the habit of being

In my last entry, when I said “lots of people think…” or “some people think…”, what I really meant was “I used to think…”

People have asked what happened to me ever since it happened, and I’m still not sure what to say. It’s been over two months now, but I didn’t know what to say a week afterwards either. One reason it is difficult to say is because there was not just one definitive event. There was no fig tree, no visitation… not exactly. There was a dramatic shift, which happened over a relatively short period of time, beginning in March. There was a sequence of events, coincidences, dreams. A friend of mine, Mitsu, who was involved in all this in various ways, and to whom I talked about it throughout that early period, likes to tell my “story.” I asked him to tell it to me, and it’s not a bad one.

There was the hearing of a certain Zen parable, a trip to Portland, a poem my friend Leigh wrote about me, a strange class I was taking fall semester which lead to my reading certain books (including St. Augustine’s Confessions, which made a big impact on me), and a heartbreak. All of these things happened around the same time, and afterwards everything had changed. It is not entirely wrong to say that those things are what happened to me, but that isn’t really right either. There are other things that happened in that small time window in March, many, many, things, all of which are amazingly connected, and in fact project all the way back through my life. If it is the specific sequence of events that defines this, that sequence can’t be isolated from the rest of my history. I don’t think it is the specific sequence of events that defines it at all.

It is very tempting the talk about it in terms of “before” and “after,” but that is misleading for many reasons. There is no after, because it is still happening. Amazingly, it keeps happening. But when I think about my experiences with this in the so-called before (which is not a real before because I was always in this and did sometimes realize it), one thing that sticks out to me is that, unlike this experience now, those had definite ends, in my mind.

When I was a child, the thought often crossed my mind, while I was doing some ordinary thing like walking back from the grocery store to the car with my mother, that it was possible that my whole life was just made up, that I might just be a character in someone else’s dream. Suddenly everything felt very different, but I would actually reason with myself that, well, even if something like that were the case, I’d just have to go along with it and do my normal life, that I couldn’t stand around thinking about how it might not be real because then I wouldn’t be able to do anything. So the episode would come to an end. Later, I would have brief flashes of this different way of being, in a more physical (rather than intellectual) way, after I’d been through some challenging emotional experience and had let go of something.. usually this would happen when I stopped trying to get whatever it was I thought I wanted from some other person. But it was a very brief thing, a feeling of freedom, usually following a huge explosion of some sort. I’d also feel something like this sometimes when I was practicing yoga regularly, about 3 years ago. My whole way of relating to the world would be shifted somewhat after a really powerful class. There were many ways in which I experienced this, “before,” but they were relatively transient glimpses, and I could not articulate them. I was even less able to articulate them than I’m able to articulate what happened to me in March. One way of saying it is that there’s a way to be both in my life and aware that my life is just a dream at the same time.

Recently I was trying to tell someone, another friend, who is skeptical, about this, and he kept saying that while he was all for people having realizations, what he had a hard time with was the way I seemed to talk about the experience I had had as having some sort of special status, some uniqueness among other possible realizations. And of course, being an atheist, he was turned off by the mystical way I’ve started talking about it. I’ve gotten similar reactions from other people, and it is difficult to know how to respond. On the one hand, it is true that it isn’t really that special of a thing that happened to me. Everyone has access to this realization, it isn’t really a secret. As I’ve quickly learned, there are volumes and volumes written about it. It’s also true that this isn’t the final ultimate thing, there’s always more and more to see. But it’s also the case that this isn’t just any little realization. I’ve had other realizations, and they did not have this character. This change, which I’ve yet to really describe, was intellectual, physical, emotional, all at once. It is hard to describe or explain, but it was, and is, not at all abstract. It’s a clear, concrete, experience, that informs everything, literally everything, in my life. It’s not a purely intellectual thought. It is something I feel, physically and emotionally. It is something I participate in. I’ll try to write something about what the experience of it is like soon. The understanding is tightly linked to the experience. I had barely any concept of it a few months ago!

I’ve been reading books about Zen and yoga and philosophy and religion and various things off and on for many years, and I can say with certainty that I did not really understand them at all until now. And it wasn’t that I didn’t feel like there was anything to understand in these books. I most certainly did think there was, and I wanted very much to understand it, and I thought that if I understood it I might be happier. From my own experience, I know that it is possible to go quickly from not understanding this to understanding it to some degree. And I know that the way to make that transition is not by trying to understand it, because I did that for a long time and it didn’t work. I also know what it feels like to be someone who is reading about these things, or listening to someone else talk about them, without having experienced them. The idea that I could experience something like this now is not any more amazing than the idea that I could have NOT experienced it then. I should also say that there’s not any meaningful separation between now and then inherent in THIS, but that’s part of where the trickiness of trying to talk about things comes up… there are so many assumptions in the world that don’t hold from this perspective, and those assumptions are built into our language. But anyway, I think this is where the sort of categorical thing, for me, comes in… because for me there really was a long period of just not getting it, not grasping the full picture. And even though I cannot claim any sort of “complete understanding” now, it is clear to me that I can see vastly more now than I could see only a few months ago.

My friend the skeptic was saying that there are many realizations, little shifts, that can happen; that’s it’s not just one big understanding that a person either has or doesn’t have. And I don’t deny that that is possible, that one could come to this or something else like this in many steps. I’ve heard stories like that. And what happened to me has a little of that character, when I look back on it, trying to find precursors as I mentioned above, but there is also a distinct quality of a door opening, an eye opening, as I wrote the other day and many others have written.

