Grief, Part III: dying, death, and birth

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I thought it’d be nice to share the story of Ramana Maharishi’s enlightenment which is posted in greater detail here.
Notice how this Saint responded to the thought, “I’m dying.”
He was totally free from the drama, gyrations, and flapping arms that most of us go through. And yet, he still experienced that fear that the Taoists speak of as ru ding.

In his seventeenth year, in full health and in normal waking state he was suddenly overwhelmed with the fear of death and fully convinced that death was imminent. The inexplicable feeling would not leave so the boy began to ponder on the meaning of death. He was alone in his upper story room at the time so he decided to act out death and inquire into the meaning of it. He laid down with his arms stiffly at his sides as if dead, held his breath and said to himself;

Now death has come but what does it mean?
What is it that is dying?
The body dies and is carried off to the cremation ground and reduced to ashes. But with the death of the body, am I dead?
Am I the body?
This body is now silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the 'I' within me, apart from the body.
So I am the Spirit transcending the body.
The body dies but the spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death.
That means that I am the deathless Spirit.

The awareness of this knowledge took full possession of him, not at the level of mere mental awareness but at the deeper level of complete spiritual self-awareness. He suddenly became the Spirit and knew himself as That, no longer identifying himself as merely the body form that had been called Venkataraman. Self realization was instantaneous, complete, and irreversible. His ego was lost in a flood of pure Self awareness.

How could Ramana Maharishi be so calm about it all?
Perhaps he had little if any pain-body. Maybe his ego didn’t fight him. Or perhaps the conditioning of his mind was not as deep as most.
Whatever the reason was, he wasn’t in the shape most of us are in.
Most of us have work to do, before and after awakening. We get to practice seeing through our conditioning and fears repeatedly on many levels.

…the vast majority of people who come see me, or any other teacher, would probably do well with a little help from a good psychologist… Somehow or other the conditioning will need to be addressed, either before awakening or after awakening. You can have direct experiences of deep reality, but if you have too much psychological conflict, or your ego is still too fractured and not functioning coherently, it will keep holding you back.
Adyashanti, Who Hears This Sound? The Sun, December, 2007

Ah, yes.
Adya has described this process of examining ourselves on deeper and deeper levels, as peeling away layer after layer of an onion. Eventually, all the layers are lying in a pile at your feet.
And you are left with Nothing in your hands.
The Nothing… (that is everything).

Well, I’ve opened enough presents wrapped in tissue paper to know that fingertips can tell what’s coming. I think the same holds true layers of an onion.
And so the whole process can be scary. You can feel the dissolution coming.
But, what does it really mean?

Somehow, you have to find the integrity to look closely and inquire.
So, let me end all this talk of grief and fear and dying with these words of the French Vedantist, Arnaud Desjardins (with thanks to Beth for telling me of him):

Westerners commonly consider life to be the opposite of death, but Orientals consider birth to be the opposite of death.
For them, life expresses itself through a movement of perpetual change: an uninterrupted play of death and birth… the birth of the child is the death of the baby; the birth of the adolescent is the death of the child.
Daring to live means daring to die at each moment.
But it also means daring to be born – daring to pass through important stages in life where the person you use to be dies, in order to make room for someone with a new view of the world…
To put it simply, daring to live also means no longer having the slightest fear of what we feel.
Arnaud Desjardins, The Jump Into Life: Moving Beyond Fear.

Grief, Part II: the Crucifixion

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Pat had gotten up from the table, for a moment, leaving Becky and me quietly digesting. We’d been talking about their life in Mexico.
“What was Becky doing there?” She didn’t know. She only knew it was important, the next step for her spiritually.
Then out of that silent pause, I was looking up from my plate, eyes all watery.
The softest, most unanticipated thought had just surprised me and was settling upon my lips, “I’m dying.”
The tears were an expression of the gentle sweetness of this new understanding.
I hesitated. Was this the time to speak it out?
No – that would require too many words, words that were better left to others:

But, as even the personal man is much more than the physical body, the price goes deeper than the body.
There is a kind of dying, proceeding in the midst of continued bodily existence. Doubtless it is but natural that the personal nature should dread all this and, in a measure, grieve. For here we have the true meaning of the crucifixion….

Awakening calls for a profound, though possibly subtle, virility…
A fire descends and consumes the personal man.
For a time, short or long, this Fire continues.
The personal man is the fuel, and the fuel, in greater or lesser measure, does suffer.
But the fire does not destroy; it simply transforms.
Franklin Merrill-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy

I bet that everyday, somewhere in Mexico, there is a re-enactment of the crucifixion.
Earlier at dinner, we spoke of how the myths that really catch on are the stories that hold true on many levels.
Now that Becky lives part of every month in the land where she was born, Jesus finally made sense to her.
In Mexico, Catholic cathedrals were put in place right over Aztec pyramids.
This is a people who know all about human sacrifice.
And here I had told them about the words of Merrill-Wolff regarding crucifixion.

But, I hadn’t mentioned why I was rereading him.
I have been watching this grief inside me, wondering if the energy/emotion will resolve before it actually shreds my heart. Sometimes it has felt fairly nip and tuck.
The aneurysm they found in January, right where the aorta ascends from my heart, is obviously bulging from the strain.
“Hypertension,” they say. And there are all kinds of calculations as to the chance of rupture, and all kinds of drugs to swallow.

Here too, a story holds on many levels.
How will it all play out?
How much of me is dying?
And what will be the price?
Not that it really matters.
I am ready to pay anything… almost.

My final word on this particular subject is: I sought a Goal the existence of which I had become convinced was highly probable. I succeeded in finding this Goal, and now I KNOW, and can also say to all others: “IT IS ABSOLUTELY WORTH ANYTHING THAT IT MAY COST, AND IMMEASURABLY MORE.”
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, speaking of his own enlightenment.

Grief: "Yes!"

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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.”