Reader request: first round!

Ok, between my own life experience and responses to the prior post, it’s going to be a little Anusara, a little illusion/reality/asana and a pack of seventh series.

Anusara: the best ranting about this that I’ve seen recently is here.

Good stuff on Primary and especially on illusion/reality/asana (and good stuff generally tends to appear here) can be found here.

There, that wasn’t too hard.

Let’s return to this “death” business that I’ve been going on about for a few months, but with some Trungpa added in. I’ll write the teacher/guru bit after this.

Trungpa says that one unmasks; that this process is a continual set of painful disappointments. He also says that the spiritual path is like a doctor operating on your illnesses without anesthesia. These both speak to my seventh series experience.

Death: it isn’t that everything in my existence has a funereal pallor; it’s much more about the interior than the exterior. How did this work? I’m trying to recover the dynamic and it’s just coming out a blur. In large part this is because my internal organs are still knotted up right now with the fallout of what might be a wheat allergy; on every occasion, about 36 hours of clogged organs. Gross.

Anyway:

What began in the latter half of 2008 as some sustained sexual frustration (when our pregnancy began) later picked up a whole entourage of demons from the past (samskaras, if you will), about being worthy (of love, essentially), about identity as a sexual being (which for me even in terms of heterosexual practice had a very “coming out” flavor to it and took me until my 30s to lock down), and quite a bit about relationships and sex droughts and miscommunication (read: bad marriage here). A LOT of demons came out of that.

Somewhere in here, probably four months ago or so, maybe more, there’s a post where I get some discriminative knowledge about my drive for sexual experience and my own identity. Basically in that post I pull out the drive and look at it, see it as something different, not-me.

That began to crack the pain, sort of jnana-yoga-style. “Who is feeling?” and that variety of question. By April 2010 I was claiming “ascetic practice” as my own (and doing so in Facebook status updates, which perhaps only I understood, but that’s ok, because I do love being obtuse). Some time around right now it’s 700 days of sparse sexual activity and miscommunication and not having time for each other, although we do get in a good conversation (even if it’s about etymology or something) now and then between baby care and work and running hither and yon.

So what is the “death” bit all about, then?

It’s in part “identity loss,” as my climber-yogi-lover triad had to give way, mostly due to time demands, to partner-father. I kept “yogi,” I latched onto it hard, felt like a skiier going over a cliff reaching for the famous Warner Brothers cartoon branch down there, you know?

But it’s also–and more interestingly–the knowledge that that triad was a mask that I wore, and now that I KNOW it’s a mask, I can’t put it on the same way, cannot believe the same things about myself, cannot BE the same person. This is opening, pretty much EXACTLY as Trungpa talks about it (or, if it’s not, it’s as close as I can imagine getting).

The surrender was agony; still is. But not as much. Not with as much confusion, not buried as deep in the demon hordes as before.

Where and how are the good things in my life?

Oddly, they are all still right there, where I left them. This is the magic of the thing, the sort of wonderfulness of “ordinariness.”

If you just take ME out of the view of my life, if it were possible to see my existence without the FILTERS OF MY LOOKING AT IT, then it all does look quite fine.

I climbed in Seattle, and it was magnificent. I went back the same night and mastered some boulder problems that I’d tried out that morning. I used to see climbing as part of, well, not a “spiritual thing” but as part of my overall quest, mastery-unto-defeat, what I’ve earlier here called a “quest for the impossible.”

The first thing that ordinariness (again, taking it from Trungpa) does is to reduce the stratospheric level of visions like that. So much of self-aggrandizement is built up like legends, like archetypes: Beowulf, Cuchullain, take your pick. Arthur. Or follow my 2003 poster acquisition into it: Durden, Bickle, and oddly (but not if you’re me), Harry Dean Stanton from Paris, Texas.

Self-aggrandizement in ego terms is the nobility of all that happens to “I.” I am suffering, I have had this bad relationship, I am conquering, I am liberating, I am getting the next highest grade of boulder problem or the next series of yoga asana.

