My Story
I could never figure out why there was only one green in my crayon box and where blue green turned into green blue. I learned early not to ask who in the hell chose which was which, and I used to wonder since my right eye saw color differently than the other, one saw a yellowy green the other a blue green if others saw color perhaps entirely different from me. Perhaps what I called yellow they called red. I began to feel that great aloneness, and I would hold onto the grass for fear that I would spin into space.
I remember clearly hating it and trying to avoid being forced into boxes of this and that like, "whats your favorite color?", "are you an introvert or an extrovert?". It felt like a straitjacket. Later, however, I remember looking at people and trying to figure out what type of person I wanted to be, as I wanted love and it seemed only formed people were loved. How could I make myself loveable? I knew I didn’t want to be like my Mom or Dad or anyone else I met as they didn’t seem happy. I didn’t want to be a man or woman, I didn’t feel like either.
It wasn't until I was eight that the pain of separation hit me like an avalanche and squashed all the light out of my world. I spoke about it with my parents and they laughed and told me that little kids don't get depressed. A few weeks later my mother came into my room one evening and said that it'd get better when I went to college...(wha?)
Soon all the other little girls were talking about how many kids they wanted, girls or boys and their names. I knew without a doubt that if I had a child it would most likely feel this pain of life as I called it, and I knew I would never have children. I don't even remember a lot of my teenage years. Wrapped up in a fog of depression and layers of fat.
In my early 20's I took acid and the light of the world started to shine in. I remembered the laughing child I had once been. So I decided to be happy come hell or high water, shoving all the sadness under the carpet. It was a life of painful pretense. Self is pretense, the belief that what is going on can be known and the terror of not knowing.
To try to fill that hole in my heart, I over ate, exercised, took drugs, drank alcohol, traveled, read psychology, philosophy, I looked for it in romantic love, read books and daydreamed to try to avoid it. Pretending that I was happy was a constant. Fear was the constant. Fear of myself and others. Fear of admitting that I didn't know. Fear of loving too much, and losing love.
Pretty much every perception was judged as helpful or harmful. Every moment I judged what was I feeling. If I liked it, how could I keep it or get it again? If I didn't like it, how could I change it or get rid of it? It was exhausting and painful.
I had an intellectual understanding that there was no free will decades ago. We went to a Hare Krishna joint for a free meal as we had heard they were not too pushy. Well, I was obviously entranced with the girls beautiful butterfly winged saris and it must have showed, so one of them came over and began to try to sell me her thang, I kept just trying to run her in circles to continue eating.
When it came to free will I said I didn't believe in it. I said ya know you can never go back and see if ya coulda done something different. That ended the conversation. However actually I did believe in choice and someone to have it, as well as separate things to choose from.
Beliefs are like that.
We are convinced that ours are right. We will fight for them. As we ARE them. As all beliefs are accompanied by hope and fear, hope that it's true and fear that it's not, or hope that it's false and fear that it's true. (Like the guy who says he doesn't believe in horse shoes for luck asking where and in which direction to hang it).
It's truly obvious that there is no next, and many agree with me, but they believe there is. They hope and wish fervently that there is a next, because that belief is what they are.
I remember the first time when it occurred to me that cause and effect was a belief. I could say well what was the cause of this tea cup breaking
The falling
The newspaper I was reaching for
Or the day I bought that dam table!
I had read that a hiccup was the same as a lightening bolt, and intellectually understood that all things were interrelated or interconnected, and I longed to grok that. I longed to recognize the sameness of inside and outside.
I read many books that last couple of years, and found watching breath meditation. I did it almost all day and I was pretty high! Contriving this feeling of ease. In the end I was trying to get rid of thoughts. Even the music and pictures like vivid day dreams that filled in when thoughts were absent.
I used to meditate, "My blood flows the wind blows". Trying to truly get that inside and outside were the same, but to no avail. I was waiting for a bolt of lightening, and it happened as soon it was apparent, like a bonk on the head, that nothing I had ever done nor not done had ever brought me what I so longed for, even though I had no idea what it was!
When it dawned on me that I could no longer pretend that everything was OK, and that all the methods and practices I had used to achieve well being were not working, I was utterly stunned for a month. My practice was to recognize awareness for short moments but by the end of the month it was obvious that awareness was always on, although I still thought of it as a thing.
Then there were four days of unutterable joy and awe. It was a beautiful powerful free glimpse of the utter perfection of things, yet it was not a seeing of no-thing-ness. That shift in perspective would come in less than a year, and it was permanent.
