Sailing Off The Edge

Bath Tub Truth
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

There’s a phenomenon happening in the world today.
More and more people are waking up – having real, authentic glimpses of reality.
By this I mean that people seem to be having moments where they awaken out of their familiar senses of self, and out of their familiar senses of what the world is, into a much greater reality…
Adyashanti, The End of Your World

They (the doctors) will tell you, they will practically shout: “There is a cure. Do this!”
But, if I read the data carefully I cannot find this “fact.”

Instead, I find right in black and white and I am practically quoting here:
Doctors treating Hodgkins make assumptions the greatest being that chemo followed by stem cell transplant is better than chemo alone.
Read on down and they also put it bluntly: there is no modern study that proves this.
And then, they try to explain why overall survival is not improved… 40-50% of transplants relapse; regular chemo can produce multiple remissions, but they do not hold.
The statistics become a mess. The news is not that good.

But, Eve has to make a choice and so we continue reading.
I am used to reading “the literature.”
I am used to the tedious flipping back and forth between the first page and the fourth or third and double checking references.
Science literature is not read in a relaxing armchair. It is attacked at your desk with a pen and calipers and an intellect that would vivisect a kitten.
But, I am totally surprised that in cancer new articles appear daily.

So now, I can get pissed when a doctor says he’ll give oral busulfan when intravenous is proven better.
All the facts keep changing, ever changing.

I am not used to knowing the latest before the doctors can switch their routines – not when a loved one’s life may depend upon what’s new.
At times it feels like we’ve sailed off the edge of the world
Into this Void of No One Knows.

If you read back through this blog you’ll find a trail of rants as to “reality” and “knowing” or “not knowing.”
But, these past few weeks Eve and her Hodgkins seem to have transposed that spiritual lesson into such a nitty-gritty reality that previous struggles seem like pie in the sky indulgence.

Or, maybe they were just a prelude.

We (the world) know so much.
The world is truly linking up to form a new collective consciousness that can tackle problems. No one person can think it through. Not with cancer.
The factoids float. They swarm. They flood and overwhelm.

All these facts somehow have to come together or at least get waded through.
How do we part the waters?

We (the world) know so much…and I am only led to realize: No one knows!
Not really.
All we can do is slip a foot forward through the muddy waters and test to see if slippery rocks beneath feel steady enough to bear our weight.
One step forward, does it feel all right?

It has to be a feeling, not a certainty or fact.
Cause no one really knows.

Get used to it.
Get used to it and where that leaves you.

We have sailed off the edge.
The bottom has dropped out.
And where are we now?

Sit quietly (I know that is not easy)
But, sit quietly.

Sail off the edge…
into the lap of God.

…what is experienced, if it is a true awakening, is the same: all is one; we are not a particular thing or a particular someone that can be located in a particular space;
what we are is both nothing and everything, simultaneously.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World

The Seeker and Fear

Diving Within
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

We all have a deep longing and a Deep Fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery.
The most effective way it (the mind) AVOIDS Awakening is to SEEK it.
Tony Parsons, The Open Secret

This Sunday I leave for a five-day silent retreat with Adyashanti.
I’ve been wondering if I’ll ask him a question.
And if I do, how can I word it?

Just now, I began it this way:
“I’m not sure if I have some strange metabolic state, some aberrant physiology that makes my daily consciousness seem strange, OR if I am ‘treading water on the void’.”
I then heard Adya say, “You know which it is.”
And tears broke into my eyes.
I do know.
I am treading water.

Some time ago, I gave a synopsis of Adya’s discussion with a woman who was also treading water.
She was using doubt, always doubting her experience, as a means of preventing herself from going deeper.

I am using fear. …Ok, and throw in a dose of doubting intellect and a dash of core issues regarding love.
But, for now let’s look at fear.

Fear in one form or another keeps coming up these days.
One version is intense anxiety. In the characteristic manner of painbody flare-ups, these attacks are way out of proportion to precipitating events.
The causes of my anxiety can almost elude my awareness and are simply the same daily pressures I have dealt with for years. But now, my reaction seems to fill every cell within me. Something obviously is going on.
So, it’s been easy, if quite uncomfortable, to simply focus on the physical sensations.

During these times of intense anxiety, I have some version of these words of Suzanne Segal running through my head:

Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you’re not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn’t someplace else...

For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn’t in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it’s there too in the vastness of who we are.

And, just like that I can see the anxiety is on the level of something like a broken arm - I can feel it and it's no more a part of Me than, let's say, that chair. And then I try to see what IS me... and do not like the view. I do not like to even put the words to what I see. For, that is far too scary.

So, other times, there is simply down right fear.
For instance, recall awhile back I mentioned The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep? It’s been an interesting teaching and I was enjoying the book,
Until I came across these words:

The second way of understanding the practice is to realize that waking life is actually the same as dream,
that the entirety of normal experience is made up of the mind’s projections…
This is one way of articulating the realization that all phenomena are empty and that the apparent self-nature of beings and objects is illusory.
There is not an actual “thing” anywhere in waking life – just as in dream –
but only transient, essenceless appearances.
Arising and self-liberating in the empty, luminous base of existence.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

This passage is now highlighted in yellow and in the margin you will find, scribbled in blue pen, “I hate this!”

