| | First of all, if you don't want to read a long account of someone who has done many different practices for decades with no real instruction or discipline and has not a clue what is going on, don't waste any more of your time reading this.
Secondly, yes, I have had many psychological evaluations, and I do not have any major disorders, I have a job, wife, kids. However, I am willing to accept that my experiences might just be chemical imbalance or psychological problems. I don't know. That's why I am asking.
I was raised in a lower middle class, blue collar town, and went to a Baptist church. I was not in any way exposed to anything else until I was in my late teens.
The first strange experience I remember was when I was about 8 years old, and it was raining lightly so I was outside playing. This is very hard to describe, but my surroundings seemed to come into ultra focus, like looking through a ViewMaster. Everything seemed to pop out and glow with life. There was a tremendous feeling of having a raw and direct connection with reality, as though everything before was dreamlike and this was real, it was NOW, it was things as they truly are. It was beautiful, and a bit frightening. The storm clouds were no longer labeled "clouds" -- they were real, alive, and dynamic things. That's the best I can explain it.
When I was 11 or so, I had my first experience of the curtain being ripped away, exposing the dream life that I and everyone around me was living. I realized my mortality, and was terrified to panic. I could not help but despair because our dream lives were completely empty and void of meaning. I never wanted to feel that way again.
Too bad, because at 13 I not only felt that way again, but this time not for an hour, but for months. Again, everyone was living in a dream. This was a fact, not a sad feeling. People were literally living stories that had nothing to do with reality. Reality seems to be that all of these meaningless stories and lives would end in meaninglessness.
Let's just say this continued off and on, and when I was in my late teens I started looking for meaning and answers. I had long ago given up on the Bible, as it made no sense to me at all. At least the way it was interpreted in my small town, it was just another meaningless story, just part of the larger illusion.
I was drawn to Buddhism because it made sense given my experience. Life was suffering. We were living in delusion. Our dreams were not leading us to a better place, but just to a meaningless death. I tried meditation, over and over, in different forms, and at least progressed from terror to some acceptance. No joy, no bliss, but acceptance of the way things are and at least the hope that what I saw and felt was not all of reality, and still illusion.
I moved on to years of Zen, and then Krishnamurti, and then finally realized that the big illusion I had missed was that I was an illusion myself. The person who was afraid of death, in despair, and suffering in fact did not exist. I was an illusion. It was a fact. I had no existence in and of myself. I was built of thought, imaginary, conceptual.
To my dismay, this only started a cycle of losing my fear and being detached, and then losing my insight and falling back into misery despite what I knew.
Never at any time did I have any great joy, bliss, or anything like that. I never have. Knowing that the self is an illusion has never fully penetrated. I cannot get rid of it. I can sometimes have detachment and no fear, but before long the self reasserts itself. I realize it when I become miserable. Detachment was a refuge, but it damaged my relationships. This detachment had no joy, just indifference and oneness.
I went to a more experienced person who pointed out that I was emotionally blocked, that my "heart chakra" was blocked, and told me to shift my meditation focus from my head to my heart, warning me that I would suffer for this, but that it was the only way to open up and have true, intimate relationships, or as he called it: to become fully human.
He was right. I opened up my suppressed emotions and lost my ability to detach. I am often overwhelmed with negative emotions, extreme depression, anxiety, and the same emptiness, hopelessness, and despair as I suffered long ago. Unlike before, I just stay with it, observing. It doesn't seem to end. My only insight of late, from sitting through all the pain, is that the emptiness, hopelessness, and despair is not reality after all, it is me. It is myself I am seeing. The observer is the observed. It is the truth about my self: empty, illusory, meaningless. Still the illusion will not break. I know it is not real. I know it is the source of my suffering, but it pulls me in over and over, and even when I escape there is not any special relief, then I am drawn back.
I sit and watch. I suffer. I feel just OK, or terrible.
I apologize for my super-long self indulgent post, but for all I know someone out there understands how I am stuck and can help, which would be of great benefit to everyone in my life.
Thank you for reading,
John |