Spiritual Emergence/y Part 1: A Journey Beyond the Mind

Spiritual Emergence/y Part 1: A Journey Beyond the Mind

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside!

Rumi

Almost twenty years ago, I was living in New York City. This was its own kind of spiritual practice – a maximalist, ecstatic, tantric whirl that I had no preliminaries for. My outer world never stopped moving – between bedbugs, the art scene, landlords who didn’t speak my language, commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan to work under the table to make rent, and trying to write a thesis, I was in a constant state of activity and claustrophobia that was stimulating and enjoyable at first, and later overwhelmed me. I had moved to New York to write and paint, but quickly decided that I couldn’t justify adding anything more to the incredible density around me. I channeled my creative energies into performance, which I felt more comfortable with, as it left no product behind. Soon this transformed into finding creative modes that seemed to create space, rather than fill it or even refrain from filling it – these modes included Reiki, shamanism and sitting meditation. 

I signed up for a week-long meditation retreat in northern California the week after graduation, and I couldn’t have been happier to not speak to or make eye contact with anyone for a week, not read or write or run around. I had been sitting modestly in New York, but had probably not meditated for more than 45 minutes in a day. I practiced some of their shamatha/vipassana instruction, but mostly I did my own shamanic-style work that I had been trained in. I began to touch my emotions more, to let myself cry. I saw myself more clearly – my approval-seeking habits, my anxieties around food, my desire for distraction. The woman sitting next to me in the meditation hall must have been eight months pregnant, while I was menstruating, and both were beautiful and grounding forces. I let go of some outer layers of neurosis on that retreat, and by the end, I felt some spaciousness in my mind, some distance between my awareness and my thoughts. 

I quickly registered for another retreat six months later – this one a winter metta retreat in Massachusetts. When I got there, it was cold and dark, and the space felt much more constricted than my first retreat. I was in the middle of my cycle, and my energy seemed to be flowing upward and outward, rather than downward and inward. I felt antsy, impatient and had racing thoughts. I desperately wanted to communicate with others. In our hours of sitting, I worked again in my shamanic mode, but after a few days decided to give the practice we were learning a chance – we were reciting metta prayers for ourselves and others. 

May I be happy.

May I be healthy.

May I be free from suffering and its causes.

May I live with ease.

Repeating this thought pattern felt like building a dam against my usual flow of thoughts. Instead of transforming my mental energy into something compassionate, I felt stymied and the force seemed to be building up and pushing against the prayer. As I said metta prayers for people whom I did not feel compassionate towards, my thoughts began to feel increasingly arbitrary and impersonal. It seemed to me that I could replace my angry thoughts with compassionate thoughts if I was told to, and why would one be more valid than the other? How could I justifiably call either thought mine? In fact, the prescribed phrases seemed to be more true than “my own” thoughts. I cried as I said metta prayers, feeling for the first time disidentified with my emotions. 

A Crisis of Meaning

Unfortunately, I had no way to understand or integrate this realization. I didn’t have a framework for understanding, so I resorted to the materialistic model that I had grown up with in my largely secular, scientific culture. As someone studying energy work and animism, I didn’t think that I held to this paradigm of reality as tightly as those around me, but when pushed to my edge, I realized that at bottom, this was the paradigm I thought was true. I could only understand my experience by seeing my thoughts and emotions as physical processes in the brain – neural pathways, chemicals, and electrical firings. A thought was more or less arbitrary, as it was a physical process without larger significance, and could be removed and replaced with a different neural process – why not? At base, my thoughts, emotions, and physicality were mechanistic, and could be altered like a car or a computer. 

This understanding seemed quite nihilistic and frightening to me. I looked at my own arm, and couldn’t really identify with it, couldn’t say in any meaningful way that it was “mine.” I seemed to have zoomed out from time and space, and saw them as quite relative. From the universe’s point of view, I thought, we are here for such a tiny blink of time – how bizarre that we all see our lives as so large and significant. I felt sad and afraid and disoriented. I felt myself as a tiny clinging creature with nothing to cling onto. 

One of the teachers told a story about her own journey with meditation. She talked about her teacher, who had told her to go lay on the earth, and to feel it embracing her like a mother. This story pushed me over an edge, because I didn’t feel held by the earth – I felt like a speck of matter floating aimlessly through space, happening to touch on this planet for a moment. Even if I had felt held by the earth, the earth was just a random fleck of matter barreling pointlessly through emptiness with nothing embracing it… 

The Nature of Impermanence?

I began to think about death. I was so afraid, because I felt that as a physical process about to be extinguished, there could be no meaningful experience after death, and in that way, there could be no meaningful experience before death. And at the same time, I couldn’t figure out why I was so afraid of it, what could possibly be the real thing that I was so afraid to lose. Being alive was okay, but a mixed bag at best.

I went to one of the teachers. I cried as I told her, “It’s not making sense that I’m in this body and you’re in that body.” It seemed so amazingly arbitrary to me that we identified ourselves and each other with these physical packages, which would look so strange if we weren’t so familiar with them. She told me, unhelpfully at the time, “That’s beautiful.” 

I snuck out to the cold parking lot in the night and called family and friends. It helped to hear their voices, but I couldn’t express what I was feeling in a way they would understand.

I went home, secretively, on the fourth morning of the retreat. Back in New York, I tried all kinds of ways to feel reconnected to my body. But the city itself is so disconnected and chaotic that I couldn’t quite find a nurturing space. I began to have visions – crying on the subway as I envisioned the inevitable demise of all the riders of the train, the train itself, and the city altogether. I walked through the hordes of shoppers and street vendors in Chinatown, and as I looked into their faces, I only saw skulls – they weren’t menacing, but just showing me what the faces truly were, or were so soon to be. Sitting in coffeeshops, I saw portals above people’s heads – tunnels, doors, bodies of water – which seemed to be connections from this world to the next, or how they would transition between life and death. I knew these visions were not a part of physical reality, and yet they were more real and more apparent than something like a daydream. They didn’t fit into my idea of what was real, and they nudged me to open to a broader range of experience. And yet, no one else was talking about experiences like this. 

I thought about death compulsively. I woke up thinking about it, and thought about it more or less until I fell asleep. I had dreams about driving my car, stopping for a man in the road facing away from me. I knew the man was Death, and I yelled at him to show me his face, but all he would say was that I wasn’t ready to see it. I felt continual terror and anxiety. I felt I couldn’t possibly live another handful of decades knowing I was going to die. I felt a constriction around my neck, like I was being pulled by a cold grip into an underworld. I felt the energy of an uncle who had committed suicide. I worried that I was having a schizophrenic break – I was in my early twenties; I had pushed my brain too far. I worried about what happens to people who think about death all the time.

I had a therapist at the time who used modalities like Jungian therapy, art therapy, and mythology, and generally ignored the medical model. She told me that I was seeing the nature of impermanence, and pointed out that this was the kind of experience I seemed to be asking for by jumping into retreat. She was helpful in terms of validating my experience and framing parts of it, though I worried that if I went too far into this madness, she wouldn’t be able to provide a boundary or container. What if I needed more intensive treatment?