My first mystical experience was never something I recalled as important because I'm sure most of us have them as small children. Yet, people who tell stories of their spiritual journeys often include them. I would go outside in the yard of the house we rented, where there was a little grove plants and a couple trees.
Gold sparks and little points of light swirled around and I would hear friendly voices whispering and murmuring. They made me feel safe and more at home than did my family. After I started going to kindergarten they stopped, and I never heard them again.
1972 Teenage mystical experience
I had been meditating for two years. A day came when I arose with an extraordinary feeling of lightness, and went to my classes at Pasadena High School, practically floating all day, everything crystal clear to my senses, every movement effortless, and no avoiding eye contact because of my usual shyness. I don't remember how long it lasted. A week? I recall feeling like I fit in even less than normally, and needed to be "responsible." Round that time, there were also phenomena like a journey out of the body while meditating after studying Robert Monroe's "Journey's Out of the Body." Once while meditating on a focal point in front of the "third eye" the translucent blue heads of beings appeared in a triangular configuration, and a hollow, musical voice toned "to become square, square yourself." It wasn't the effect of drugs or alcohol. I was a competitive gymnast and chess player, and made straight A's.
Many years later I searched until I came up with several meanings for that, eventually realizing that the riddle was not for finding the solution, but for its investigation. I had no concept of a spiritual path then. It was all out of my endless curiosity and an intense desire to develop my mind.
1992 Worse than screaming demons
I couldn't stand it for even five minutes, sitting and doing nothing. Some wise guy on the car radio said it was good for your health, just five minutes of sitting, relaxing, and breathing...meditating. I didn't even believe in God, but I tried it. I fell into a blackness, with no bottom or sides, only the horror of nothing. It would have been better if a demon or beast had arisen in front of me and screamed in my face. Burning in hell would have been kinder and gentler. But this vacuum sucked something out of me I didn't even know I had then - my soul.
It haunted for my days while I scurried through my 70 hour work week. It was there when I kicked my girlfriend out for using my ATM card to support her cocaine habit. But my life was structured for maximum distraction, and the black hole memory faded. The only time I allowed my mind to slow down was when I was unconscious and horizontal in bed. I thought I had it mastered. I was way down the road from my childhood mystical experiences. An overachiever, an agnostic, a workaholic.1994 Broken bones at 3 am
Whacka, whacka the sound reverberated off of the tile walls in the operating room. I stopped for a moment, held the heavy metal mallet near my chest, and looked at the big clock on the wall. It was the old fashioned kind of clock, and it said 3 am. The second hand ticked along, counting down the time as the night moved toward 8 am when I would see my first patient in the office. I wasn't even sure what day it was, but in that moment I became sure of one thing: this was the last operation I would ever do.
I started pounding the nail again, down into the shaft of the tibia, lining up the broken fragments as it went deeper into the bone. I went on autopilot. After 14 years of training, a surgeon can do that. I knew a neurosurgeon who blew out a lumbar disc after leaning over doing brain surgery for four hours. It was so bad he pissed on himself, but he finished the case and the patient did fine. I finished my case, and the patient did fine too, even though I couldn't remember anything that happened after I looked at that clock. But, we are trained to do that.
I set the alarm for 7 am, to get an extra hour of sleep, but when it went off I knew it was over. I called my receptionist to cancel all of the patients, and then I called the OR supervisor at the hospital and told her to take me off of the trauma schedule. That caused quite a stir. "I'm serious," I heard myself say. "I'm not going in."
I stayed in bed for a month.
1995 Pulling out of it
A spark of caring arose. Somewhere down the road and months after that operation on the broken tibia, a little light switched on. I never knew where it came from. One moment I went from not wanting to exist, to knowing that I'm supposed to be here. The only place I could go lower was death. I had gained a solid career, two BMWs, a house in the hills, and 60 pounds in just three years. Now it was all gone except for my big round gut. I felt lower than death.
I started working on my body, bathing regularly, going on short walks, taking vitamins again. My brother and an ex-girlfriend (not the cocaine addict) took turns checking on me in my little in-law apartment. They also paid the bills and brought groceries, and for the first time in ages I felt gratitude for something other than my own success.
