Spiritual Blahbedeblah

Doing a little better yesterday and today. Who knows, maybe tomorrow back to the pain and the melancholy. It comes and goes as it will, and there isn't much I seem able to do about it at this point, except be grateful and let go for the ride.

Trungpa's title means so much more to me now: The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation.

There is no Freedom anywhere, no separate Freedom. And the non-separate "type" of Freedom does not fulfill the Freedom-seeking desires of the separate self. Its so different in fact, I don't even like referring to it as Absolute Freedom or Transcendental Freedom. At least when the development enters true nonduality, beyond the Formless/Form Divide of the Causal.

If we have to use words to say all this. Which I hate. But I guess I have to.

Speaking of things I hate to discuss...the emotional turmoil of the last week or so was initiated by some extremely powerful (I hate this word but here goes) "mystical" experiences. There just experiences. They are more lucid and intense than daily waking experiences no doubt, but experience they are. They arise, they have their fun, they go away.

But I no longer seek these things out like I did previously. So when they emerge, something else is going on--something else has accidentally I think bumped up against whatever this propensity is, and sets off a mystical reflex or something.

The only reason really they are at all valuable is cause they alert me to investigate what this "other thing" going on really is.

On the deepest level, the issue is always the same, has been basically forever. My deep-seated fear of joy and true power. Not in the abstract anyway, but just in my own life. To quote The Tiger, "They're great" for everyone else, I'm totally pro-joy for all others, just not myself. In this spiritual mumbo jumbo we use, that is I'm afraid of the path of the siddhi or the Resurrection if you like.

If we were all as truly powerful as we could be, we wouldn't live long, we couldn't live as the world is currently constituted. Not suprising therefore I think of Trunpa--the alcoholism, womanizing, and the rest were responses to being too "on" in life. Or he was too "on" and therefore the energetic display was too much, was too natural for others, so they had to turn him into a god, had to worship him, had to cling to him, needed him to validate their pathetic existences (not in their essence, just as their lives were/are constituted by choice).

Most of the rest of the "enlightened" so-called make compromises---crap, they have to. Whether it is being a sunny, goofy, child-like peacenik; a detached overly causal-absorbed sage; a non-teacher, regular person; an overly Tantric-Siddhi "Crazy Wisdom" Divinely Egotistic Utterly Creative, Maniac, detached from the world.

Jesus going after the Temple Establishment and the Roman State got him killed. It was inevitable where his intensity would lead. Where else could it? The world can not handle such fire. He didn't booze and chase skirts so far as we know, but the political-social angle (as a coping mechanism) is an interesting parrallel to Trungpa, I think--or so says my heretical side.

So that is why I retract. I can't be some stereotype--whether the happy, well-meaning, but not profoundly critical "spiritual" type (or whatever blend, Eastern, New Age, Christian, blah blah). I can't be consumed by the Vishnu-complex, running around calling myself the greatest enlightened being of all time, or the leader of some future revolution in consciousness, yada yada. I'm probably too cynical for all of that--too exposed to too many aspects of life, too critical in my thought, too old for all that. Nor do I have any desire to be the detached, ever-mindful, totally serious causal sage--All is One, OMMM--shave my head, wear special clothes, get some groovy Sanskrit name.

God that is all so 20th century. And in all fairness, I'm being a little silly here, poking fun at the North American spiritual racket. Obviously people are doing wonderful things, and I have learned incredibly from the persons who are the symbols of my cliche spiritual master types. I'm mean at least they tried to do something. At least they were willing to embrace--however pathologically--the brutality of translation, the density of this created construct.

I want to have a wife and kids. You can't have a stable family scenario and really zone outward--ask Aurobindo for proof of that one. How am I supposed to have dinner with my family, do all the ridiculous social games we are supposd to play, put on the happy face and not actually deal with emotions, growth, and life, just sorta act like we do--and then BAM, turn on the juice.

How are you going to have a "normal" conversation with that around. How is the conversation, if it does anything not immediately going to turn to "the spiritual question" thereby reinventing the entire psychodrama of thinking there is something to realize, treating the spiritual as some cordoned off aspect of existence, or thinking there actually is something called spiritual at all (The Myth of Spirituality)?

There is just infinite pain. The infinite infinite pain being the forgetfulness, the ignorance, and the desperate clutching and seeking. There are loads of finite infinite pain--tragic deaths, abuse, poverty, hatred, loneliness, sorrow, disease, and all the rest.

I want to love and heal, and never lead. I write under a pseudonym; I seek the shadows. I look simply to continue the tradition, let the ideas speak for themselves. I am deeply scared of anything beyond that with anyone except my love and a very select group of friends, whom I deeply trust.

Because by being supernaturally normal, you immediately become singled out, pedastalized, demonized, castigated, adored, separated--either way its not you, its projection, none of it is you or your message being taken seriously-humorously. The realization is nothing but the non-specialness of everything, especially this personality and body. And yet that is treated immediately as special--the positive special and the negative special being only two flip sides of the same coin.

I'm not against seeking in a spiritual sense. As long as people are seekers, they must seek. Its just I don't want to get all caught up in it. But I guess that is inevitable.

In other news...

I guess I'm not going to get around to the piece on Human Genetics--at least not for now.

I'm doing more reading now in critical ecology--looking for a post-environmental ecology or post-environmentalist environmentalism. Environmentalist in this context meaning the consensus environmental lobbyist groups and in worst case scenarios, ecoterrorism, ecotage, and combative radical biocentrist environmentalism (like EarthFirst!). This is a topic I am really connected to for whatever reason. More on that later.