You know what I’m talking about! When you’re arguing with anyone and your mind keeps playing back your version of events and how you’re right and the other person needs to just see that. You tell yourself not to think about it, then moments later, the cycle of words and phrases repeat themselves. It’s at these times that we’re most contracted and completely bound, with no freedom to simply stop the “story” and end our mind’s tirade.
When I dropped alcohol in December 2020 it happened spontaneously and cold turkey. I was never an addict but hardly went a week without a drink on most days. When I stopped, I could see how my drinking was almost a subconscious effort to see if I could “throw off” the love-bliss that had taken centre stage in my life. When I woke with a heavy hangover but found myself swimming in ecstasy even so, I realized I had no desire to drink and was unsure why I was doing it. I simply stopped.
I have imagined in the moments just prior to death, my body distressed and suffering and can see the egoic nonsense of thinking that enlightenment is only possible when everything is just right. And since it’s never just right, it’s permanently postponed. If a little background anxiety is sufficient to distract my attention from The Great One on a calm, blue-sky day, what chance would exist for this fool in the jaws of a bear at the moment of death.
There are times when the motive to move my attention in any direction whatsoever is so weak that I find myself sitting still while waves of love-bliss crash down through me. The madness and stubbornness of my pattern is that a motive forms at all and off I go, leaving Grace in the background…
If you and I were standing on the side of a stream right now and I pointed out an eddy to you, you’d be able to see what I meant and would agree, yes, “I see it”. It would for you and I exist as a separate something, a specific whirlpool, there about 20 feet from the shore, about 8 feet in diameter although a bit oval in shape, and with a foam of white water swirling in it’s middle.
Deb and I have repeatedly fallen in love in cars. With almost 30 years of time spent together, there have been a number of road trips of various lengths and while a few stand out in my memory, I can’t recall a single trip that wasn’t filled with sweetness.
In my morning meditations, I’ve begun to feel closer to the edge of the self-contraction. There are times when all body awareness, thoughts and feelings fade into a blissful current of felt energy, and I can almost sense how it’s not inherent in the energy itself that it be experienced as “things”. That somehow, there is just energy and “I” am spontaneously generating the dichotomy of subject and object as my attention “notices” what appear to be patterns.
Can an ego truly be inclined toward ego death? I feel the answer to that is identical to, “can an ego choose not to seek”? No I don’t think that I, as Cage, could choose not to seek and by not seeking, end myself, since I exist only as a fiction generated by the action of seeking itself.
When I fist listened to a discourse by Adi Da Samraj in the year 2005, the first thing that struck me was His incredible eloquence even in public gatherings while speaking spontaneously. He spoke in polished, essay like, prose that was simultaneously very humorous and understandable while being evocative and precise. He has a…
When feeling this sweet current of Being that is The Beloved and any of my more overt contracted inclinations show up, instead of heading straight off in the direction of the accompanying thoughts like a dog chasing a car, I notice in that moment the blissfulness start to recede or at least become more muted.