In my own amazement and almost disbelief that such a thing could really happen, even faced with my own experience as evidence, I read a lot of books about it. In fact, I haven’t read anything that isn’t about mysticism or conversion or enlightenment since March. It is partly because I was able to find so many accounts of experiences like my own that I feel comfortable talking about this using terms like “God” or “enlightenment.” I don’t think this has to be framed using those particular terms, but I do think that what it is the Catholics are talking about when they talk about conversion and grace is the same thing the Buddhists are talking about when they talk about satori is the same thing basically all religions are based on is the same thing I am trying to talk about here.

There is no saying how the door opens. There is no saying how the wind is sucked out of the world and you with it, through the door, which, as one can see clearly from the other side, was never closed in the first place. One can see clearly, from the other side, that there is no other side. There are no words to describe a change which is not a change from one thing to another, a movement which is no movement at all. But because writing is what I do, I will try to write about this.

The funny thing about enlightenment is that people think it is a state they should strive to achieve. It sounds like a good thing: enlightenment. It sounds like laying down burdens. The problem with this, thinking enlightenment is a good thing, is that you might then suppose that burdens are a bad thing. Everywhere, there are people who want to be enlightened so they can stop suffering… so that they can get rid of the bad stuff and be free. But that is not how it works. Enlightenment is not about getting rid of suffering. Enlightenment is realizing that suffering isn’t something one needs to get rid of.

I think this is very similar to the saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. I think an elephant would have an easier time getting through the eye than a person who doesn’t suffer would have attaining enlightenment. A person who doesn’t suffer isn’t alive. Enlightenment, though it requires a kind of death, is a state of extreme alive-ness. Everything is more vivid in THIS, even suffering.

Of course, the other thing about enlightenment, the kingdom of God, or whatever you might call it, is that once you see that you are there, you also see that you were always there. You didn’t have to go through the eye of a needle afterall. All you had to do was open your eyes. This isn’t really something one can attain, because it is impossible to attain something you already have. This is why you can’t find God by looking for him. But this isn’t to say that looking for God or trying not to suffer is bad either. There’s no difference between saying that suffering is a bad state to be in and saying that trying to stop suffering is a bad state to be in. They’re both wrong. The bad state doesn’t really exist. The line between immanence and transcendence doesn’t really exist. THIS isn’t about breaking through barriers, it’s about no longer believing in them.

A lot of people might say they couldn’t be happy, because happiness requires believing in things blindly. Actually, it is being miserable that requires this. You really have to believe that you are trapped, that you are doomed, that you are worthless, that you have nothing to give, to be truly, deeply, miserable. You have to believe it no matter what other people say. You have to believe it even if you can’t prove it. These are the kind of beliefs that are hardest to let go of. Happiness is the absence of beliefs.

To find God is to see that one has been in God from the beginning. There is nothing new. I think another thing a lot of people expect from a big, universal, insight, is that it will be a new thing that changes the world. That’s not really true either. Yes, there can be a sudden, profound shift in how a person experiences the world. But it’s still the same world, and you’re still the same person. Nothing new is added. Everything was already there.

My best girlfriend in elementary school was a Mormon with long blonde pigtails and blue eyes. We got matching notes on our report cards saying we were great students but that we Talked Too Much. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I remember that having nice hair-ribbons was really important. Becky always had nice hair-ribbons. Nicer than mine. So nice no one could tell she lived in a trailer park. Not even me.

In middle school, we both played the flute. We would call each other up on the phone and practice, taking turns listening and playing into the receiver. She was better at it than I was. When we did our duets for Solo and Ensemble competition, she always played the top part while I played the bottom. At concerts, I was third chair, while she was second. (The first chair girl, Olivia, was not our friend. She was some red-haired Flute Goddess from another planet.) In the gifted program, QUEST, we wrote a paper together, about Cleopatra. We confessed to one another our fears of Being Fat And Ugly.

She gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon once, with some of the good parts hi-lighted and sticky-noted. She said I didn’t have to read it or anything, it was just something she had to do for her church, and it was because I was her friend. I didn’t think Mormons were any stranger than any other Christians, except the part about not being able to drink Coke, and I went to potluck dinners at the LDS church with her sometimes. When, around age 13, I confessed to her I was not only Not Christian, but a Wiccan high-priestess in an online coven, she was fine with it. Though I knew she was more than a little annoyed about her family’s strict rules about dating and caffeine, when Joseph Smith would later came up in our US History class, Becky was the first to raise her hand and proclaim without a shred of embarrassment that she was a Mormon and that polygamy wasn’t allowed anymore by the church’s constitution.

By freshman year in high school, I’d started wearing all black, and she’d joined the cheerleading squad. I was listening to the Sisters of Mercy, and she was listening to Celine Dion. I spent all my free time on the Internet, and I don’t know where she spent hers, because I’d pretty much stopped hanging out with her outside school altogether. We were both unpopular enough that we relied on each other to Sit With At Lunch, but whatever it was we’d had to talk about so much in elementary school, we definitely didn’t have anymore. She had a reputation at school for being stuck-up and snotty, but when it came to the downfall of our friendship, she was neither and I was both. She never cared that I was wearing fishnets and feather boas and pentagram necklaces to school, but I cared that she was doing anything but. Before long she stopped taking all honors courses and traded in band for chorus, and we barely communicated except to write long notes in one another’s yearbooks come May.

I formed much stronger friendships in the latter years of high school, but Becky and I still hugged and cried at graduation. I went off to New York, while she, despite her Dream of Becoming a Broadway Singer, stayed in Statesboro and enrolled at the local school as a music major. We never spoke again.

Last night I Googled her name and found her email address. She wrote back immediately. It turns out that she hated being a voice major, just graduated with a degree in Computer Science, is dating a professional poker player, and will be moving to Las Vegas in a month. I asked her how long her hair is now, and I really, honest to God, am dying to know.