The second noble truth and the Boddhisattva vow

I felt a need to rest and relax, so this last week, I haven't lifted weights or run, although I have been stretching every day. I felt unusually tired and unmotivated each day, and so at first, I put it down to my body feeling fatigued and righteously justified my lazy self. I also had a strong burst of kundalini last Friday 10 days ago (grand mal seizure stuff), and after feeling high for a day or two, started to feel the tiredness. As I go further into this kundalini process, I am starting to recognize that the strong surges usually dislodge deeply held attachments, and as these surface, I feel them as tiredness, resistance, procrastination and tension as they are released from my body. It's a fascinating cycle and I gotto be one of the slowest learners on earth. Whenever shadow comes into being, my first impulse is always that I need a long holiday somewhere in the tropics because life has just been too demanding, and then I start to wake up to what else could be going on.

My old habits and desires are losing their attractiveness to me. I know in my heart that I do not wish to return to my old forms of pleasure and happiness, yet my ego, which seems to desire repetition and a return to the known, still calls for a return to a life I used to have. I am at a crossroads, where I know that what used to make me happy no longer satisfies me, and I am not sure how to go forward and to set new goals based on my emerging value system, which seems to be about service and adding to the well being and wisdom of others.  I end up being caught between a rock and hard place, as I stay attached to the old while being pulled by the new. I imagine myself to be like a sailor holding onto a sinking ship as it starts to go down. The ship has bought him a long way and served him well, yet if he continues to hang on and refuses to let go and swim to the air, the ship will drown him.

This week I stagnated, hummed and haaad, and didn't do much in the way of writing or creative work. In a sense, I trapped myself again, and getting caught in my own trap, or as Shakespeare would put it "like an engineer hoist by his own petar", I started to feel frustrated. So, yesterday, I returned to writing as a form of self exploration. Writing is my medicine, and as soon as I stop the flow, I start to get kind of sick and I go a little strange. I am compelled to write; there is no way around it. What with kundalini doing its relentless perpetual thing, I have also been forced to convert myself into a type of reluctant psychologist as I have learnt to recognize blocks and find my shadow material, and to identify the conflicts within myself that seem to be continually arising as this transition goes along its merry, hangover prone way.

I sat yesterday with a commitment and a resolve to push forward. I reset my focus towards self-liberation, reminded myself what its all about, and then started writing. As I wrote, flashback memories started popping into my head. This happens fairly often with the different practices I do in ILP. I usually notice them, but because they happen so often, I usually don't explore them further, as I assume it's just the repression layer lifting and I don't have to pay much attention. This time, I wondered what would happen if I chose one of those memories as a starting point for entry into untapping my current blockage.

The memory was pleasant; it was of a tennis court and a car park where I spent many happy afternoons playing sports when I grew up. I started to write about it and the associations that came, and at first I felt as though I was going around in circles. I had the feeling I could write endlessly about the experiences of my youth and what would be the point?

As a continued, I found myself smiling and enjoying the trip down nostalgia lane. Then, I wondered why pleasant memories of fun and sports and laugher and the ignorant bliss of youth were being released. Then it dawned on me. It dawned that for a long time I had thought that the blockages in my system were due to negative factors and experiences which had held me back, and that the key to moving forward in life was to understand and let go of negative experiences and negative shadow aspects. If I could just understand the negative, then I would then be a reservoir of only happy positive experiences, and that would translate into positive action and a fun playful life, freeing my inner child and releasing me into a world of fun. However, I hadn't realized that my attachment to my positive experiences equally held me in bondage.

The ego likes to repeat positive experiences. To be honest, much of my spiritual drive has been egoic, as I have done the personal growth work to have a healthy, fulfilled Bruce. Yet, the only healthy, fulfilled me is the one that I am carrying created from my past memories, and deep down, I have wanted to create those happy, idealistic, carefree and healthy times, when the secret to life was a suntan, hotdogs and tennis. I am bought into a brilliant awareness of the Buddhas first and second noble truths. First, that there is suffering (or dissatisfaction). Second, is that suffering arises due to craving (attachment to the good and aversion to the bad).

My ego would love to entrench itself through repeating what was good and pleasurable. This would do nothing but entrench the small self, and the small mindedness of the small self that miraculously thinks itself to be the center of the universe. Yet, my current path is to permanently realize my true Self, which is the center of all things. This fight between my egoic little self and my Big Self plays itself in my body, driven by the illusions of pleasure and happiness and the reality of an unmistakable freedom,  and I get to witness the whole spectacle. My way forward is to recognize the trap of my suffering, to see how my past joy and my delight have become the bars that contain me within the jail of my suffering.

As soon as I can see this, the illusory walls disappear, and the sky appears free, unfettered. I am unbound, I am liberated. I stop projecting my radiance, my joy and my delight onto a memory, onto a phantom of my mind, and I realize that its here, right here, right now, and shines through if only I can see how I have been blocking it.  Ironically, I have to drop my joy and my dreams and ideals of pleasure and happiness to find that which I am seeking, which is here inside me, arising this moment, and then this moment again.

For me, this has always been the tough part. I have never really wanted to give up my joy and the things that I love, and most people, when asked to give up their delights and their dreams, would refuse. Because, if you do that, what do you have left? What does the ego have left if nothing on which to create a future on? If you do that, it's inevitable that you will have to stare into the abyss of your own despair and futility, and be faced with the emptiness and hopelessness of a vacant life, a voluntary walk down suicide lane. If you give that up, you give up your attachment to your little finite separate self, which is doomed to destruction anyway. By holding onto my little dreams, my tiny pleasures and cherished recollections, I magnify my smallness, and I increase my suffering. What would it mean to accommodate the world, instead of shouting to the world to accommodate me?

What's left then? The only worthwhile actions then seem to be ones that serve the well being of the Big Self. The ILP boddhishattva vow comes to mind ‘May my consciousness and my behavior be of service to all beings in all worlds, liberating all into the suchness of this and ever moment'. This service to the whole, in service of the whole, seems the only thing worthwhile, as it will reduce the suffering in the universe by helping others see that which is not real, to see the suffering involved in perpetuating the separate self, and to support them in their liberation. First then, I am called to intensify the journey towards my own freedom. I am halfway across the river of liberation. I have left the far shores of desire and there is no possibility now of ever returning. I have had glimpses through the briefly lifting fog of the nearing shore of liberation, and I need to paddle harder to complete the crossing, and not get swept into oblivion by the current that disappears in the churning distance.  I have to take actions first in service of my own realization, and then, if then, well, the mystery will continue to unfold.