One method I was supposedly using was to let thought and feeling happen without trying to change or get rid of them, but I have to say that I never ever felt like I was doing this, it felt like this was happening to me, there was no choice but to feel it all fully. As the entire structure of the beliefs of who I was was crashing I never tried to fight it even through the most excruciating pain, as it somehow felt just right. The first big belief fell. I had used a particular diet in order to rid myself of a disease and I had always wondered if it was the diet or the belief in the diet that had cured me. Suddenly an intense fear gripped me. I felt it physically and psychologically. If this belief left would I die? I lay on the couch powerless to even try to escape it, and just as suddenly the fear and belief fell away. I suppose it was the beginning of the end of belief in belief as well. It was like an avalanche of what I had feared ripping through me.
After that there were six months of extreme sadness and intense despair alternating with unspeakable joy, peppered with sudden bouts of impending doom. I noticed beliefs about who I was and what the world was like catch fire and burn and become transparent and fall away. I felt lighter and lighter, and noticed that memories and thoughts of future and even what was seemingly going on was losing its grip. Quite suddenly after six months I noticed that joy and sorrow had merged and I truly could not tell the difference!
I remember as so many beliefs popped, it was scary at first but also enjoyable as many of the beliefs that were leaving were the beliefs I didn't like about myself or the world, that I was unlovable etc., or that others were. But I remember it suddenly hit me oh my all these things that I believe in that I like will also have to go, that I am lovable, or that there is something called love!
After that there was a period of intense anxiety, I would lay on my bed of nails every night, sleepless, gripped with unknown terror. There was a point when I realized that I had thought of myself on a path, and that I was ‘getting’ somewhere, and I just knew that that belief had to go. I remember sobbing hot hot tears. That too was absorbed somehow, it was obvious that phenomena were uncaused.
In my tradition the 'goal' so to speak was called 'going continuous'. I had no idea what that was but I wanted it. I was trapped in that most magnificent conundrum of everyone saying there was nothing to get yet that you would know when that happened.
At one point my desire consumed me. My chest hurt and I could hardly breathe, it was worse than when my mom had died, and I kept trying to talk myself out of my desire. It finally burst and morphed into a marvelous overwhelming love as I saw there was nothing to get. I realized many years later that this was a mourning of my own death.
I had the very clear picture of myself before the shift of trying to grasp something that had no edges that was very slippery and there were no indentations there was nothing I could get my fingers into to hold. The other vision that kept happening was I was in the backyard with a butterfly net jumping very very high and trying to catch the air I didn't know what I wanted but I knew that I wanted it and I was beginning to realize that I could not have it.
I started to recognize every face as mine, not in form or substance but an undeniable recognition. That has never left.
Two weeks later I was cleaning a stove and suddenly the rag became my hand became the space became the stove, as all lines between things between moments and between myself and the world dissolved. There were no separate things divided by space! It was like the scales had fallen off my eyes! I was astounded that life happened without a me doing it! There was a palpable incredible bodily and psychological relaxation that accompanied this shift in perspective. I felt that I might pee my pants or my body would crumple to the floor, yet my body continued to do what it was doing without effort. All ideas of effort or achievement were gone. It was obvious that there was no one doing life, and that life wasn't happening to a me. It was the end of a lifetime propelled by hope and fear and need of a never arising next. It was as if time died. It was as if I had died, yet it was obvious that I had never existed.
I wondered if this was a 'special' state I had read about, yet could not believe that one could put the blinders of separation on again. After three weeks I marked the date. It was easy to find as we cleaned that house every other Friday. There was no fear associated with this new way of seeing, I knew without a doubt that this was what the famous sages had been singing about. I really never looked for confirmation or avidly sought others who knew this. Who could I tell? I also knew without a doubt that most others I had read had no clue about this no-thing-ness. I called it 'falling into indivisibility'.
Yet, somehow there was a belief that this had happened to a me. So the next two years were smoother. Just watching as more beliefs of who I was untied themselves. Through out these years I watched many beliefs fall away, either as they popped, or after, I'd think, Oh my I don't believe that anymore and never really did!
I sang about this incredible stunning no thingness on facebook for over a year and a half and finally I met another who echoed my heart song, not just speaking of no self. It was such a relief! We sang together on a forum until it folded.
It seemed that the 'gauge' during these two years was self consciousness, self judgment and self correction and doubt becoming less and less, until there was nothing left. Not even nothing. I never knew there would be nothing!
