From Grunge to Intersubjectivity

All of this, for me at least, is some kind of spiralling inward towards a genuine grasp and expression of meditation. Earlier on in my life, there was more sense of ecstasy and perhaps less serenity or what feels like some degree of equanimity. I felt a particular euphoria in focusing on a sense of disembodied love connection that best seemed to fit with Rumi's ecstatic sort of poetry.

Dr. Lorna Smith Benjamin presents the perspective that psychopathology (especially so-called "personality disordering") results from an unrequited gift of love--to our parents, our God(s), our fellow human beings, etc. I find that my own patterns of unhelpful, uncreative habituations seems to follow that sort of blueprint. Although this is a very deep point, it is not necessarily all that subtle if you think about it. How many unhappy people create unhappiness in their own lives and with those around them because they do not feel adequately loved and loving? If you feel loved and loving, do you want more fame/power/money or would you rather sink into that loving as a sensual, intimate, delicate indulgence in and expression of the beauty and wonder of life?

There's a lot of energy or power or whatever you want to call it in that spiritual-disembodied affirmation of love and a lot of the same in the negative feeling and habituation of unrequited love. Depending on what we are able to feel and express, we either project more of a shadow (echoes of unrequited love) or a halo (emanations of affirmation). And other people respond to what we project, what we bring to their lives. Feel the love?

Ajahn Chah gave the metaphor of meditation as being like sitting quietly by a still forest pool at night. If you are quiet and still enough with your mind, animals will come out of the dark forest to refresh themselves at the pool. If you are loud or startle them with crashing around, movements, expressed dissatisfaction, you disturb their "wa"--their inner settledness--and they run away if you even get to see them at all. The same is the case when we are unable or unwilling to leave the the confines of a solid self-identity; we never see what is out there in the rest of that universe. In responding to others, most of us feel the value in the wildness and delicacy of connection with the aspects of ourselves and our universe.

That delicacy challenges the primacy or importance of what we project while responding directly to what we (ourselves) and others both feel and project. Besides the positive or negative feelings, there is a degree of stillness and subtlety that can lend towards serenity. And there is a well of energy in which we can feel stillness running infinitely deep. Things change when we begin to experience ourselves as one (or perhaps as many) of those wild forest animals that returns to this pool. In regards to love, feeling this wildness in your soul can bring us also in touch with intensity from a different direction.

Most folks are used to feeling intensity as pressure or as a rush. For those who can get in touch with their own potent-and-delicate wildness, it's possible to begin feeling that intensity comes from that still pool, that infinite-living reservoir of energy that is life itself. When that happens, we start to register pressure as extra or unnecessary, as karma, samsara, judgement, punishment, whatever. Pressure as pressure pushes us into that shadow which follows each of us always.

Peace or serenity or that pool of stillness-as-intensity, on the other hand, opens up the possibility of relating without pressures. Rather than trying to push towards whatever we might feel as good or--as Ken Kesey said, fighting/leaning against evil--we live (in Rumi's words) "in a field beyond right and wrong", gone beyond, parasamgate. Rather than carving out a space for self-identity, rather than being in this world but not of this world, rather than being spirits in a material world (sure, I grew up listening to the Police), we live in and of and as and with the universe as pluribus and unum. In Zen, it is asked, "If the many return to the One, to what does the One return?" I have described meditation as the willingness to return. It's not that the animals or spirits of the forest live only in and of the still pool, but they return. And you know why they return. I'll sometimes refuse to meet you somewhere other than there. Even when you don't KNOW why, you feel it.