A Renegade Among the Realized

I’m still trying to get my story straight. It’s not easy because the story is based on a series of metaphysical experiences. And the distance between what I make the experience out to be (my story) and the actual experience itself is separated by a great gulf. I know what happened, continues to happen. But transposing my experiences into a story — a form for general consumption — involves a bunch of linguistic gyrations too vast to bridge that gulf. A polyglot lexicon of everyday vocabulary, spiritual terms from various traditions, and my own attempts at finding better ways of expressing the ineffable. The need to structure that which has no structure, a process more about the rules of story telling and self-promotion than about the experience. Getting the story straight is a pain in the ass, and an impossibility.

No matter how carefully I pick and choose each word, no one language applies. No matter how detailed, how specific, the experience is never encapsulated in the story. Instead of getting closer, I actually increase the distance between the listener and myself. It’s no one’s fault; it’s the way it is. You can’t tell someone to work harder at it; it either comes across as a kind of grokked whole or it doesn’t. The It of is either transferred or It isn’t. And if It isn’t, it’s my fault.

We’re dealing with two realities. The mutability of the story and how it ends up being about the telling of it as opposed to the actuality of the experience which is all about Nothing, Silence, Love, and Oneness.

The phrase through a glass, darkly comes to mind:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Is St. Paul talking about being conscious of consciousness in this passage? Because that’s the goal — being able to transfer consciousness, the inkling of its actuality, or some wee aspect of it, enough to get the listener going.

How do people communicate even a tiny shred of their metaphysical experience to a broader audience? How do they put the “story” wrapper around the experience? It isn’t through words. I know because most people are like me: they hear a lot, but retain very little. No one really “gets” the words on a one-to-one basis, matching the word-label to the experience-actuality.

Is there any incremental way of transferring actuality? If I could sit in a room with a group, turn down the lights, expel the white noise, not rush things, and speak only as images come to mind, I might achieve clarity. And then again, probably not. I might end up falling asleep.

But if I didn’t have a story — some bunch of words, no matter how incomplete or unsatisfactory — I wouldn’t be here in the first place, writing on this blog trying to explain all this stuff, which never happened because there is no me, only It. My story is only my experience, which can’t be encapsulated.

But if it weren’t for my experience, there wouldn’t be a story. And since something DID happen, I cannot NOT be here. Something happened, and I’ve been trying to put labels to it ever since. Which hasn’t been much fun. There is no language for it. No verbal, No! Too many words from too many different languages. So Babel-like, the more I try to perfect the story, the further away I get, the more confused I am, the harder it is to remember the experience because the experience can’t be told, only felt. And the story part anathematizes feeling. The more I try, the further away I get from what I really want to say.

The last time I put my story to an audience was a failure. Part of it was my trying to finesse it, actually making it worse. Another part of it was standing in front of an audience, feeling hopeless about the process. A process is usually something one someone transmits to another someone. It either happens or it doesn’t. Usually, by non-verbal means.

It happened to me that way — through meditation and Yoga. It’s happened to others since the beginning of time. There aren’t many of us so we tend to feel special without any real reason.

We’re not. Our only specialness is, perhaps, a biological leakage of fluids to the brain that opens super-consciousness, sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. Like something that happens to an old man during the night, leaking into his Depends. That’s all it is: a biological accident. A valve opening, releasing an elixir, stimulating the brain. Or is more than an accident? That consciousness came first and preceded all. That the ancients then discovered doorways into pure consciousness, one of them being Kundalini. They discovered that Kundalini energy is included in the body to serve an evolutionary purpose. If it didn't serve a purpose, it wouldn’t be there. Evolution would have eliminated it. That we could activate through the practice of various techniques.

Faces Tell Stories

Do these awakening experiences mean that DNA can be changed in one generation? No, not absolutely, but these experiences are not opinions or abstractions; they've occurred in the bodies of men and women all over the world. Does achieving clarity for even a single moment mean I have to buy every teaching of every tradition? Reincarnation, for instance?

I had a biological accident; elixir leaked into my brain, causing an experience, which triggered nothingness and clarity and love. And now I’m being asked to buy into reincarnation?

Do I buy into reincarnation then? I don’t discount it. The experience made it a distinct possibility. Landing in a vast energy field as I did — immersed in It — a tiny vibrating speck of It. Alive through all eternity came to mind. Without ever having witnessed a reincarnation, my mind grokked it. I call them my first realizations: the immediate workings of the mind after the experience, the first words after wordless immersion. Images becoming thoughts: no death, a cycle of life, energy vibrating, transforming. Not the rational mind at work, but a right-brained transference of images to thought.

You don’t need a guru for this, but people will say you’re not realized if you don’t have one. You don’t need to belong to a group for this, but people will say you’re not enlightened if you don’t. I don’t have a guru, don’t belong to any group.

 I'm not enlightened, I'm realized, which means I realize I'm not enlightened.

Don't take this too seriously; it's just more of the story.