Cracking those multiple layers of armor (what Trungpa says is “wearing cement”) is real pain. Giving up the triad, the warrior face, which is built on the suffering face of the massive headfuck relationship, which was built on the past sexual frustration of adolescence, the determined face of “making the relationship work,” of “living in the salad days.” All of the layers of armor come from Catholic neurosis planted early, come from adolescence’s reckoning with fire. And it’s not a Freudian thing; one doesn’t need to “go deep” to get INSIDE it, because one is already inside it. The armor layers are ACCUMULATED not installed, not interior. It’s not a depth dive to the inner child; it’s more like dropping a microphone down a well that the scared soul built AROUND ITSELF.

Or as Pink Floyd would put it, about cracking “some bugger’s wall.” Pigs on the wing.

Maybe someone young and scared began putting on the armor that became this brick house (hah!) but now as it cracks, we find someone older. Hands that cling to plastic holds, and calves that go behind the head. These skill sets are new. We will never find the “original,” because the armor we put on is not a cocoon, it’s not a caterpillar-butterfly metaphor.

Sure, I don’t want to do the crying-baby-care or the 3 am bottle go-back-to-sleep ritual or for that matter, maybe I don’t want to put up with the whole thing and the hard relationship or whatever, but that’s ok, I don’t want to go to jury duty or teach an auditorium full of first-year students either. But compose your ideal life in your head and you will STILL find things you don’t want to do. “I don’t want to sweep out the entry to the cave today.” “I don’t want to fix the holo-deck today.” Whatever it is.

You take “want” or “I’m angry at” or “I’m upset about” and you find what Trungpa calls “its real living quality.” He was writing about anger, I think in one of the Q and A sessions, when he said that. Don’t judge it or refuse it, but instead find its real living quality. I love that sentence endlessly.

Let me give you an example: maybe a month ago I was giving the 2 am crying baby a bottle to get him back to sleep (because that’s the only way it can be done). Crying hurts my ears, makes my nerves turn to knives; it’s a thoroughly unpleasant noise and I REALLY dislike it and can’t wait for it to end. So this night I’m trying to find a way to get over it, above it, past it, somehow around it. It occurs to me, “wait, what if this crying were the sound of the unenlightened mind? All the crying that those in darkness do, you included. Your own whining about this noise. Reinforces it.” That came out of nowhere. And instantly it turned up compassion in me, not specifically for the boy, but for all of the unenlightened, for myself as unenlightened. It totally shut off distaste and don’t-wanna and it turned on something else. And I put the boy down and went back to bed.

Now, I deceived myself there. One crying child is NOT, of course, the total sound of the unenlightened. But that doesn’t matter; it’s not the accuracy, it’s the EFFECT. It made me compassionate, took me totally away from “I am pained, oh woe” to something else, something that serves better with no resentment.

Kriyananda would say that serving when you don’t want to is a sattwic thing, you make the sattwic choice and this helps it become habitual so that you develop a, if you will, “sattwic habit.” The real living quality of my wish not to do, is simply inertia. “I’m not interested in that, that’s unpleasant.” But climbing walls is hard and not always pleasant, and I’m interested in that. I’m even interested in showing other people how to do it, that’s why I set routes. That’s, more generally, why I teach. It IS, true, in part because “I” like it, but it’s also serving.

So where is the good? All around. Everywhere. For example, I’m to water the garden this morning. I don’t REALLY want to, but I’ll just sunscreen up and go out there and do it. Living in ordinariness doesn’t require desire. Say that again.

And I think that the world of death I’ve been so keen to describe and delineate is the replacement of a world of desire, of hard-earned gratification (I got to the top! I did the pose! I did thing Y in position X!), with a world of ordinariness. It’ll require more unmasking to turn it all the way over. More unmasking is more pain, and more death. But there’s life all the time all around it. Even a man buried in sixteen feet of cement armor (a man that un-naked, that heavily clothed) DOES things, can have a conversation with his partner, can water a garden.