Hey all.
I've been away from reddit for a while. I've been busy being pretty immersed in my experiences. I was having a lot of social interactions and I find that nothing else has quite the magnetic pull that they do, especially intense and emotional ones, and I got pretty well sucked into them. So I spent the last few months thinking primarily about my job (which underwent big changes), my hobbies (which are quite illuminating and exciting to me but can also be truly superficial), my relationships (which also were shaken up recently), politics (one human being has 150 billion dollars and I don't have healthcare - that's probably not okay), etc. I experienced a lot of anxiety and found a lot of subtle and passive hindrances that I'd been blind to during these last few months. But I also learned a lot about what makes me happy, calm, mindful, and mindless. I've undoubtedly spent a lot of time with truly meaningless and mindless things and have spent virtually no time actively practicing wisdom. This is not my first experience with a period like this and I have no good reason to believe it will be my last.
Recently, obviously, being here writing this, I've begun to return to a place of contemplation and meditation and, looking back on the last few months, I have a lot to learn and investigate and unpack. It's like I was acting out a film, and now I've taken the role of film critic, except my goal is less about analyzing the content of film and more about deducing the nature of film and video from the footage available.
First on that list of things to analyze is a lingering anxiety about how easily I slipped into a state of very minimal contemplation and meditation and of worldly absorption. I didn't so much as decide to spend a long while lost in convention as I did simply not resist sliding quickly into it. I find that prolonged periods of introspection and practice exhaust me in one way, and immersive 'humaning' exhausts me in a different way, and the last decade has been my bouncing between them for periods of anywhere from a few months to a few years at a time.
Does anyone else experience this? Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time? Do these experiences happen on a different time scale for you? Have you developed techniques to deal with this? Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality? Or is it a sign or failure instead, and a waste of time or even detrimental? Or is it all about the way you spend such time?
And really I'd just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water's like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.
Edit: I apologize if any of my wording here is careless. I trust most of you to be clever enough not to be mistaken by it. I'm a bit like a sleepy cat just woken up in the morning. I'll need a moment to regain my sharpness.
Replying to your post..
I came to the conclusion some time ago that there are no meaningless or mindless things. Even the choices we make that tend towards distraction, tell us about ourselves. We watch movies, for example, that would tell us about our ideals, if we needed them to. We pursue entertainment that pulls at corners of our self just yet emerging. Our choices in entertainment are a reflection of our dreams and visions and nothing is done that isn't significant. Even the choice to not face a pain, but rather to drown it in forgetfulness - that is information-rich, because it points to the pain.
I think a lot of our best work comes about in unfocused states, where we can experience the spontaneity of being. I'm familiar with the traditions (foremost in my mind is Gurdjieff) that rail against the default state of man, for not living each moment 'in the waking being' - and what my teachers have told me is that this lack of self-acceptance vis-a-vis ordinary living is itself as good a guard as any against the manna of the moment. It is a spiritually erudite form of self-dislike, the adept's version of the teenager's plaint: "I'll never be one of the cool kids!".
My understanding is that each one wears the veil here, and when one realizes what a panopoly of worlds the soul had access to before choosing to come to this one, one realizes that the duties of the day are in fact quite perfectly suited to the subtle chiseling and ornamentation of the soul of man. To want more is good, because it inspires seeking. But where the want passes into a disdain for the everyday self, it has missed the balance point and overreached, imo.
Yeah, I experience something similar.
No, but I'd gather from your choice of words, the possible existence of a lack of self-love undergirding what you perceive to be your spiritual seeking. When you moonlight as everyman, do you dislike yourself?
Yes. I've had to work on my "spiritual inferiority complex" and learn to stop compulsively meditating and compulsively gauging my spiritual state. To learn to love myself even when not shooting forth metaphysical fireworks. My humdrum, everyday self.
I'm not sure we have the awareness to clearly distinguish between these states, and to authoritatively assess what constitutes one or the other. Sure, we have some vague gauge of how light-filled we are at any one time, but that perception is itself like a weathervane tossed in the wind. My goal is to stop obsessive self-measurement, not to spend each moment on Mount Olympus. I like submersion.
I'm not fully on board with the bifurcation that you are positing. I posit that a lot of limitation and willed self-deception can exist in the guise of whatever states of elevation man believes himself possessed of. I have felt very enlightened at times, and been very much a fool - as became clear years afterward. I believe every step has a thousand levels, so vast is our Father's Kingdom.
I'm walking the same path as I imagine you are: immersion, and practicing disciplines of Will, Faith and Love to fight against the currents of ill-attunement that grab and tug at each of us.
Loving the chance to take each step, loving the penultimate humbleness of my silly piano lessons, loving the opportunity to walk each road, do each silly and seemingly mundane thing that is nevertheless overflowing with purpose, though I struggle to see it. Trying to see the love required in each humble act that pays no great reward, except the reward to be another day with the Creator. The garden of delights so vast and varied, that he let us add our strains of tragedy and strife, to paint it with the colors of our madness, and now it breathes forward into the strangest, most gaudy, most quixotic shapes: each one attesting to the beauty of His light.
Originally commented by u/fortunatefields on 2018-09-20 11:41:42 (e6ak34y)