I Have Not Heard
It’s been over a year since my last post which was on August 3rd 2023. On Aug 1st 2023, my daughter was admitted to the hospital in Halifax with an extremely rare autoimmune disease caused by a medicine she was prescribed to deal with postpartum anxiety. She started with something called Stephen Johnson’s syndrome which progressed to something much worse called TENs. That disease caused the outer layer of her skin to be attacked by the body and in her case, more than 60% of her body’s outermost layer of skin burst open in a few days.
Fourty days later, in mid-September, we departed the hospital and she began the long road to recovery. She survived and has had a very bumpy road that is expected to require at least a couple more years from now. As you can imagine, this is the kind of event that reshapes a personality entirely. But it has also generated a level of resiliency and strength in her that only a real encounter with mortality can produce.
I’ve used the metaphor of a train derailing to help others understand the impact on all our lives. The initial accident was horrific and it slowed life down to a crawl in which so many details were magnified, but it took most of the rest of the year before the full impacts were felt all the way to the last rail car. My daughter will need a year more of pain meds and is still on a daily dose of hydromorphone that would likely exceed what they’d give a person who showed up with an arm accidentally amputated. The majority of her body’s skin was shed by the illness and the nerve endings of the new skin that regrew is exceptional at communicating raw pain. When her children stroke her arm tenderly, it’s like being scratched with sandpaper, and much worse without pain killers.
Thankfully, there’s almost no scarring! Can you imagine?? The Halifax hospital has something of a boy genius in the burn ward who travels North American providing specialized care and he was quick to treat her with a body wrap that functioned like artificial skin while her new skin regrew. I’m not really trying to horrify you. These are just the things that happened. Photos would be entirely too much.
As of today, my daughter is back with her children and partner and she’s proceeding on the basis of a new normal with daily bouts of joy as a parent but with a different mix if challenges in her life than most people. My experience of this happening was a bit different.
My story is one of ongoing blissfulness in the face of the unthinkable. As a parent, looking over her body in those first weeks, one would assume I was overwhelmed with fear and anxiety and the trauma of empathy any loving parent should feel in a similar situation. Instead, I was deeply present, filled with love and amazement at my child’s strength throughout, but at a deeper feeling level, I was also often turned blissfully towards Adi Da Samraj, my Guru, whose tangile spirit force I experience as an onging feeling of ecstasy even in the midst of such pain. This is hard to explain but I’ll try.
First off, I was not so in shock by this event that I became disassociated from the situation as a way of dealing with the trauma. My situation wasn’t one of self-delusion as a coping mechanism. If you’ve read any of my blog up to this post, you’ll know my experience as a devotee of Adi Da Samraj has been filled with bliss and ecstasy since an “event” while hunting in Northern BC almost four years ago (September 2020). While waiting for the sun to rise, holding a rifle and calling for a Moose, I was granted an insight into the relationship between the perceiver and the perceived that broke the link of presumption that I am this body-mind being called A Cage.
I’ve spent the last four years studying Adi Da’s teachings and trying to unpack the gift given to me in that single moment when I wondered why I think I’m the one with the fingers and tastebuds but don’t think I’m the blue sky and the trees when clearly all of these “objects” of perception are identical in how they are presented to the awareness where I stood as subject (to get a sense of how I got to this insight see here).
There have been a whole lot of ancillary benefits of this initial gift of insight such as the spontaneous release of my addition to sugar and other habits like no longer drinking alcohol which I used to do almost daily. The habit of eating until I was stuffed disappeared overnight as I found myself now eating very slowly and consciously and stopping when my body told me I was full rather than 10 bites later when I was stuffed past comfort.
But one of the primary impacts of that gift of insight was that I saw how all thoughts and feelings, any content of any sort that arose in my body or mind was just stuff, all equally objective to where I stood as perceiver, and, as such, none of it was good or bad until I brought some “attitude” to it. With the certainty that I am the body-mind somehow severed by that initial gift, thoughts, feelings and even many habits would try to capture my attention but then because I wasn’t reinforcing them, they would effectively dissolve.
As a consequence, through most of each day, I found myself floating in a dreamscape I previously called the world, with a near constant current of blissfulness conducted through my feeling awareness regardless of the actual conditions in my body-mind.
In the first winter after this transformative event in my life, I was skiing in Sun Peaks, BC, Canada where I operate a property management business. It was the final day of the ski season and I was floating through a double-black diamond run with large moguls while the sun shone and the snow had softened up perfectly as it does drawing spring skiing fanatics for the last turns of the year. My knees were flying up and down easefully in this difficult terrain, when I suddenly found myself face down with an incredible pain shooting through my right shoulder. I had wiped out in a blink of an eye and had yet to even understand how. I was just lying face down in the snow with the most intense pain I had experienced in many years. I was certain I had broken something. I lay unmoving for a minute or two unsure I’d even be able to move while the pain broke through me in waves of intensity.
