Tower:11.Work in Progress

After going through my own dark night of the soul, I feel like I was reborn into a place where I really fell in love with meditation. Life took on a whole new dimension for me. It was like in that movie, The Forgotten, where Julianne Moore is talking to Alfre Woodard and suddenly Alfre was whisked up into the sky and was gone. It was kind of like that with me. I found myself totally in a different place all of a sudden. I could never go back to where I’d been before… and I’d never even think of going back because that was dark and painful and horrible and here, now, everything is beautiful and fresh, and life is wonderful and meditation is perfect and everything clicks. That was four and half years ago. Since that time, I had been doing my own thing. I was still involved in the group, but I was not invested in it at all. I had everything that I had wanted when I became involved with the group. And I started seeing how useless some of the things we were doing were. Such an emphasis was placed on completely retarded things. Maybe that’s beneficial to someone first starting out but it’s completely useless to someone that has been on the path for any extended amount of time. But, the thing is, nobody in the group ever graduates. No one ever achieves anything. Ever. If they get to the point where they think they’re free, then they’re told it’s their spiritual ego and efforts are made to either take them down in front of everyone or exert pressure on them to leave. So, nobody ever becomes enlightened. Ironic, isn’t it? Makes you wonder, if he has never helped anyone to become enlightened, then how can he be called a master? In any other field, if someone does master-quality work.. if they do something so beautiful or accomplished that only a master of their craft could have done it, THEN they are worthy of being called a master. Similarly, a spiritual master is someone, in theory anyway, that has taken somebody and transformed them or helped them transform into an awakened being themselves. He never did that. He just started using the moniker of spiritual master. He just decided that he was a master one day. It’s like making ice and then calling yourself a chef.

With my own experience, I realized that meditation was completely independent of any psychological issues I have or any thoughts or feelings I have. Meditation, God, Love, whatever you want to call it… transcends all of that. It was completely irrelevant what “the mind” was doing. It was interesting and perhaps useful in the beginning because before I actually fell in love with meditation, I could have been distracted so easily by it. But if you’re head-over-heels in love with someone, how easily are you distracted from that? Not very. You think about them all the time and you begin to see the world thru the lens of that experience. It’s very similar to that. So I didn’t really have a problem with Angelo being flawed…being human… (although Lord knows I would never have voiced that in the group unless I was trying to get kicked out). I saw him as a work in progress and what he was experiencing on a mind level had nothing to do with his god experience for me. Based on my own experience, I was perfectly willing to believe that he could be experiencing a great Divinity and I could still benefit from his experience -- because I had discovered that all those mind issues don’t really matter. But, that being said… I had stopped making myself available for cleansing as much. And in class, I’d go to hear the satsang at the beginning. And maybe I’d hang around for some of the exercises. But you can only pretend to be a chunk of melting cheese so many decades before it gets old. And less than that before it becomes totally ridiculous as far as achieving anything. So, I’d listen to satsang and then hang around to see what the exercise was and usually I would leave… passing a few other people making their own way to the exits. Even though I was trying not to be obvious about it (out of respect) I know that my leaving was noticed. Several people made comments. Also, Angelo started calling me Shazzam sometimes because he’d look for me and I’d be gone. To be fair, for a big guy I can disappear like a ninja without half-trying. But I’d pull my disappearing act and let him act like I was fucked up or whatever because it was all fine. None of it touched my experience and the absolute worst thing that could happen would be that I would be asked to leave… and at this point I really didn’t care at all. I could have stepped away at any point in the last few years and not looked back. I had found my own experience of God and it was strong enough to carry me through anything that came up.