For the past fifty years, I have more or less followed a spiritual path which has usually been invisible and not at all apparent to me. That stands to reason, I suppose. The spirit is immaterial, or so we consider it in the West. In many people's minds, it's a fiction, if they think of it at all.
I happened to come of age during a time when several spiritual tsunamis were sweeping through the world. I probably first picked up on it sometime in late 1965, early 1966, both through the music of the time and the primacy of drugs in the burgeoning counterculture.
Except that I very early on sensed something suspicious, sinister even, in the use of drugs as a mystical tool. It didn't ring quite true to me that a chemical could be a signpost. I was too young to test my hypothesis directly but I did have an older sister who started putting it to the test sometime in late 1966, early 1967. She was five years older and would describe to me her drug experiences. At first, there was a certain glamour and the thrill of "insider information" to these disclosures. But slowly that sense of something more sinister at work came to the fore as I watched my sister's personality disintegrate before my eyes.
She dropped out of my life and I hardly saw her for the next 4-5 years. But I remember reading a letter to the editor of Life magazine sometime in the fall of 1966 wherein the writer espoused the opinion that the hippies, then a new phenomenon, were right in their declaration of love as the answer to the dilemmas of the times, but were wrong in their choice of mediums, that is, drugs. This seemed to me to hit the nail on the head.
I did do about a year of light experimentation when I was 19 but two things intervened. One was an insistent inner voice that kept telling me to stop. I'm talking about conscience here, or what we might more accurately call intuition. Incredibly, I actually listened to this voice despite the fact that drugs were socially ubiquitous at that time. I was surrounded by them.
The other was the interesting experience of an altered state of consciousness. It was a novel discovery that there were alternative states to our ordinary, binary state of mind. But instead of delving deeper into drugs, I paired that interest with the earlier experience of the inner voice and instead decided to start meditating. It gave me a useful "out" with my peers, because one had to be drug-free in order to take the beginning meditation class that I was pursuing.
That small, subtle decision set my life on a course I could never have anticipated. I found indeed that I could easily enter into an "altered" state of consciousness directly through meditation, and that it revealed a fascinating interior terrain.
But rather than attempt to trace the meanderings of the past several decades, I'm just going to say that here I am, nearly fifty years later, re-thinking my life and that entire endeavor. Everything is up in the air. I'm alright with that. Somehow this whole experience, which has taken me around the world and allowed me to meet many incredible personages, has only served to solidify my sense of self, not dissolve it. For better or worse, I appear to have always been on the path of discernment rather than that of love.
What that means is that I have slowly, over the span of my life, learned how to think. It's not something that came easily or naturally to me. Until about the age of 35, I spoke almost entirely in the language of simile and metaphor, and nobody could understand me. I'd say, "It's like...." and I'd pull something out of the ether, the thin air, which appeared unrelated to what I'd just been talking about, but which carried an inner resonance with it. It drove people crazy.
Ever so slowly, I learned how to think like other people. That is, somewhat rationally, all the while realizing that everybody just does whatever they want to do anyway, and they make up the high-falutin' reasons after the fact. Just so it sounds good to other people.
But even that is not what I mean by the path of discernment. In effect, it's situational ethics. What I learned over the course of my life was simply a grounding in situational ethics, which I absorbed by living through many agonizing and conflicted situations. There's a built-in truing mechanism to life. Either you learn from it or you continue to suffer the consequences of your own choices, behaviors, and actions.
If you put me in a particular situation today, I can eventually think my way through it, work out the ethics and the broad spiritual implications. I don't feel bound by that process, but I can do it if need be. You see, I also realized somewhere along the line that desire is not the enemy, even though much spiritual literature portrays it as such. To put it more personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing what you want, simply because you want to, all things being equal. Course corrections are always allowed. For most, this is not an issue at all, but for the few who become bedeviled by spiritual concerns, it's like a smart bomb that hones in on your very own psychological weaknesses and neuroses. You'd be surprised how many people I have watched in my life as they painfully, torturously twisted themselves into convoluted and unnatural pretzels simply because they couldn't accept their own desires.
I see that I'm going to have to revisit this idea of desire here. In a prior post, I said that ten years ago, I wrote thirty pages on the subject of desire. Perhaps I exaggerated -- it was probably only twenty. At the time, I was obsessed with the ontology of desire. I was intent upon giving desire spiritual credence. I wouldn't feel driven by the same need today, but back then, I was.
Sometime this month, I will unearth my previous material about desire, see if I can digest it, and try to bring forth something worth sharing.
Til then...
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