The weight started to come off, and I was walking up a flight of stairs without panting. I was making it to the gym, and with stress eating almost eliminated I lost 30 pounds the first year. As I got healthier I worked on my psychology and began to confront all the demons in there. Coming out of therapy sessions, I would feel nauseous from the hole inside, and backslide by eating ice cream. Self-help books scared me, something in my mind inducing sleepiness to block them out, even dropping the book on my face. Looking at myself was looking into a broken mirror. Knowing that I'm supposed be here was the only reminder to keep going. Oh, and that little spark that wouldn't die.
I accepted myself as a nobody who was doing nothing, which was true, because that is what I believed when one hits bottom. If you can accept yourself at the bottom, then there is nowhere to go but up. After a while, I arranged to work part-time. During one therapy session two years after that final surgery, I found that I knew more about myself than the therapist did, and I quit. It was clear when I looked back at my life what was wrong, why I became a workaholic, and how I burned out. I felt a new sense of mastery - a sense of balance I never had during the years of being driven and distracted. But something was still missing.
1997 What is Enlightenment?
I had stopped believing in God after a university biochemistry class. My theory of the universe was that life came from a big bang of matter that evolved by chance into a complex organism made of bone and tissue, and when it died it went back to molecules and got recycled. I had fourteen years of scientific training to back up this theory. End of discussion. So when I found myself at Border's bookstore, curiously poking around in the Spirituality/New Age section, it felt very strange.
Maybe my mind
was different, healed in some way and receptive, so I kept looking. I decided I didn't want a book
about Chakras, or the Seth material, or Urantia. (I would wind up reading them all on my upcoming journey). The entire pursuit seemed unreal, like someones fantasy, intangible, yet I kept looking. Checking for a quick read in the magazine section, one grabbed me, a
magazine called "What is Enlightenment?" A whole magazine about some altered
state of mind. Freakish. I had heard the word a few times and couldn't
understand why someone would want to be in a trance state where everything looked
"joyous and beautiful." Go take mushrooms, I would think.
I flipped the pages anyway, and an ad caught my eye. "Retreat to India on a
Journey to Enlightenment," it said. There was a picture of a white guy with a
mustache.
Aha washed over me. Instantly I knew I must go there, and
I knew I had to find this thing they called enlightenment. I felt like the victim
of some bizarre mind experiment. The spark inside me had
ignited something. Within a week I had finished the magazine and was reading books late into the night. I started having strange dreams, and except when I was at work where my mind could focus, I
walked around in a daze. Then I bought a round-trip ticket to New Delhi.
(I wrote about 1992 - 1997 from memory, on January 23, 2012. There seem to be two kinds of memories that get etched indelibly into our brains - emotional trauma, and spiritual experiences).
Aha washed over me. Instantly I knew I must go there, and
I knew I had to find this thing they called enlightenment. I felt like the victim
of some bizarre mind experiment. The spark inside me had
ignited something. Within a week I had finished the magazine and was reading books late into the night. I started having strange dreams, and except when I was at work where my mind could focus, I
walked around in a daze. Then I bought a round-trip ticket to New Delhi. (I wrote about 1992 - 1997 from memory, on January 23, 2012. There seem to be two kinds of memories that get etched indelibly into our brains - emotional trauma, and spiritual experiences).
1998 On fire
I ended up at the feet of ShantiMayi in India, stewing in the sand with 100 other grovelling foreigners, each with their own agenda. She was the first person who spiritually stunned me, shining into my eyes the sheer force of her enlightenment, flaming my spirit until it melted, and setting me in motion until i got it. I wanted it so badly that in my mind I gave up my life for it, overcoming the fear of death totally, but there was a deeper fear: accepting the consequences of changing into something that only-God-knows-what, metamorphosing into an unidentifiable and alien misfit. During the two months I was there, I had a mind-emptying experience that lasted for five days. It was such a relief that my questions were over that I was blissed out, but just a freedom from suffering bliss, not an elevation into euphoria. All of my existential questions were replaced by answers, and the only questions I have had since then have been questions about the matter of enlightenment itself.
2000 This is it!
I didn't become a misfit. It happened to me in the spring of 2000, 2 years after I started my bat-out-of-hell search for the Truth about the Universe. The day came when I got it suddenly, awakening and arising without a thought, wordlessly pacing about my monastic apartment with no concept of an individual identity, my body filled with energetic vibration, and from within my brain I seemed to hear the sound of the creation of the universe. Creation was not something that occurred 13 billion years ago; it was occurring right in the now, all around me, from infinite points in space, creating me and everything around me. I knew enough to recognize it, but not enough to know quite what to do with it.
