seventhray27 Sun Jan 20, 2013 9:11
"Edg, thank you again for this, four years later.
I can't help but think though, Edg, that you've arrived at
a pretty good place. So, was that because of? Inspite of?"
Hey, seventhray27,
You got me cornered; so's I gotta admit I like where I am "at" even though I'm
not spiritually "at" where I EVER planned on arriving, and, too, that TM was
the major spiritual tool I used for most of my seeker years. So it hadda done
been sumptin'! Thass fer shur.
Meanwhile, post TM, I really did a scholarly thingie with Advaita, and that
intellectual study forced me to push past the meager offerings of MMY's SBAL
and Gita -- which "had logically held water," for me, over many readings of
those two books.
But Ramana Maharshi and Nisargadatta's writings just jammed my nose into the
fact that I had not considered deeply MOST of the TM tenants enough to see the
issues that MMY never addressed.
But just because I have come to a separate peace with the probable eventuality
that spiritual subtlety is not going to be my big-ass accomplishment in this
life, that "peace" does not mean that I am a happy camper. I have merely
stopped arguing with what is not pleasing to me as an ego -- seeing so clearly
now that all humans are quite deeply entangled with the Tar
Baby.....identification. To me it is but a very slight exaggeration to
designate humans as zombies -- plodding along with non-sentient obsessions.
Nor do I say it is evolving to seek to be "humanly happy" anymore. I think
seeking happiness is not necessarily a legitimate spiritual goal, because so
few are willing to define happiness as "being nothing." To seek any emotion is
an addiction process.
Instead, it is bitter herbs with which I celebrate livingness.
Celebrate, because, well, me's all I gots, and I might as well have at least
one follower: my ego. The ego can still cherry pick thoughts from the stream
of consciousness and cobble together an "image" of who it is/was while ignoring
all the unpicked thoughts I also produced. According to the ego, I'm a
good-guy doncha know.
But when I consider ALL my thoughts and feelings and actions as my true
historical record of "me," then all the failures come to the fore, and
perforce, identification is not such a lovely thing after all. It is a good
thing to "finally get straight," for it shakes certainly like a rat in a
terrier's jaws. Far harder to be certain about "that's me" when there's so
much in the mix that is embarrassing.
What's left? My ego still thinks it's running the ship, even though my
intellect sees the deterministic actualities. I know that anything I have ever
thought myself to be was delusional, temporary, chaotically imaginative,
riddled with obsessions, heavily in denial about a host of issues, and,
frankly, pretty much working against my becoming more subtle.
But, being this, clearly to myself (ego,) brings ironic relief, in that, a new
wealth of compassion has been garnered. Knowing my own blindness, I cannot
blame blindness in anyone now. I see myself, truly, honestly -- with about the
same spiritual heft as ANYONE I ever meet or met. Sigh....including FFL's
motley crew.
And what next? I continue reading Advaita. I continue looking at science and
seeing ever deeper metaphors for spiritual concepts. And I divert my brain
from vicious cycles with the few entertainments I've discovered that have that
power: trikking, writing, etc. can keep my brain busy enough to bat away all
the shame -- at least for a while.
I do have a theory about reincarnation that gives the ego some relief that "it
might have more lifetimes to get saintly," but truth be told, never being a
person again and having no individuality in the ocean of being sounds like the
winning lottery ticket to me. The plight of "Edg" and how he ends up in the
future is not "something with great appeal" -- not especially a hot ticket at
the local IMAX.
And too, I'm trying to embrace the mysterium. Trying to calm the ego down and
enjoy, bronco style, the ride on the wild ape through the time-jungle. Trying
to be jiggy with all the smallness of me. Relaxing into laughter about how
itty-bitty petty I am and yet how vast is the underpinning of everything that
everyone ends up being. I'm not a saint, nor are most folks, but yet we do the
things that seemingly divine puppet strings have us do. Each jerked limb also
being a butterfly wing flapping its presence, causing hurricanes divinely
ordained that we'll never know.
Edg
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung wrote:
snip
> > And, then, when my faith-bubble in TM finally burst, on exiting the
> > TMO, what did I do?
> >
> > Yep, I went to about a dozen more seers, readers, jyotishis, healers,
> > psychics, and got all my alien implants removed, got my unlucky
> > numbers to avoid, got my suggested list of yaygas to have done, got a
> > Philippine doctor to take bloody raw clumps of meat out of my body,
> > got some minister from the Sanctuary of the Om to whisper sounds into
> > my ear, got some psychic nurse to scan my family for cancer, (she
> > missed: my son had cancer during the time of seeing her, but all she
> > did was tell us that we needed to eat red meat,) and then toss in your
> > assorted Reiki treatments, chiropractic treatments from FF's
> > enlightened docs who charged $45 a treatment instead of the going rate
> > of $20 everywhere else, and, oh, my face is too red to continue this
> > listing.
> >
> > Spent about $12,000 doing this "exit plan." That was my patterns --
> > that had been honed and wired by me investing in the TMO -- refusing
> > to give up the identification I'd pumped into them, ya see? So many
> > mystic urges had to be separately extinguished by having each one used
> > until clarity dawned and the ruse was revealed.
> >
> > Am I free? Phihhh, that's the lesson, see? One is never free if one
> > is investing identification into ANYTHING.
> >
> > As long as you're splashing sentience everywhere like it was coming
> > out of a fire hose, well, any charlatan can figure a way under your
> > radar, and blammo, you're back to paying someone to make shit up about
> > you.
> >
> > It cost so much. I paid so much.
> >
> > The time, the money, the failed investments, the shame, the pain of
> > the pulling myself roots-and-all out of the FF community where I knew
> > a thousand people by name and face, the cost, the cost.
> >
> > Yet, who will take the least advice about this from me?
> >
> > That's the tell, ya see? We're all winging it and intuitively know
> > that there are no real experts about what goes on inside one's robot.
> >
> > Gotta laugh. Consider this:
> >
> > I'm sorta like the guy who's entered 30 spelling bees and gotten
> > tossed on the first word every time -- so who's going to come to me
> > for spelling advice even with such a deep involvement in spelling bees?
> >
> > Fuck, I'm not even an expert on how to be a loser.
> >
> > Anyone got a spare Xanax?
Edg, thank you again for this, four years later.
I can't help but think though, Edg, that you've arrived at a pretty good place.
So, was that because of? Inspite of?
