I’ve not written in a while – it has seemed impossible.
I’ve decided to try posting snippets, and in this case, a transcript that I’ve been contemplating.
It’s a rather long excerpt from an Adyashanti CD, Enlightenment: The Direct Approach.
It deals with grief: grief with a capital G - grief that at times shakes the student, Adya is talking with, into convulsions.
Such deep grief has become very familiar to me in the past few months.
I want to understand such grief.
But, also notice that when Adya speaks of resisting the Immensity he speak of the entire Cosmos and he doesn’t frame his comments as metaphor or analogy. (He uses metaphor later, referring to plugging a hose with your thumb.)
The Grief at issue here touches an Immensity, and that Immensity apparantly involves, both experientially and in parsing Adya’s words, the entire Universe.
I was always embarrassed by Maharishi using the term Cosmic Consciousness.
Now, I believe he was simply trying to be accurate in his terminology.
How is this possible – that human consciousness becomes Cosmic?
What would that process feel like?
The proverbial camel and the eye of a needle come to mind.
But the extremes of the actual task are far greater actually: one individual and the entire Universe.
Notice too, that when Adya asks the student to explain her grief, she says she feels like she’s been “living life backwards.”
Awhile ago I mentioned Thomas Merton’s description of Adam’s sin as “a double movement of introversion and extraversion.”
In this phrase “living life backwards” we again meet something of that trick of twist.
Somehow, the Cosmos in which I exist seems to keep getting turned around and swallowed so that it resides within me.
I find this flip and twist excruitating. I react as one would to an electrocution.
Later, upon reflection, I find that returning to my true nature feels like executing some sort of fancy dive: forward somersault with full twist.
And you must pull it off without the slightest splash.
...But, the main point here regards grief and the transcript goes like this:
Student: About three months ago I gave up what I was doing, not really knowing why, but I just had to do it… I have this sense that there is something deeper in me wanting to move through and by doing what I was doing, I was just kind of bailing-out. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. But it really meant just falling back and giving up income and having no idea what was going to happen.
So what’s been happening in that process is just a lot of grief, just intense grief touching upon a depth of aloneness that is terrifying. I can intellectualize what is going on and yet … the feelings that come up are just so big, they feel like they are just going to rip me apart. And there is part of me that wants that, just let it take me over and I can’t…
Adya: It’s going to happen you know that. The moment is going to come and you’re not going to be able to resist it… It’s just about saying yes to it. Yes…. Whatever. Yes. It’s going to kill me. Yes. I’m ready.
Student: Yeah. I can say that when I’m not in it.
Adya: What I am saying is it will visit you until you get to that place where you really say/feel throughout your being, Yes.
Yes, you’re just done resisting…
There is a great Immensity that is coming up within you. The thing that makes it feel intense though, as opposed to immense (immense and intense are different things)… The Cosmos is immense. It’s not necessarily intense. The resistance of that much space, the resistance makes it be perceived as an intensity… Something holds on as the Immensity of Being is coming into your consciousness. Then It is experienced as very intense, overwhelming, terrifying maybe.
That’s why I say when you can get to the moment when you can just say, “Yes!” it’s like you’ve taken your finger off the front of the hose… It’s experienced totally differently. All is well. Then all is unimaginably well.
Student: Yeah. I’ve had glimpses of that… And you know the grief that is in there, that endless, endless grief, it just takes me over sometimes. It’s just unstoppable.
Adya: What’s the grief about? What’s the bottom of the grief?
Student: There’s really not a story or a memory…the best I can put it, I feel like I’ve been living life backwards in a way and that I’ve come to this core of I can call it separation, just the deepest, deepest core separation, just being ripped apart out of wholeness…I find it difficult because I don’t see it around me much. It feels like such a lonely process.
Adya: It feels lonely for the moment inside yourself [as other people hide it]… inside of us, [there] is the central wound…the core wound of turning away from what we really are. As soon as we turned away we experienced separation that causes a grief and suffering and everything else that follows. But as you get very close to that essential turning away… that’s the grief, the grief for having turned away from what you really were and the separation immediately issued. … it’s the grief of turning away from the immensity of what you really are.
Student: And that’s what it feels like, that I am on that edge. I just have to remember. I have to know what I hold in me, what I’m here to express, cause it’s just so painful not to.
Adya: You’ll find it by turning into that intensity. And when I say, “Yes,” I’m trying to impart a certain sense - it’s the letting go of resistance.
“The drop experiences the Ocean by becoming one with it.”
That’s what Maharishi use to say.
No complicated somersaults and twists need be involved.
In fact, Maharishi used to describe the inward dive of meditation as simply leaning over and letting go.
“Yes.”
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