2001 Enlightenment lost
I lost it less than a year later. I tried to blame ShantiMayi, and another guru of much influence, Gangaji. When I shared it with them that summer, while I was in full flame, they both told me the same thing. "That's it! Now be quiet." I took that as a sign that I was finished, but I didn't need a sign. I knew directly beyond signs and words that I was free, and that the pain of suffering was over. But after a while the freedom faded, and I didn't know why. Shantimayi was in India and Gangaji was in other parts of the world.
I did my best to be quiet and not talk about it. My mind was the mind, and my body was the body. Everything was a constant flow of awareness, and nothing was separate. The mind saw things as separate, but the new experience of awareness did not. I was no longer the doer. Months went by as I did absolutely nothing, exerted no effort, and allowed the body and the mind to flow and dance through the illusion. The mind and body can work quite well without us, I would think. This "I" vanished into the illusion, because the illusion is really all one. Unity is an illusion. The Creator and all that was created became nothing more than a state of mind.
I would go around with my new awareness, the mind excited by new ways of putting thoughts and words together, and spill a little out here and there, the words coming in bursts of energy. People's eyes glazed over. I couldn't control how I expressed the infinite awareness, or how people would react so I learned to keep quiet about it, but the pangs of wanting things came in like the tide of an ocean. I worried a little, and went to a teaching by Adyashanti, who wasn't so big back then, and a few satsangs with lesser teachers to try to get a reference of where I was at, but they bored me because I knew it all. I got into a couple of rounds with some of them, throwing words like darts, and after the teachings the students would avoid me. Still, people can be very tolerant. I tried to meditate a few times, but nothing happened. With time, the tide of delusion kept rising. Thoughts about having better things and a loving relationship began to crowd my awareness, making me want what I didn't have, making me restless.
Perhaps keeping quiet had been bad advice but trying to share it didn't work any better. I felt annoyed at the two Masters, and I even accused the Bodhisattvas that assist us from higher realms. It couldn't be my fault, I had done nothing wrong and everything right, I had given my life for it, yet my new found energy and vibrational purity was being subsumed by exciting desires. I wanted to make more money; I wanted a sexy girlfriend; I wanted a bigger apartment, and a newer car. The clear mind that was centered in the infinite moment wandered and became my mind, distracted. The realization of the Absolute, having come in the a surge of a moment, was drowned again in the ocean of illusion.
Now, rather than sharing with others directly from that infinite moment of pure awareness, I have to call on the memory of it. It's a powerful memory, stamped onto my brain, and scarred into my cerebral cortex. But now my voice is a muted effort to iterate some version of the Truth. I can't blame the Masters, it just happened, my path is not your path or anyone elses. But I'm still annoyed after these years of returning to the state of self as separate, and somebody must be held accountable. A few more satsangs and I found a target for my annoyance.
False teachers who get rich from writing and preaching the language of Enlightenese, a tongue that fools students into returning for canned talks about "enlightenment," and serves to keep students digging into their wallets to serve the teacher. That's what annoys me now.
The direct experience of an inner state beyond hell, to the transformation of awareness that is beyond infinity. Knowing exactly what Buddha meant when he said that a hundred universes can fit on a mote of dust. Ending up somewhere between heaven and hell, yet still knowing what Buddha meant, all of it in part of one incarnation. I call this a path of extreme spiritual reality.
ShantiMayi sat on the rock wall in front of the Bodhi tree of Maharaji's ashram in Laxman Jhula, the last town before reaching the source of the Ganges River near the Tibetan border. Footpaths travelled by Gautama Buddha 500 years before Christ paralleled the river and I felt the sacredness of the place, the time and the exalted vibrations. All the while half-naked Indians shit in bushes along the path, hungry kids tugged at my shirt and pants for a rupee, and amputees sat around small pots waiting for donations - amputees who had sacrificed limbs to gain sympathy and increase their yield. I know because I became friends with Dr. Demani, a semi-deranged man wearing thick glasses, who had the privilege of separating such lower-caste individuals from their healthy arms and legs.