And then I noticed, underneath the pain and discomfort of my body, I felt that pulse of ecstasy still circulating through my body-mind, more tangible in many ways than the pain in the body. I may have even chuckled face down in the snow when this noticing grew. I found a way of rotating my feet below and sitting up and now seeing my right shoulder was located closer to my right armpit I understood that I’d dislocated my right arm. My ski had popped off for no obvious reason. I was using touring bindings rather than downhill gear and even though I’d skied those moguls a hundred times without incident, this time they popped open without warning and produced this exquisite moment.
My son, Raiden came by a few moments later. He was on a different route but intent on finishing the lower half of the mogul run called 5th Avenue where he found me. He called ski patrol and over the next hour they got me off the hill and Raiden drove me to the hospital where three hours after the initial incident, a doctor and two support staff yanked on my arm painfully then snapped it back into place. It was properly damaged and to this day can pop halfway out while I hold one of my grandsons. I’ve avoided surgery and done a bunch of things to strengthen it, but at 60, it’s just what it is, functional but less than perfect and prone to arthritic pain.
The doctor told me that it’s one of the most painful injuries one can get. He said it would take months to heal but was happy to see how well it popped back in, so off I went, still blissful even as the pain came in waves of physical discomfort layered over top of my silly ecstatic grin. Over the past four years since the first ecstatic insight was granted, I’ve discovered that the understanding generated that day seems to have broken the link of absolute certainty that I am this body-mind entity called, A Cage. It hasn’t really changed how I go about my daily life, but somehow, that core presumption that I am this “meat box” has been severed.
So my time in the hospital with my daughter, Coby, was a lot like a protracted period of having a painfully dislocated shoulder. There is real trauma experienced at the level of the body-mind, but since the body, mind, feelings emotions, thoughts, others and world are ALL EQUALLY objective to where I noticed myself to exist, as a separate sense of attention, the blissfulness I felt then and now seems to “colour” all the other experiences that arise to my attention. Yes, I felt horror and fear and anxiety while sitting bedside as my daughter fought for her life, but like the pain of my dislocated shoulder, there was blissfulness felt over top, prior to and alive with the feeling of Relationship with my Guru, Adi Da Samraj, Who is the very Consciousness prior even to attention.
In practical terms, that meant I’m much more deeply present and loving and empathetic in the world and that allowed me to sit with my daughter without bringing extra drama to the situation. For the final two weeks of her hospital stay, I just lived and slept on a cot in the hospital room beside her, able to support her in any way she needed. That, in turn, freed her to heal without her energy needing to be expended to comfort me as naturally it did for others in our family that she could see and feel felt pained and helpless in the face of this terrible disease.
If you haven’t read or listened to Adi Da’s talk called the Dreaded Gomboo, it’s fairly topical to this situation. In it, he uses a humourous phrase, “The Dreaded Gomboo” to describe the disease (dis-ease) that the entire human drama generates through our endless search for relief. This disease is fictional and yet we expend our entire lives trying to cure our feelings of anxiety, fear, doubt, and despair (collective signs of the Dreaded Gomboo) when in Reality, Perfect Happiness is Always Already The Case.
So sitting bedside with my daughter, what I found myself mostly doing was turning my attention, body, feelings and breath toward the tangibly felt relationship to that One who has appeared in the world as Adi Da Samraj and who has carried with Him the Message and the Means of Transcending the suffering we separate body-minds represent with our attention fixed on our body-mind selves presuming we are identical to those “objects”.
In the past year, I’ve expanded my journey of devotion to Adi Da by increasing my practice commitment to Him by entering what’s called the Second Congregation of Adidam. In practical terms, this means I’ve decided to step up my game and follow Adi Da’s instructions that include becoming a raw food vegetarian, eliminating substances and habits that toxify or enervate the body (such as caffeine), while increasing daily time commitments to study and meditation.
But in the past year, I’ve also learned a fair bit about myself as a pattern making and replicating machinery. First off, I’ve begun to “phase” more which means I’m tending to become more Cage and less turned to Adi Da as I have been in the previous three years. Patterns begin to creep back in. Short of Perfect Self-Realization, which is to say, short of the Perfect Realization of Adi Da’s State and Person by Transcending entirely the body-mind self-contraction, all states are egoic, conditional and therefore changing.
It’s really true that in the past four years, I’ve only had a handful of times that, if combined, might add up to a week or two of being in any state of mind or feeling that was anything other than easeful, happy, blissful and ecstatic. At least this is true of the waking state Cage.
While my devotional disposition has certainly filtered into my dreams, (I awoke this morning having been doing a devotional chant in the final moments of dreaming) by and large, the dreaming person is devoid of devotion. The blissfulness I feel during most of the time in my waking state disappears once I fall asleep. With that said, I don’t dream a great deal and I tend to fall completely asleep within a few minutes of putting my head to pillow so most of my nights are spent in deep sleep without any body-mind awareness at all.