I mean really, who wants such a vision?
Nothing is really real! Only temporary dreams rising and dissolving into emptiness!
(Yet, those trucks will flatten you.)
Sometimes, the paradox is so ludicrous I find it truly a cosmic joke and am filled with laughter.
But mostly, it makes me kind of cringe or leads to down right panic.

So, I have adopted a strategy. It consists of largely trying to ignore the vision, or quietly accepting it with a kind of periphery vision.
Either way, I consciously avoid looking at the situation all too carefully.
And if such behavior isn’t treading water, then I really don’t know what is.

In some version or another, this has been going of for years.
Years – Years! of suffering and drama to the point of near exhaustion and what a waste of life.
No not waste, it’s just the way I’m going about things.
But clearly, it is time for resolution.
And I have no idea of how to go about that.

Oh, I know the words comprising one answer or another.
Adya, has addressed it many times.
So have many others whom I do not even know, but I do enjoy their words:

One of the things I came to see is that Enlightenment only becomes available when it has been accepted that it cannot be achieved.
Doctrines, processes, and progressive paths which seek Enlightenment only exacerbate the problem they address by reinforcing the idea that the Self can find something that it presumes it has lost.

It is that very effort, that investment in self-identity, that continuously recreates the illusion of separation from oneness.
This is the veil that we believe exists.
It is the dream of individuality…

But your mind is frightened to let go and still has an idea that something special should happen…
Tony Parsons

Something special, yes. We all expect a bit of flash.
But, I think that in the end it just takes simple Grace.

...once again there was a pervasive silence and once again I waited for the onset of fear to break it up. But this time the fear never came. . . . Within, all was still, silent and motionless. In the stillness, I was not aware of the moment when the fear and tension of waiting had left. Still I continued to wait for a movement not of myself and when no movement came, I simply remained in a great stillness.
Bernadette Roberts

Have a nice week while I am gone. I will get back with you later.
Namaste.

PS - If you miss reading a post midweek, take the time to GO HERE and read an interview with Bernadette Roberts by Stephen Bodian. It's an old interview but rather remarkable, RE: The Void.

Literature and Everyday Transcendence

Just you
Originally uploaded by mercant

In college I eschewed the humanities, at eighteen having already spent half of my life certain I would be a scientist. However, my life has not gone at all as planned. For instance, by my late twenties, I was playing catch-up, reading Poetry and the NY Times Book Review.

From this period I have carried ever since these isolated paragraphs in my head and heart.
I was thinking of this one just the other Sunday morning, as I pushed my cart through "Your (ie my) Dekalb Farmers Market."

She liked - she loved - to push a cart with nice rubber-tired wheels through a paradise of groceries, vegetables, meats, fish, breads… It’s because our fortresses were meant to be impregnable that the fortresses of the ancient world have outlived the marketplaces of the past, leaving the impression that fear and bellicosity were keystones of our earliest communities, when in fact those crossroads where men met to barter fish for baskets, greens for meat, and gold for brides were the places where we first grew to know and communicate with one another. Some part of Betsy’s excitement at the Buy Brite may have been due to the fact she was participating in one of the earliest rites of our civilization.
John Cheever.

I have this in my head as Betsy Brite at the Buy Rite, but that doesn’t matter. She has stuck with me, because I enjoy the same ritual, the same transcendence in the everyday.

I have also carried these lines of John Barth, being as I am a child of central Illinois. From this I know a flatness that the mind struggles to comprehend: fields silent and black, with the roads running straight through the sections, 440 acres without a tree, where silos are the skyscrapers.

I knew that I would leave. John Barth knew my reason.

[80 percent of] Dorchester County, Maryland is subsea level: estuarine wetlands all but uninhabited by men, but teaming like bayous and everglades with other life: the nursery of Chesapeake Bay… More exactly it will be brackish, turbid, tidal and tepid; about the same salinity and summer temperature, I am persuaded, as the fluid we all first swam in… I used sometimes to stand in those boundless tidal marshes, at the center of a 360 degree horizon, surrounded in the Spring by maybe a quarter million Canadian Geese taking off for home and at least by age nine or ten thinking two clear thoughts: 1) this place speaks to me in ways that I don’t even understand yet; and 2) I’m going to get out of here and become a distinguished something or other.

My wife shakes her head at the apparent vanity of the latter. But in a landscape where nothing and almost nobody was distinguished; whether for better or worse there was no pressure from Nature or culture to stand out; where horizon is so ubiquitous that anything vertical- a day beacon, a dead loblolly pine – is ipso facto interesting, the abstract wish to distinguish one self somehow, anyhow, seems pardonable to me.

Pardonable. Understandable. Yes.
And I think that perhaps we all live a version of this story as we flee the void of Nothingness, dispite of and because we know that it speaks to us in ways we cannot fathom.

Adya calls it “Treading water on the Void.”
So today I chose a picture from the Flickr Pool, “Floating Worlds,” known in the Japanese as Ukiyo- a way of escaping earthly brutality by floating upwards.

(Be sure to click the picture- With Thanks to Antonio Mercurio.)