Suspended as nothing I felt I could steer the car into the oncoming traffic and it wouldn't make any difference. I couldn't say it was OK or not OK. I had no group or no one to share this with. I can't even say when it happened as it was such a gradual falling. I did remember that friend saying once that it takes years to get used to this.
About a month later, one day I was speaking with this friend about how it requires imaginary separation to recognize unicity and I said, "oh I will dance with you anytime". He said, "We have been dancing for quite awhile". Suddenly it hit me. The enormity of what had happened. and that he had been there those last few months. Love had been there. Not a psyco-sexual love, but a true Sage is a beautiful clear reflection of your own love and emptiness.
For some the fullness trickles in, but here it was all of a sudden.
It was like he gave me back myself. It was love that brought me back. That's when the weeping began. For no reason. For every reason. I was back. But I was dead. Both. A story knowing I was a story. Like being a character in a movie yet knowing you are made up. Like a hologram, a dream, a magicians tale. Dreamlike yet somehow more alive and vibrant, wondrous beyond measure.
This is an entirely different way to experience what is going on, free from the terror and pain of looking though the window of imagined personal volition. Somehow the window looses the painting of what you have imagined life to be like and ideas about what it should be like. All ideas of truth and meaning and non-meaning fall away.
The imaginary clouds clear themselves and there is no more longing for an idea, no more longing for that which is not. It's more like a longing for what is and there is utter ease. There are no more what if's or what's next. It's like time dies.
No longer does it feel like there is a me doing life or that life is happening to a me. There is an untouchable profound peace underlying all and everything a seamless ease that has embraced the mind and always an unutterable sense of awe.
Self remains but it has lost its relevance.
Life is passionate full on yet impersonal at the same time.
Whilst not singing here with you, I slide into the vastness. Suspended as nothingness. Just a constant wow. But camping with friends and family I felt like transparent light sliding into and through the dream. I Appear and disappear into my own beautiful reflection through their eyes. An ecstatic love dance of one of two of many of one... as love, lover and beloved, a constant union a swooning into the swoon of what was never apart.
It's like before I was wind dancer and now it's like light dancer.
Not even nakedness, not even a wisp of a song clothes what has no weight.
Yet my feets still know how to dance, there are simply no footprints.
I could never figure out why there was only one green in my crayon box and where blue green turned into green blue. I learned early not to ask who in the hell chose which was which, and I used to wonder since my right eye saw color differently than the other, one saw a yellowy green the other a blue green if others saw color perhaps entirely different from me. Perhaps what I called yellow they called red. I began to feel that great aloneness, and I would hold onto the grass for fear that I would spin into space.
I remember clearly hating it and trying to avoid being forced into boxes of this and that like, "whats your favorite color?", "are you an introvert or an extrovert?". It felt like a straitjacket. Later, however, I remember looking at people and trying to figure out what type of person I wanted to be, as I wanted love and it seemed only formed people were loved. How could I make myself loveable? I knew I didn’t want to be like my Mom or Dad or anyone else I met as they didn’t seem happy. I didn’t want to be a man or woman, I didn’t feel like either.
It wasn't until I was eight that the pain of separation hit me like an avalanche and squashed all the light out of my world. I spoke about it with my parents and they laughed and told me that little kids don't get depressed. A few weeks later my mother came into my room one evening and said that it'd get better when I went to college...(wha?)
Soon all the other little girls were talking about how many kids they wanted, girls or boys and their names. I knew without a doubt that if I had a child it would most likely feel this pain of life as I called it, and I knew I would never have children. I don't even remember a lot of my teenage years. Wrapped up in a fog of depression and layers of fat.
In my early 20's I took acid and the light of the world started to shine in. I remembered the laughing child I had once been. So I decided to be happy come hell or high water, shoving all the sadness under the carpet. It was a life of painful pretense. Self is pretense, the belief that what is going on can be known and the terror of not knowing.
To try to fill that hole in my heart, I over ate, exercised, took drugs, drank alcohol, traveled, read psychology, philosophy, I looked for it in romantic love, read books and daydreamed to try to avoid it. Pretending that I was happy was a constant. Fear was the constant. Fear of myself and others. Fear of admitting that I didn't know. Fear of loving too much, and losing love.
Pretty much every perception was judged as helpful or harmful. Every moment I judged what was I feeling. If I liked it, how could I keep it or get it again? If I didn't like it, how could I change it or get rid of it? It was exhausting and painful.
