Day Two of my Adventures in Sobriety series,
in which i look around to find a bong where there shouldn’t be one.
Today is better, and i have this feeling it may only get easier from here—
that’s probably an addict’s delusion, and more likely so because although an addict might one day [find staying] clean a piece of cake (that’s how my draft reads, so i’m going to roll with it), and another day find sobriety [read: reality] a seemingly insurmountable trial.
But surely the first day is hardest—or the third … eek! That’s tomorrow. Continue reading →
Day One of my Adventures in Sobriety,
in which i renege on the first day of my resolution to not smoke marijuana
I am reluctant to say this, but i’m calling today Day One, the first day of dragging myself away from the pot-hazed fugue my life has been for the last month or more.
I was tempted to use Ground Zero, because i do feel i have a clean slate, though nothing explosive or catastrophic has happened.
We read all the time about people who cleaned up their act after some disastrous event, usually by doing something drastic and out of their league—right now i’m reading Wild, the story of a 26-year-old woman who walked the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother suddenly died and her family imploded.
I don’t really have that, the whole drastic-premise thing: my experience has been more of a slow-burn of ever-increasing disillusionment with what is typically offered us as a way to live, and a growing sense that i need to do something to drag myself back to life, to find the alternative way of living that is most conducive to my wellbeing, and therefore least conducive to relapse.
It’s a long road, but i’ve never been one to take short cuts. Continue reading →
Consciousness is a witness, an observer of the mind. But we confuse consciousness with mind – we think we are the mind: i am has come to mean i am the mind. We say, ‘I think, therefore i am.’ It’s Descartes’ fault – not mine!
A new pronoun is needed, so that we can begin to move away from conflating ‘i’ with consciousness: i is not consciousness; i is the mind; consciousness is consciousness. From now on, consciousness is represented by the symbol ‘!’.
In our current usage, ‘i’ is too much loaded with mind-identification, and we tend to think consciousness is of the mind – the two are conflated and it’s confusing. Sometimes we talk about something like ‘collective consciousness’ if we want to refer to that consciousness that transcends the individual human mind, but this term is also too much loaded with ideas about groups made up of yet-separate individuals when really, the term ‘consciousness’ should be enough to imply collective consciousness.
So i’m experimenting with alternative pronouns for making a distinction between the mind-made ‘i’ and consciousness – for now, a symbol, because i don’t want to coin some new word, words being too much loaded with ideas from our linguistic intellect.
a rambling five-part exploration of how spiritual healing must complement lifestyle changes that will facilitate spiritual healing – Part II is here
Turkey
I arrived in December 2013 on a three-week luxury bus tour with my mother. I am still here, seven months later – though i’m writing from Lesvos, a Greek island a few hours off the west coast of Turkey.
Leaving the Eden Hills sanctuary in Australia, i was worried that i would allow myself to be derailed from the progress i was making. So be it: in Istanbul i took up smoking again, stumbled in love and fell, and gradually plummeted back into despair.
I started drinking again, smoking weed … but in a new way. Even in my despair i knew that something had shifted when i was at Eden Hills – something had shifted in me and made way for the growth of self-love, which cannot co-exist with the sort of self-hate that had previously left me seeking oblivion in consumption and other external sources. I had resumed attempting to fill myself up from without, but i was more aware that this was what i was doing.
The relationship broke down as i accepted that external romatic love is just another thing i was eating, trying to fill myself up from without, when what i knew i really needed was a practice to cultivate self-love. We tried to be friends and walked some days on the Lycian Way together, but things broke down further in Kaş and we went our separate ways.
Pained by another cherished friendship jeopardised, i was alone again, and homeless, again. So i walked forth into homelessness and arrived at Çıralı, a lot sad but mostly happy and relieved that my pilgrimage had resumed. Another start.
In Çıralı i met a young Italian woman and an old Turkish man. We communed, and Maddy inspired me to travel back up the west coast to the Mount Ida region, where an Osho festival was being held. We had been talking about our respective practices, and i about how mine had waned. I said i couldn’t get back to Thailand until December, as though my practice is somehow dependent on place, which, to some extent, it is for now – i need/want to be in an environment conducive to meditation and the lifestyle practices that support the inner journey.
I have not yet cultivated enough of an inner sanctuary that will mean i can carry my practice with me wherever i go. Meanwhile i oscillate between strong practice, lackadaisical drifting and binge alcoholism.
Drifting is important, though. I was reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at the time, which helped me understand that sometimes drifting is a necessary part of our life process. I was drifting when i arrived at Çıralı, and i was drifting as i sat in Yilmaz’s beer garden, talking to Maddy and Özer.
