--- In [email protected], "claudiouk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Just like to thank people for their responses, which I've found very > helpful. I wrote my piece late last night after too much wine and was > rather apprehensive when logging onto FF Life this morning.. I now > feel "relatively" better. Seeing it as a Dark Night of the Soul is > maybe a bit grandiose for me but at least doesn't extinguish the candle > of hope altogether. Taking it all in a more liberating existential way, > just going with what life just IS, also helpful. There is still an OCD- > like compulsion to seek spiritual perfection, and a fear of ordinary > life with its inevitable ugliness as a contamination.
I think it's pretty common for spiritual seekers to spend years and decades (lifetimes?) on treadmills to glorious perfected futures, always trying to purify away what's broken and impure right now. I certainly did. And, while there was value to that pursuit, there came a time when I needed to get off that treadmill, and "Be Here Now". > Need to enjoy the rose without minding the thorns. As this past week has reminded me, sometimes the thorns are going to be minded. In fact, the thorns are being minded with more intensity of awareness than ever before. The difference, though, is that all the minding is now in the context of awareness of that which is not involved in the drama. It all unfolds in unbounded silence. Temporal states when the thorns just don't have the power to bind the attention feel like the most amazing, blissful freedom. My experience over the last couple months was that in the absence of internal drama, most of the I/me would simply disappear, leaving only an observer of sensory inputs. The I/me would come into play, on demand, as needed. It was a nice vacation. Now my every waking moment is I/me in overdrive, living and reliving the emotional Vietnam of my early adolescence. I hate being a 45 year old teenager, forever stuck in unresolved psycho-sexual bullshit. But, it is an opportunity to notice what remains the same in both the presence and absence of internal turmoil.
