Once in a warm summer, I found myself in a flipped canoe. Though I wish for a far more elegant way to say so, there is absolutely no subtlety in my sister and I flipping our canoe during a family trip. My searing skin and I found ourselves engaged in fight AND flight; a moment of yelling, trying to keep afloat, then the sudden oxymoronic chaos of the peace underwater. Succumbing to my loss of control and an overwhelming sense of "oh well," I was caught momentarily under a fallen tree, the roots of what we had just hit with a canoe, inhaling dirty river water and acknowledging the fact that all I could see were tan-colored bubbles decorating my vision. I came to be furious, my sister upset & chasing our belongings down the river, as my aunt noticed my frustration and came floating around the bend screaming (and laughing) "you're fine! everything's fine! don't freak out!" as my head bobbed above water. The recollection of this memory comes to you in an effort to bring attention to recent experiences I've had, visceral reactions I've encountered to someone else's words and the realization of what total injustice I've brought myself to and through. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle is a spiritual enlightenment guide and was recommended to me by my therapist as an off-handed comment in regards to my expected restlessness in quarantine. "You're a seeker," she said, "I think this could be beneficial for you." I had become frustrated no longer seeing the light of day, but rather another day to push myself through. I had spent weeks in a tailspin of my own thoughts I had once expected to stay behind the metaphorical mental levee I built. Though this intends to be a reflection of that, I bring to you one of the lessons I had the biggest reaction to, the one that ties to the previous anecdote: "You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still." This, among several other snippets of the book, left an imprint on me that I have yet to explain but am attempting to do so here. I recall some time ago hearing a quote eluding to the idea that you only reach enlightenment when you die. For that reason, I had always put the term "enlightenment" on a pedestal: a silhouette with dancing light around it and presumably something we will all inevitably reach only when our day comes. Naturally, this instills fear, this instills worry, this instills a retrospective misunderstanding of what I have now, in the past week and a half, come to know as "enlightenment," or what may be eventually so. "Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' ... and find that there is no death." In this quote, I came to understand that seemingly those who live a life of content unconscious (or absent-minded) thinking are those that reach enlightenment only in death. It is possible to find it before, I just needed to understand that death and enlightenment are not synonymous, to a degree. Some part of you dies to find enlightenment, but unlike physical death, you get to choose what it is that passes. Thus began what has come to feel like a new chapter in my life. Yes, it's absurdly cliche. In this time, however, I've found a simplicity to my mind. I've found a lightness to my being. I've found my already naturally observant nature become far more vivid. I've begun to recognize occurrences in my life that very blatantly align themselves chronologically with how their respective conversations unfold in the book, signs that I can't bring myself to ignore due to their vibrancy. The issue in my attempt at writing this as a cohesive narrative isn't that I don't fully understand what's at my fingertips, it's that this cohesive narrative only presents itself in sets of details, allowing me to construct it to merely half-ness. In a night's haze, I can vaguely remember coming to my capacity. In the wake of losing two family members to illness and a childhood friend to suicide in less than two weeks, I wrote of these moments and what they left me with. This became the new normal; my sense of emotion blunted by a dull double-edged sword. There was an especially overwhelming lack of Being in my own head on a night in February I stood in a match-box sized venue, comparable to the ones I'd been in before, listening to some guys scream into microphones. In the bustle of everything I found myself asking "am I in the way?" more often than I said my own name and not being able to turn off whatever it was that was bothering me, though I couldn't detect it. It felt like white noise worry. Though in the moment I was sweating, nervous, out of my mind, retrospectively I moreso remember laughing most of the night, being lightheartedly picked on by the friend that came with me, and leaving feeling absolutely intoxicated on the energy that came to be. The band I went to see specifically, America Part Two, has presently come to represent a flag planted in the ground for what felt like the beginnings of a turning point in what I was trying to find in my life. Individually, collectively, and musically these guys continue to bring an energy that's still palpable in a humid room. Over and over I speak with the friend that introduced us, Abby, about the resolve that followed an otherwise shuffled evening. I've gotten more "signs," if you will, since then. Though a conversation I feel naive for going back to, Abby accepts it with grace and indulges in the details we can both remember. Having involuntarily been brought on this existential journey with me, she found a reaction similar to my own when it came to an excerpt in The Power of Now speaking on "group work." "A group of people coming together in a state of presence generates a collective energy field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current