So she sat there, the beautiful ShantMayi, a white woman from the U.S. who received the name from her Guru, a woman who had pierced my heart instantly, her straight blond hair nearly reaching her waist, and she went into a rage. "Some of you have been coming here for years, five years, ten years and you don't awaken! What is your problem? I'm tired of seeing your faces and knowing you're not getting it. GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY ASHRAM!" Her burning eyes pulverized weak minds and timid souls, forcing some to rise, heads bowed in shame, hurting and with tears in there eyes. They left and never returned. I too had tears in my eyes because her severe Truth deepened my love for her more than ever. That was a moment of deepening along the path, the path of many moments that made the desirelessness come closer. I asserted again to lose all the boundaries of our separated existence, and burned for the unknown. But all I could do for the time being was continue grovelling in the dirt, impatient for the deepening to take me beyond the teachings, to blow my own mind of thoughts and even awareness that I was on a "path." After that came obliteration of the path, there in reality being no path, because as the realized beings say, the Truth is here and now and without beginning and without end and because of ShantiMayi I got it, and she told me I had it and then because of my self-centered return to the reality of separation in this illusion i gave it up and lost it, just as someone who was free of the path returned to the path, in my case the path that lead away from the Truth. I know that for eons in my future my spirit will cherish the experience of freedom and infinite unbounded beingness. I will never lose the most ultimate gratitude for the experience of realizing the Absolute even while I find myself as insignificant as a mote of dust in the vastness of many Universes.
(1998 - 2001 was written on 8/22/09 and was my first actual post on this blog. At that time, I was on no path, following no discipline, and didn't care. I just follow a mounting urge to write them down as these powerful memories would not leave me alone. I have edited out some garbage.)
A decade of suffering
It's one and a half years after my first November 2009 post, my last post, and my last crack at communicating a spiritual truth - except for little meaningless bursts of tainted wisdom here and there. It's all tainted. Finding a purpose and driven by a mission that is dedicate to easing suffering and the improvement of this planet, I encounter walls of resistance, one after another. It's tedious and draining, the inspiration to help other people. The brain in a box/ perspiration of going to the old day job at least coughed up a fat paycheck, and even some time to enjoy the spoils.
Now, all I do is cramp over my keyboard 12 hours a day, begging for grant money to transform a greedy private medical office into a vital, breathing, community health center dedicated to improving people's lives. "We cannot support you," reads the short grant rejection letter from a foundation that splurges millions for fancy seminars on clinic floor plans, flighty websites to demonstrate obscure IT projects, and health fairs. I calculate the personal loss of 500 hours and $5,000, given naively like a helping hand to a child who, sliding off a cliff, is guarded by biting dogs.
Hopefully, the inspiration won't give way to frustration and alienation. The famous doctor who cracked some managed care heads in the 80s and 90s, the passionate doctor who had a major Hollywood movie made about her story, responded to my email a few days ago. She suggested a phone call next week. I replied to her reply. I'm waiting for her to offer a time to call. I'm in suspense. It will be the first big break, if she decides to work with me. It might be the tipping point into a rush of success, a rush of energy to make a positive impact on this dark planet.
There will be less cramping over the keyboard, because there will be meeting, speeches, rallies, testimonies, and changes. Big changes. Little doctors will crack, forced to do what they signed up for, helping those in need, trading down their sports cars and 700 series BMWs, cashing in their vacation condos, and tightening their retirement budgets. Their kids will choose careers other than medicine, and will be replaced by applicants who actually want to serve others more than themselves.("A decade of suffering" is a cut and paste of my second post written May 28, 2011 before I revived this blog. I left in some garbage to show why unawakened stream of consciousness is off the path. There's more to the story about the decade of suffering, because when I read this post it seems like it's from long ago).
It's inspiring, trying to help suffering people. Then I suffer, because I'm attached to the outcome. Now, we're all suffering. That's why I desire to go back on the path. (January 24, 2012).
Note: everything in this story is factual. It is an account of my direct experiences. Although from 2001 to 2012 I have thought of as being "turned away" from the spiritual journey, in fact those years were an important time of integration of new varieties of life experience and suffering. There is no question that growth and deepening occurred, even subconsciously and in the unconscious. When I would resume seeking, it would be from a place far, far down the road from that magazine ad for a trip to India.
