Post 5
One of my best friends passed away when we were 20. I was already in a period of seeking but this drove me deeper. I had to know if there was any Truth. I decided to pursue the truth in the religion of my youth. I approached it like an experiment. If there was any truth in the Bible I reasoned, it could only be found by following the instructions inside. I entered a period of intense study and prayer. During this time I did almost nothing but read or pray, even reciting a mantra all day while at work. The instructions in the book were to “pray unceasingly”, and I followed them.
I quickly became absorbed in prayer, using mantra in my spare moments and the stations of the cross (visual representations of the life of Jesus) during my daily rosary practice to enhance my engagement. It wasn’t long before a distinct change occurred in focussing the intention and attention this way. I would begin to say the rosary and a Power would descend, enrapturing the heart and silencing the mind. I could not think if I wanted to, nor continue to pray, but only “be” with the Presence. In Catholicism this is called “infused contemplation”.
As I began to be absorbed in the inner life, I had a very intense dream, more vivid than any I’d had before.The dream consisted of only two images in succession. First was the child Jesus holding the world. And the next was old Carl Jung holding a book. Both images remained in my dreaming mind, held static, for what felt like a long time. The images seemed to beckon and hold more meaning than I could make of them. In addition to my study of Christian mysticism, I began to study Jung.
Synchronicity was one of the most intriguing concepts Jung had to offer. The short version is that events seeming like uncanny coincidences for us can lead us down the path to discovering the Self or Soul. Of course I began to notice more of these in my life, and I only slowly learned more about which ones were simply flights of imagination, and which could not be denied.
One such coincidence was in finding a very old Toyota microbus for sale in the newspaper. It cost enough for me to sell my perfectly fine car and have money left over to travel. I had wanted a bus since high school, and certainly this one must be for me! It was the first time I looked in the paper after deciding to get off the hamster wheel of what I considered pointless work. By this time I was living on the east coast, but I imagined I would travel back west and find a teacher to help me understand and integrate the spiritual experience I was having. I cringe now to write about it, as if there were no one with spiritual knowledge in the Chapel Hill area in which I was living, but such was the melange of ego driven imagination and spiritual emergence I was living in. I was in an ecstatic state of experiencing myself broken open and filled with blissful energy, but also using this energy to fuel some wild flights of fancy.
I decided to take the bus from North Carolina to New York and visit my family before heading back to California. When I arrived my father immediately told me what a dumb decision I had made and that the bus was going to break down. Turns out the message was right, but the delivery and my stubborn idealism made it tough to absorb. I got back on the road and headed west. By the time I got to Indiana and pulled into a rest stop the bus wouldn’t start again. Undaunted in my bliss, I pulled the license plates off the van, stuffed whatever I could fit into my backpack, and headed down highway on foot. When I tired I found a field to lay in and wondered at the puffy clouds in the clear blue sky. Not much time passed before the police pulled up. Someone had noticed a vagrant lying in their field. To my great good fortune the nice police man gave me a free ride to the bus station out of town and I continued on my merry way west.
It’s an interesting exercise to sit at the keyboard, now over 25 years later, and decide what should be included in what I write and what’s off topic. It’s very much akin to the process I was going through in attempting to follow my bliss all those years ago, only maybe a bit more refined. I don’t now need to travel back and forth across the country and break down on the side of the road before I realize that I am following an agenda driven more by a,“me”, than the, “I”. It’s quite clear now. I’m either present to the visceral flow of Life Force through the heart and mind, or I find myself a couple sentences down the page losing presence and telling an old story for my own sake.