mind dominance. This will make the state of presence increasingly more accessible to individuals." ...and that it did. While I could speak for days on how my live music journey has led me into what feels like oblivion and back, what's important at this moment is understanding the impact music has begun to have on me again. Abby convinced me to go to a show I would have previously made an excuse not to attend, this having been the first show I attended since the previous September and the first show I personally bought tickets for since the previous June. Along with the loss of everything else in being diagnosed with (obvious) depression, music & concerts took the biggest hit. Where I had begun to find the pieces of myself scattered like glitter in the dust covering my hobbies, I had yet to relinquish the chains of what had always made me feel whole. Leaving the venue I had a rasp in my throat, a ringing in my ears, and a charge in my chest I hadn't felt in quite some time. I found a similar charge in the days after finishing The Power of Now, beginning to relate to and implement these learnings into my daily life. Typically I can knock out a book of this size in a day and still retain a good amount of it, but I truly began to savor it just a few pages in. This simple task played into the unmistakable accent of "timing" in this entire process. Two or three days into the going I read what briefly spoke on the topic of "sin" and "being aware of the silent presence of each thing." Though not immediately related in the book, they held a similarity to one another in the evening I first heard Language of Silence by Christian Sparacio, another artist Abby works with. I had only known of Christian for less than two weeks when I experienced a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the lyric "looking back is a man, not a sinner," holding heavy likeness to words I had read earlier in the day. What I came to understand of sin, despite living my life as a child going to church almost every Sunday, is that in the context of the presence, sin serves you no purpose to live continuously amongst that which what you have left to forgive yourself for. Simply: I learned, after some reading and re-reading, no label or error defines who I am in the moment, which is why the aforementioned lyric left me speechless and slamming my computer shut. Moments like these are what allowed me to see myself in a clearer and more honest picture, not the muddied version I tend to project because I've spent my whole life with myself and this is what I've trained myself to think. Last October I quit my job after a rough summer of being acting manager and being led to believe I wasn't capable of a job I had so been conditioned for. Mainly of my own natural thought process, some of outward influences. Nevertheless, I returned when the recently hired manager quit and intended to be gone within a few weeks of the new new manager, Lila, being hired. In this time I not only came to realize that I was slowly becoming content with staying once again at a job I had grown to loathe, but how drawn to Lila I was, energetically, and only in conversation about me suspecting she showed up in my tarot reading did she say "I'm sure I did, I've been waiting" and elude to the fact she too, had felt a sort of similarity between our respective Beings. She has inadvertently become a source of trust and understanding, as a lot of what I'm going through she has also gone through in equivalence. As the "signs" continued to show up in the book, there came a page in the book that spoke about a play of creation, or lila (lee-lah), as defined in Hinduism. I came to find, in my shock of lila, group-work, the relation to the America Part Two show it held, that the very same chapter ended with "Nor must you come to depend on a teacher or a master, except during the transitional period, when you are learning the meaning and practice of presence." Coincidentally, I started therapy in October just days before I returned back to work, only a few weeks before Lila was brought on board, and with the exact same therapist that came to say "I seldom recommend this book to people your age, but I had hoped it would help." Before I started therapy, I had grown tired of conflicting anxious thoughts, indecisiveness, and my perfected innate ability to overthink every little thing, above much else. By the time January had come and gone, I no longer recognized the person that had gone to therapy with these anxious thoughts and wondered how I had ever lived in such a way. A similar situation introduced itself in the midst of all of this. To sit and watch my unconscious (absent-minded) brain work had become fascinating. To actively recognize a thought and watch it pass by felt like a weight off my shoulders. It was nothing I felt I had to react to and it was in the knowledge that a reaction would only make it worse did I find relief. The biggest tip brought to me in this reading is that identification with your mind is the first step. To quiet it and let it go is merely the beginning of presence, of no-mind. To practice no-mind is to bring attention to the present moment. "How does one have no thoughts? You can't just STOP thinking!" This is true for someone unable to see & not analyze. In this regard, I feel like I'm being told to quiet my naturally overly-analytical brain and learn how to observe at face value. Learn how to see & watch absent-mindedly (almost, not fully), before thoroughly, truthfully, & clearly exploring through an emotional deep dive. Swim your way to the bottom of the lake, don't just strap a weight to your waist and jump.... or accidentally flip a canoe..... to get there.
Comments