I’ve decided it’s time to take this blog back to its original purpose. Enough fooling around! And now that I have spent several months recuperating from various surgeries, I have a giant backlog of journal entries that I’d like to share. In fact, many amazing things happened “on the way to the operating table” and on the way home from it that drew me along my path and shaped my relationship with the divine. As I said when I sort of re-appeared in July, I sometimes feel like a different person. Clearly I’m not, because when I fail to do the things I’ve learned to do over the past 6 months, I fall all too easily into the impatient and ego-driven self I’ve always been. I’m hopeful that by reviewing the journey I will also recapture the means to get back to where I was at the peak. Where to begin . . .
January 7, 2008
As I type up old journals for the blog I am amazed at how much spiritual progress I had made – and then lost – again! This is a repetive pattern. Do other people do this? I wonder if it is what Phyllis (my pain psychologist) was talking about when she told me about all those who dropped out of her prayer group once real transformations began to occur? We want to change, we do, but it is scary to let go of our familiar, habitual ways of being so at some point we stop doint the necessary things, and eventually begin sliding back . . .
For me, I believe what happened – and I have to rely on memory because I stopped keeping a journal at the end of the summer 2007 – is that I really did not need the journal anymore. The purpose had changed, anyway. I occasionally recorded a few key insights. But after Christmas 2007, when some things happened, a great shift occurred in me. I began to feel that I was making a doormat of myself with my attempts at compassion and forgiveness. Instead of working at figuring out how to achieve the appropriate balance, I began to actually desire to hang on to resentments!!! I didn’t want to smooth them away with the mantra; I wanted to begin to collect them! Heaven help me, I wanted to nurse my anger enough to harden into a protective shell. I’d been badly hurt, you see. I felt that I wasn’t going to allow it any more.
But in my blindness, part of what I was angry about was feeling that I wasn’t respected. Not for me, the “real” me, the person I’d been and the one I was becoming. That I’d cut off or hidden big chunks of myself to please others. So in my anger, what did I do? I turned my back on the best practices I’d ever known, the most incredible spiritual progress I’d ever made, and in the process hid even more of my real self. Brilliant! I began to find excuses not to meditate – never hard with a schedule like mine – until eventually, by late March or so, I wasn’t doing it at all. I’d say by mid April or so I wasn’t reading any spiritual or devotional material. I was very busy with my job; several conference presentations in and out of state, teaching four classes, managing large numbers of TAs and RAs, interns and independent studies. Lots of institutional and community service. And a lot of pain that led to two surgeries in the summer of 2008. We also were trying to buy a house, which we did, and moved in on September 22. Then it was just a mad, crazy dash through the semester. Just hoping to survive it. No thoughtfulness really. No meditation, no concentration. I still have the mantra.
Now I have a room for meditation. That tired old excuse is gone. I am on Winter Break and my only excuse for not starting again is pain, which is no excuse. And the shame for having been gone so long. Like my Self doesn’t know?! And all the other excuses are all the more reason I need to GET IN THERE! Today! So I will. No more excuses.
January 15
[Had wisdom tooth pulled and two doctor visits leading up to third surgery]
I’m going to be able to get to work, the blog, and even my spiritual life back on track now. I have a place to meditate, the ice is broken; I have a plan to begin reading the Uddhava Gita and the Upanishads again, and I’m going to pull myself back to Krishna’s feet.
January 17
I’m reading the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad and trying not to take a thousand notes. But some things are not in the glossary and I want to be sure to check them later. I’m in 3.1.8 and there is a Hote priest. From context, Hote priests appear to be associated with fire and speech and maybe death. Breath too? Just read and learn from context like a child – that is what I am supposed to be doing.
It does seem to be a particular god associated with the element of fire and the means of speech. As Adhvaryu is associated next with days and nights and sight. Udgatr is with the waxing and waning moon and breath. Each of these has temples, priests, rites and sacrifices, assumedly to be practiced at certain times. Then it says when there is no support in this world, one turns to Brahman, who is associated with the mind.
This sage who is being quizzed is next asked about “graspers” and “overgraspers”. This is a fascinating way to look at the relationship between senses and sense-objects. The graspers are our sense organs. Speech, nose, tongue, sight, hearing, mind, hands, skin. Things sensed are not described as grasped but overgrasped, capturing the dialectic, the mutuality, the relationship between Self and gunas. Visible appearances, flavors, sounds, desires, actions, touches . . . they grasp us back.
Graha and atigraha – double entedre. Graha also refers to the cup used to draw out Soma. And atigraha also means the practice of offering extra cupfuls of soma. So, the grasp that grasps back!
In 4.1.3 the same sage, Yajnavalkya, is instructing the king of the same region and he goes through this kind of charade where he aks what the kings sages have taught him about brahman. They have taught him some formulas – “Brahman is sight” “Brahman is breath,” but not what the words mean “or what its foundations are.” So he goes through each one and for each he ends up saying, “The highest brahman is sight.” “The highest brahman is breath.” Etc. The king never asks him to resolve how all of them can be the highest, so he doesn’t, exactly.
January 19
I am re-reading Easwaran as part of re-establishing my equilibrium and good spiritual habits, and reminding myself of what I am supposed to be doing. On the subject of one-pointedness, I am struck (again) by how much energy I have squandered this past year with split attention. As my tasks and responsibilities piled up, I somehow came to believe I could get more done by dividing myself into 2 or 4 or 8 pieces, each with only half, quarter or eight the energy, knowledge or attention. I literally found myself booked for 2-4 meetings more than once last spring. Clearly tht did not work. So I need to attend carefully to what he is saying.
In Sanskrit, ekagrata. Eka = one, agra = point, or edge. Easwaran talks about how much energy is dissipated in giving mental attention to things over which we have no control; the past, regrets, the comeback we wish we’d made. But also he discusses the way we make some tasks boring or onerous by not giving them our attention. I mean, if you spend the ntire time you are grading essays or creating a rubric feeling put-upon and impatient, and telling yoursel fyou shouldn’t have to do this grading; it is boring; the students won’t appreciate it, or whatever, then half of your mind is fighting the other half, which is trying to work despite the clamor. A grey pall sets over everything, you feel dispirited, disgusted and bored, and the whole project comes to feel pointless.
In his terms, you’ve consumed a tremendous amount of vital energy at war with yourself. No wonder the thing exhausts you. The task could be anything one finds boring or menial or beneath them. And all of this enormous waste and generation of unhappiness that spills over into the rest of one’s life is all due to the simple lack ofan ability or will to pay attention to the task at hand.
If we gave our attention to these tasks – well, we know what happens then. We experience it with the tasks we love. So I need to remember to give the same attention to every task that I give to solving an intriguing puzzle in the data, or prepping an interesting class, or writing an engaging part of an essay. Dishwashing can be and has been exactly this absorbing when I’ve tried it. Remember? I managed this for a brief time, and it was wonderful. Everything in my life smoothed out. Why and how did I let that go?L
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