Blog number nineteen
I really, really got "into" Eastern spirituality. I meditated several times a day for months, expecting some breakthrough or other, but nothing happened. I ate healthily, thought healthily, lived healthily. Then one morning I woke up and realized I had just quit. No more spiritual work for me. I immediately felt an immense freedom. No more mediation, no more "working." To hell with it.
It was a beautiful spring day. The kids were playing in the back yard. My wife had made me a white robe a few weeks before - why, I don't know. I put it on. I'm not sure, but I think my wife suggested I wear it. I think that is so.
We went outdoors. My daughter made a wreath of flowers and placed it upon my head. I was wearing a long white robe, barefoot, with a wreath of flowers on my head. I didn't think anything of it at the time. It had all happened in a casual unusual way. Nothing out of the ordinary.
We played with the kids awhile then my wife and I went behind the swimming pool, facing a pasture in the back. We sat there talking. I had an insight that I don't now remember and while I was telling it to my wife, I had another and before I could tell her that one, I had another, then another, then another and it felt like my mind was running away with myself. I felt myself sinking deep into the earth and immediately come shooting out through the grasses and the branches of the trees we were sitting under. At the same time, this deep, loud voice that seemed to come from everywhere said, "Do what you want. If you do what you want, everything will be all right." I started laughing and crying, trying to speak, but I couldn't. I was in ecstasy.
For months afterwards, I thought it was God that had spoken to me. I read once that often, when someone thinks that God has spoken to them it is nothing more than their own selves that they "hear." It seems to me now that what had happened is that I had such a glimpse of a Truth that the recognition of it seemed like a loud voice.
I also remembered reading that when a person diligently pursues a spiritual goal and then gives up, that what happened to me usually happens. Something about the hard work and then the giving it all up seems to trigger a response.
I also thought for months that everyone knew what had happened to me - that they had been inside my head at the time. My wife told me years later that she thought that I had had a psychotic episode. I can see now, that that would be a perfectly reasonable thought. Here was this man sitting beside her and all of a sudden he starts laughing and crying and babbling. Obviously psychotic, yes?
Over the next few months it seemed as if the universe was talking to me. It was like a rebus puzzle talking to me. All I had to do was put words to the pictures so that it made sense. I understood the previously not understood claimings of people that the "radio was talking directly to them." The universe was talking to me. I think it still does, but I can no longer "read" the puzzle. I talked to my mentor about this and he said that doubt always enters and stops those things. I saw immediately that that was what had happened.
He said that when he was in Japan he used to ride his motorcycle on top of a dike between the rice patties, real fast. On day he rode a bicycle over it and suddenly thought that he might fall into the paddy and he did. He said that after that, he could no longer ride his motorcycle over the dike, that he always fell in.
The very night that he told me that, I was walking a joist in the cabin that we were building. I was walking very fast, comfortably, and suddenly I thought that since it was dark, I might not be seeing very well and I might mistep into thin air, and I almost did. I sat down and scooted the rest of the way.
One big direct result of this event that I call a "cosmic experience" was that I could now look into people's eyes. I sat for an hour or so on a bench between classes at Sac State, looking at all the people, right in the eye. I noticed that most people immediately looked away. Those that didn't look away, both male and females, flirted with their eyes. Eventually one guy came along and did neither. He looked me square in the eye, acknowledged me, and went on. What the hell was that? He was the only one that did that, that day.
I was sitting in a class I thought stupid - "Psychology of Art." I thought, "What the hell am I doing here? I didn't want to do this." God had just told me a few days before to do what I wanted and if I did, everything would be all right. Ok, time to obey orders. I got up and walked out, started dropping all my classes, left college. Whee!
This reminds me of a guy I met though a circuitous series of events. He told me that he went to a monastery and as he lay in bed that night, he heard this loud voice from God telling him that he was to stay in that monastery. I said, "Wait a minute. God told you to stay there, so what are you doing here?"
He said that his back was hurting from working in the fields and the head guy told him, when he complained, to just keep working. So he left. I asked him what about God's orders and he said he figured out that the monks had did some kind of a ritual to make it seem like God was talking to him so that he would stay there. I thought, "Man, this guy has got some ego, thinking that all those people got nothing better to do that do rituals so they would have the pleasure of his company. I never told him that, but I thought it.
What I did think was that if he had stayed there working, that might have cured whatever was wrong with his back. I never told him that either.
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