I had an intellectual understanding that there was no free will decades ago. We went to a Hare Krishna joint for a free meal as we had heard they were not too pushy. Well, I was obviously entranced with the girls beautiful butterfly winged saris and it must have showed, so one of them came over and began to try to sell me her thang, I kept just trying to run her in circles to continue eating.
When it came to free will I said I didn't believe in it. I said ya know you can never go back and see if ya coulda done something different. That ended the conversation. However actually I did believe in choice and someone to have it, as well as separate things to choose from.
Beliefs are like that.
We are convinced that ours are right. We will fight for them. As we ARE them. As all beliefs are accompanied by hope and fear, hope that it's true and fear that it's not, or hope that it's false and fear that it's true. (Like the guy who says he doesn't believe in horse shoes for luck asking where and in which direction to hang it).
It's truly obvious that there is no next, and many agree with me, but they believe there is. They hope and wish fervently that there is a next, because that belief is what they are.
I remember the first time when it occurred to me that cause and effect was a belief. I could say well what was the cause of this tea cup breaking
The falling
The newspaper I was reaching for
Or the day I bought that dam table!
I had read that a hiccup was the same as a lightening bolt, and intellectually understood that all things were interrelated or interconnected, and I longed to grok that. I longed to recognize the sameness of inside and outside.
I read many books that last couple of years, and found watching breath meditation. I did it almost all day and I was pretty high! Contriving this feeling of ease. In the end I was trying to get rid of thoughts. Even the music and pictures like vivid day dreams that filled in when thoughts were absent.
I used to meditate, "My blood flows the wind blows". Trying to truly get that inside and outside were the same, but to no avail. I was waiting for a bolt of lightening, and it happened as soon it was apparent, like a bonk on the head, that nothing I had ever done nor not done had ever brought me what I so longed for, even though I had no idea what it was!
When it dawned on me that I could no longer pretend that everything was OK, and that all the methods and practices I had used to achieve well being were not working, I was utterly stunned for a month. My practice was to recognize awareness for short moments but by the end of the month it was obvious that awareness was always on, although I still thought of it as a thing.
Then there were four days of unutterable joy and awe. It was a beautiful powerful free glimpse of the utter perfection of things, yet it was not a seeing of no-thing-ness. That shift in perspective would come in less than a year, and it was permanent.
One method I was supposedly using was to let thought and feeling happen without trying to change or get rid of them, but I have to say that I never ever felt like I was doing this, it felt like this was happening to me, there was no choice but to feel it all fully. As the entire structure of the beliefs of who I was was crashing I never tried to fight it even through the most excruciating pain, as it somehow felt just right. The first big belief fell. I had used a particular diet in order to rid myself of a disease and I had always wondered if it was the diet or the belief in the diet that had cured me. Suddenly an intense fear gripped me. I felt it physically and psychologically. If this belief left would I die? I lay on the couch powerless to even try to escape it, and just as suddenly the fear and belief fell away. I suppose it was the beginning of the end of belief in belief as well. It was like an avalanche of what I had feared ripping through me.
After that there were six months of extreme sadness and intense despair alternating with unspeakable joy, peppered with sudden bouts of impending doom. I noticed beliefs about who I was and what the world was like catch fire and burn and become transparent and fall away. I felt lighter and lighter, and noticed that memories and thoughts of future and even what was seemingly going on was losing its grip. Quite suddenly after six months I noticed that joy and sorrow had merged and I truly could not tell the difference!
I remember as so many beliefs popped, it was scary at first but also enjoyable as many of the beliefs that were leaving were the beliefs I didn't like about myself or the world, that I was unlovable etc., or that others were. But I remember it suddenly hit me oh my all these things that I believe in that I like will also have to go, that I am lovable, or that there is something called love!
After that there was a period of intense anxiety, I would lay on my bed of nails every night, sleepless, gripped with unknown terror. There was a point when I realized that I had thought of myself on a path, and that I was ‘getting’ somewhere, and I just knew that that belief had to go. I remember sobbing hot hot tears. That too was absorbed somehow, it was obvious that phenomena were uncaused.
In my tradition the 'goal' so to speak was called 'going continuous'. I had no idea what that was but I wanted it. I was trapped in that most magnificent conundrum of everyone saying there was nothing to get yet that you would know when that happened.
At one point my desire consumed me. My chest hurt and I could hardly breathe, it was worse than when my mom had died, and I kept trying to talk myself out of my desire. It finally burst and morphed into a marvelous overwhelming love as I saw there was nothing to get. I realized many years later that this was a mourning of my own death.