The important thing about drifting is you eventually bump into something. I bumped into Maddy, and i bumped into her reply to my saying i couldn’t be in Thailand until December, which was the simple, profound question: “Why?”, a two-fold question: on the surface it meant Why can’t you go to Thailand now?; underneath it also meant Why can’t you practice now?
There are logistical reasons i can’t be in Thailand now, but there is no reason i can’t practice now.
So i went to the Osho festival, and from there i went to Osho Afroz in Greece. In Turkey we did a lot of daily Osho meditations and group sessions with various therapists, one of whom was Giten, a breathwork and trauma-release specialist.
In Greece we finished an eight-day course in breathwork training.
What i learned in the course is that i do not know how to breathe properly (gasp!); i have almost no inner connection with my body; i have much tension to let go of, and i am learning how to do so with breathing; my chakra system is in a sorry state of disrepair; i am disconnected from my core creative energy; i have many mechanisms for keeping myself separate from this core, from myself, others and the divine love of the universe; i am afraid of how i will feel without these mechanisms.
In the first days of the course i touched a deep sense of peace and joy, but for last days I felt utterly terrible, deeply ashamed.
I have learned that when i connect with and accept the trauma that has lead to the development of such mechanisms i begin to heal, but that healing is often painful. It feels trite to say that we must go through the darkness to get to the light, but i feel that is a fundamental truth of self-healing. As Florence Welch says, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
a rambling five-part exploration of how spiritual healing must complement lifestyle changes that will facilitate spiritual healing – Part I is here
After Southeast Asia
In 2011 i went to Southeast Asia for the same reason millions of other seekers have left the West, disillusioned from a culture that promises meaning in the meaningless: possessions, wealth, material well-being … all of it ephemeral in that mundane way – fleeting, impermanent. I am seeking the everlasting, our spirit.
I went on the uncertain hope that i would be awarded an arts grant that would support me to continue my career while i investigated Buddhism on the side. The grant came through, and i spent eighteen months in Thailand and Cambodia, three months teaching creative writing in Phnom Penh, the rest of the time writing a novel manuscript when i wasn’t struggling against the pull of my old self to escape into the above-mentioned external sources of so-called succour.
I feel like i’ve told this story a thousand and one times, to others and to myself. I don’t want to be my story anymore.
I came back from Thailand an alcoholic, stoned out of my brain. I had done all that i could to make the grant project a success in unfavourable conditions and, by the time i was leaving i finally made my way to a five-day stay in a Chiang Mai monastery.
There, i touched a sense of peace and calm that i hadn’t known existed within me, and that was a start.
a rambling five-part exploration of how spiritual healing must complement lifestyle changes that will facilitate spiritual healing – the Introduction is here
Fits and Starts
There is a new comb. It can be used without reference to the ‘i’. There was a festival, and there is an OSHO commune on Lesvos, Greece. Here, there and now, there is an alternative way of living. It is the way of light, of love, of uncontrollable and inexplicable laughter: laughter that bubbles up from the well-spring of a healthy spirit.
I have been experimenting with writing without reference to the ‘i’, to the ego, but it is proving difficult – it feels detached from reality, disembodied. Maybe it’s too much for now, because the thing is i’m still attached to my sense of ‘i’, to a sense that things happen to me, or that i do things.
It’s complicated. I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle again, A New Earth. He has a lot to say about how we invest a sense of self in objects, things, people, whatever – things that ultimately exist outside ourselves, and are not us. And i have obviously been reading and listening to Osho, who has a lot to say about witnessing, about that part of our consciousness that can observe our ego, thereby separating us from what Eckhart would call the mind-made self – a way to start moving toward liberation.
a rambling five-part exploration of how spiritual healing must complement lifestyle changes that will facilitate spiritual healing
Introduction
For years now i’ve been implementing lifestyle changes from habits that are bad for me toward a way of being that is most conducive to spiritual progress. To a considerable extent i have succeeded, but sometimes i relapse and binge. Through experiences i’m having lately between an OSHO festival in Turkey and an OSHO commune in Greece, i’m learning that the reason some of these changes don’t stick is i am not focusing on the root cause of these behaviours – i am trying to treat the symptoms of a spiritual malaise rather than working on the wounds and conditioning underlying that malaise. Continue reading →
I had a nap-dream about me flying around in some craft and all i was really doing was moving around in the air, repeatedly. It took someone to come along and show me how to operate the craft before i could really use it to explore.
It seems obvious this dream is about finding a spiritual mentor, which is something that has been on my mind recently and is a fundamental next step in my journey on the Path. A spiritual mentor will help me navigate the boundless depths of reality.
It was like this person in my dream came and grabbed the remote control out of my hands and showed me how to turn the dark, grey, boring amorphous mass into any reality i felt like choosing.
Flux Comb 