almost all vital creatures, by the way—the human being is addicted to psychological fear. Human beings have transformed the mechanism of fear that is natural to the vital state of any animal into a chronic response of the physical being. The animal’s sudden moment of fearful excitement is stimulated chemically for a specific purpose. Fear is just a recoil, but you tend to prolong its effectiveness, as if waiting indefinitely to withdraw a finger from the flame.”

One interesting side-note is that, as a guy recovering from PTSD, I’ve read a lot of the trauma experts. And one of them, Dr. Stephen Porges (a rock star in that world), also describes trauma – and recovery from it – in almost entirely physiological, biological terms. Trauma, in other words (and hence fear itself), is not particularly amenable to psychological insights, penetrating thoughts, or philosophical tussling. Or feverish scribbling in spiral-bound notebooks. 

However, Adi Da goes beyond Dr. Porges, because He asserts that the reason fear is not our natural state is that our true identity is, “The Very Divine Being, the Eternally Living One,” which (spoiler alert) is not contracted by fear, ever.

“…In your natural state, you are like the cat, which, although it may become afraid and roll into a ball when it is attacked, is not at all chronically afraid. The Very Divine Being, the Eternally Living One, Which exists as the cat and as every conditionally manifested being, is not contracted by fear. And just as the cat has not accomplished any great, profound, philosophical cycle of investigations of the universe to be free of fear, so you need have no great knowledge to be liberated from your fear.”

He goes on to say:

 “You can be free of fear in this very moment, in any moment, even in a moment when some degree of fear seems conventionally appropriate. Fear collapses attention. Therefore, even when fear might seem appropriate, it is still better to be without fear, so that you may have complete attention in the moment to deal with the threat. Fear is plainly and simply inappropriate, except in the flash of comprehending imminent danger. But even then, in the very next moment, you are dealing with the danger rather than with the fear. Fear has only the most minute significance as a practical necessity in your life, and yet you are completely overwhelmed by it! You have made fear so chronic a mood that now you interpret your existence, even all existence, through the medium of that fear.”

I have been given, by Grace – insanely…almost perversely tenacious Grace – many experiences of that instantaneous freedom from fear states. And from many other unpleasant trauma states. It’s astonishing. You’d think I’d turn to that communion a lot more often than I do. On the other hand, Adi Da also points out that the ego is at war with its own help. So there’s that. In any case, for the countless times my Guru has shown me the True Nature of myself and everyone and everything, I bow down at his lotus feet.

Takeaway

Whatever your spiritual practice is, it probably involves putting your attention on something other than the macabre chaos of your own mind.

So, cool. And as you do that, if you don’t already, try to feel whatever you put your attention on, with your body. Like, your literal fleshy person. Here’s another way you can play with this body thing: Notice that your attention – no matter what you do with it – arises within a field of awareness, a vast spaciousness. See if you can sense that field of awareness somatically, with your whole body. If you stay with it, you might also notice, every so often, that that field of awareness has a sweetness to it, a quiet radiance, a fragrant beauty. A wide-openness that feels free and wonderful. Now see if you can feel that with your cellular being and feel scared at the same time. It is almost impossible. Isn’t that the best thing ever? 

You know how you can get awesome reminders of things like being as bodily fearless as your kitty? By subscribing to this groovy little blog, that’s how!