I am having trouble talking to people lately, which is uncharacteristic. Maybe somebody asks me how my day is going, and I pause for a moment and struggle to answer, before I remember that I don’t have to answer comprehensively. So I say something like, “It’s going great.” In light of this, I’m starting to do what I did when I was a nervous teenager—prepare rote answers to basic social questions.
How my day is actually going is as follows.
My meditation practice is continuing to deepen. It’s not that there are any new conceptual insights since last year. It’s just that the same insights are saturating more of my nervous system. The consequences are overwhelming. Mostly extremely positive, also somewhat disorienting. People told me that this would happen, that there is in fact a lifetime of laughter after you get the cosmic joke, but I didn’t believe them.
Chunks of my identity are falling off, month by month. Parts of me that kept track of my social status and my anxieties are relaxing and falling into the void. What’s left, increasingly, is a feeling of complete satisfaction with the way things are. You know that feeling of drinking a glass of water that’s exactly correctly cool on a hot day? Imagine that feeling, on your soul, moment after moment.
It’s getting confusingly good in my brain. I am starting to understand why meditation teacher Shinzen Young said he’d rather have another day in his mind than 25 years in the mind of a wealthy, healthy celebrity sexual athlete. He’s a lot further along than I am, and even by my dim lights, I might say the same thing. I know what it’s like to have your childhood dream presented to you and for it to seem like a small sad snack in the face of ego’s wanting. Even the most gratuitous pleasure didn’t satisfy that final consequential smidge of craving. Now, I am completely happy about everyday substance—air, lemonade, kiss from wife, hug of floor by feet. And I hear that it gets even better than this as the path continues. That is very weird.
I see people in the kind of background psychological pain and stress I used to feel constantly and considered non-optional. And I want to tell them, “If you take up serious contemplative practice, you will likely feel good about this decision in a few years.” But I know that this is annoying, and most of them won’t do it, so I try to keep evangelizing to a minimum, outside of blog posts like this. I’m hopeful that they’re going to see everything I’m seeing anyway—my intuition is that it comes to you on your deathbed automatically, that my daily condition is a manageable dose of the megadose of light you finally cannonball into.
There are side effects. It turns out that my anxiety was creating a lot of the sense of space and time. I often have the odd but pleasant sensation that the world before me is a brief splash of color between the void behind my eyes and the void behind the sky. Also, when you ask me how my day was, it’s hard to look back from the present moment, to conjure something other than what’s currently happening. It might take me a second to remember which Zoom calls I had, or what I said to whom. When I do recount the day’s events, they sound like plausible fiction coming out of my mouth—I am not at all convinced that the words deliver any substance.
It’s not that I can’t remember past events, or conjure linear time, it’s just not the way time intuitively presents itself to me these days. Every experience seems superimposed on the same timeless moment—it’s all a self-presenting flicker on the screen. Similarly, my actions don’t feel like a selection I made from menu of options, presented moment-by-moment—it feels more like I’m falling through space. I don’t feel like I’m making many choices.
This is the eeriest part. Previously, I would have expected a diminished sense of agency to make me act robotically, or sap my motivation. But now that I’m entering this territory myself, I find that I’m more engaged, sincere, and loving when I’m not getting in the way of the universe. I am quick with a compliment, or a dumb joke, or a poem dashed off to a friend during an idle moment of the workday. This is less of a surprise when I think of how, often, we are at our most creative and authentic in flow states, when we’re not attending to ourselves. We abandon ourselves and something else takes over, and yet this is when our finest qualities display themselves.
The difficult part is that as more of me surrenders into this, the parts of me that aren’t ready become incredibly obvious. Maybe 93% of the time I am in this unusually pleasant mode. But in the remaining 7%, I am encountering the building blocks of all the defenses that I once took for my personality. The childhood resentments, the basic sense of insufficiency that powers human beings, what is sometimes called the core wounding. It used to be hidden from me under my supposedly sophisticated behavior. It was visible to others, but now I can see it clear as day myself. Practice, now, is about going towards it, placing it right in the center, befriending it. And, when I don’t keep up my practice, those young desperate feelings, being now so conveniently close to the surface, quietly start running the show again. This is surprising, and it obliges me to keep going.
Besides soothing this low-level angst, practice is becoming about bringing myself into alignment with this force flowing through me, in all of my interactions, as much as I can, indefinitely. I am a recipient of a grace alien to the way I once was. It’s not an abstract quality, it’s right there in my experience, like a sun in my midsection. The least I can do, in response, is attempt kindness and generosity as a default stance. It’s tricky to get this right. I’m starting to love this world a lot, and I could enter nearly every conversation grinning and pelt everyone with constant praise for being the way they are. I sit in a restaurant and I am frequently in awe of people for simply existing. Just because you’re in front of me, you look a little like God, right now. But I know it would be patronizing to express this to the waiter, in those terms. Maybe if I were in saffron robes I could effuse more thoroughly and get away with it, but the current social role doesn’t call for it.
So I am trying to be halfway normal in the face and the body language. But I am also trying to be of service, and trying to be curious about what that can mean for me. I have three jobs right now, but they all feel like the same job: consistently exude more thoughtfulness than I would expect from the insecure, fearful person I have been and still am sometimes. If I can’t do that, none of this really means anything. It will have been spectacular brain drugs, but nothing more.
Photo credit goes to Saul Leiter.
Do you have any posts about what kind of daily practice you engage in? Lovely write-up
I'll have what you're having.