One of the things I’ve spent a fair amount of time considering and trying to understand is why am I enjoying such an incredible depth of blissfulness at all. What was the full nature of the understanding that I was Graced to receive and why is it producing this ongoing gift of Grace in the form of equanimity, bliss and ecstasy?
In Adidam, Adi Da uses a number of terms with a great deal of technical and specific meanings that I suspect are ultimately only clearly understood upon the true realization of those terms. For instance, True Hearing is repeatedly referred to by Adi Da as a form of self-understanding in which the being becomes fully responsible for the activity of self-contraction. In January 2022 I wrote a blog entry called A Year Bathed In Grace at which time I indicated, I believed I’d achieved the understanding commensurate with True Hearing. I am now confident that was not the case then, nor is the case now. I have not heard.
I’ve been trying to understand why my life has been so transformed that day in the hunting field with all of the effects of that understanding in my life: A real ongoing sense of equanimity. The nearly constant feelings of bliss and ecstasy that daily on multiple occasions bring tears to my eyes in the midst of devotional swoons when turned to and feeling my Master, Adi Da Samraj. The real and practical life changes that have come so easy in many regards related to renunciation (while many things related to diet and habit were easily dropped, many have not. As I mentioned, phasing occurs and egos are tricky!).
So here’s what I think I’ve understood in the past year. First, the understanding that started it all was a very clear noticing while considering The Five Reality Teachings that I could not possibly be the body, the mind, any thought, feeling, sensation or experience of any sort gross or subtle because I noticed in that moment that I must always be in a position prior to the experience as subject to object. I cannot be my tastebuds, fingers, thoughts etc, because I was aware of them over and against the consciousness where they, as objects of experience, registered in consciousness. In that same moment, I realized it was a presumption that I was the body-mind that was as arbitrary as the presumption that I was not the trees, the mountain or the blue sky.
What I didn’t understand then, but do now is that what happened in that moment was I had noticed my actual location to be consciousness as attention. And while I’ve continued to live my life in many ways unchanged from the time before this understanding, the “link” or absolute certainty that the body-mind is identical to the conscious awareness as attention of that body-mind seems to have been permanently severed. This I think explains the life condition effects that have taken place since that moment related to equanimity, bliss and renunciation. While I spend virtually every moment of the waking day functioning as I did before this insight, the spell that I am this body-mind seems to have been severed and that leaves me to some degree free of the bondage that otherwise had hold on me when I was identical to this body-mind called Cage. I now have more “free energy and attention.”
But this is also why I am clear on the fact that true hearing has not taken place in my case. Because while at a deep down level, I know I’m not the body mind but am conscious as attention, I have not understood or noticed the very action of self-contraction which generates the separate-self sense in the first place. In the remarkable discourse called, The Causal Position, Adi Da fully explains the insight He granted to me that day. Here’s a couple excerpts from that talk which I strongly urge anyone interested in understanding the “hierarchy of experiencing”:
“So the sadhana itself is a revelation process of the hierarchy of experiencing, the hierarchical structure of all experiencing. It’s a revelation of the structure itself, a revelation also relative to the objects, gross and subtle, that arise through that hierarchical mechanism. All that is observed to be self-contraction, felt beyond, until there is simple attention itself, and then the Witness. So this is the actual course of sadhana, this is the fundamental or underlying process of the course of sadhana…In the course of sadhana, as I’ve said, the entire hierarchical structure of experiences is revealed as a hierarchy until the root of experiencing is located in the right side of the heart, and the position prior to that root, prior to that knot, prior to attention in other words, prior to the feeling of relatedness is stably established as the position of the sadhana.” Adi Da Samraj, from The Causal Position, Track #5
In this talk, Bhagavan goes on to point out that ALL EXPERIENCING in any form is egoic. And that the experiences of the subtle kind (like bliss and ecstasy for instance) may be as equally binding as those experiences of the gross kind (experiences related to “Money, Food and Sex” for instance) that might be sought on their own term.
It’s worth pointing out that the sequence of thoughts that lead to the severing of the presumption of my location as the body-mind had occurred to me prior to that day. They just never penetrated all the way through. The insight granted to me that day in the hunting field was a pure Gift of Grace that I in no way earned or achieved through my own efforts.
In another talk I heard of Adi Da’s recently, He says that His way is not about the progressive stages of life where at the end of an ordeal, god is realized. This is the method of The Great Tradition. Instead, He gives everything in the first moment of recognition. No search is useful or justified. And the Way itself is the way of Self-Understanding to the most Perfect degree.
Bhagavan, The Gift Has Been Received. In time I will Hear and See Only You.