I had the very clear picture of myself before the shift of trying to grasp something that had no edges that was very slippery and there were no indentations there was nothing I could get my fingers into to hold. The other vision that kept happening was I was in the backyard with a butterfly net jumping very very high and trying to catch the air I didn't know what I wanted but I knew that I wanted it and I was beginning to realize that I could not have it.
I started to recognize every face as mine, not in form or substance but an undeniable recognition. That has never left.
Two weeks later I was cleaning a stove and suddenly the rag became my hand became the space became the stove, as all lines between things between moments and between myself and the world dissolved. There were no separate things divided by space! It was like the scales had fallen off my eyes! I was astounded that life happened without a me doing it! There was a palpable incredible bodily and psychological relaxation that accompanied this shift in perspective. I felt that I might pee my pants or my body would crumple to the floor, yet my body continued to do what it was doing without effort. All ideas of effort or achievement were gone. It was obvious that there was no one doing life, and that life wasn't happening to a me. It was the end of a lifetime propelled by hope and fear and need of a never arising next. It was as if time died. It was as if I had died, yet it was obvious that I had never existed.
I wondered if this was a 'special' state I had read about, yet could not believe that one could put the blinders of separation on again. After three weeks I marked the date. It was easy to find as we cleaned that house every other Friday. There was no fear associated with this new way of seeing, I knew without a doubt that this was what the famous sages had been singing about. I really never looked for confirmation or avidly sought others who knew this. Who could I tell? I also knew without a doubt that most others I had read had no clue about this no-thing-ness. I called it 'falling into indivisibility'.
Yet, somehow there was a belief that this had happened to a me. So the next two years were smoother. Just watching as more beliefs of who I was untied themselves. Through out these years I watched many beliefs fall away, either as they popped, or after, I'd think, Oh my I don't believe that anymore and never really did!
I sang about this incredible stunning no thingness on facebook for over a year and a half and finally I met another who echoed my heart song, not just speaking of no self. It was such a relief! We sang together on a forum until it folded.
It seemed that the 'gauge' during these two years was self consciousness, self judgment and self correction and doubt becoming less and less, until there was nothing left. Not even nothing. I never knew there would be nothing!
Suspended as nothing I felt I could steer the car into the oncoming traffic and it wouldn't make any difference. I couldn't say it was OK or not OK. I had no group or no one to share this with. I can't even say when it happened as it was such a gradual falling. I did remember that friend saying once that it takes years to get used to this.
About a month later, one day I was speaking with this friend about how it requires imaginary separation to recognize unicity and I said, "oh I will dance with you anytime". He said, "We have been dancing for quite awhile". Suddenly it hit me. The enormity of what had happened. and that he had been there those last few months. Love had been there. Not a psyco-sexual love, but a true Sage is a beautiful clear reflection of your own love and emptiness.
For some the fullness trickles in, but here it was all of a sudden.
It was like he gave me back myself. It was love that brought me back. That's when the weeping began. For no reason. For every reason. I was back. But I was dead. Both. A story knowing I was a story. Like being a character in a movie yet knowing you are made up. Like a hologram, a dream, a magicians tale. Dreamlike yet somehow more alive and vibrant, wondrous beyond measure.
This is an entirely different way to experience what is going on, free from the terror and pain of looking though the window of imagined personal volition. Somehow the window looses the painting of what you have imagined life to be like and ideas about what it should be like. All ideas of truth and meaning and non-meaning fall away.
The imaginary clouds clear themselves and there is no more longing for an idea, no more longing for that which is not. It's more like a longing for what is and there is utter ease. There are no more what if's or what's next. It's like time dies.
No longer does it feel like there is a me doing life or that life is happening to a me. There is an untouchable profound peace underlying all and everything a seamless ease that has embraced the mind and always an unutterable sense of awe.
Self remains but it has lost its relevance.
Life is passionate full on yet impersonal at the same time.
Whilst not singing here with you, I slide into the vastness. Suspended as nothingness. Just a constant wow. But camping with friends and family I felt like transparent light sliding into and through the dream. I Appear and disappear into my own beautiful reflection through their eyes. An ecstatic love dance of one of two of many of one... as love, lover and beloved, a constant union a swooning into the swoon of what was never apart.
It's like before I was wind dancer and now it's like light dancer.
Not even nakedness, not even a wisp of a song clothes what has no weight.
Yet my feets still know how to dance, there are simply no footprints.
No comments:
Post a Comment