My Spiritual Life: A Journey from Childhood

I was inspired to write this post after reading about Tom Wootton, a man in his 50s who had been meditating since the age of 5. Tom would detach from his body and find himself floating above and looking down at himself sitting there. He intuitively knew that this and other meditative practices would bring him to a state of ecstasy. Altered states of consciousness soon became the most important thing in his life. It was only later in his practice as a monk that he found ultimate ecstasy after suffering from deep depression. Once he found ecstasy in depression he found it everywhere, at last finding equanimity. A deeply encouraging story for sufferers of stress, anxiety and depression and one that may resonate with anyone who has had childhood spiritual experiences which is more my own perspective although stress is also a part of my life at the moment.

Tom’s early childhood story is almost identical to mine. I was an extremely happy young child and the pleasurable altered states of consciousness that I was able to reach at this young age gave me, like Tom a profound state of happiness and a feeling of a spiritual closeness to a ‘God’ like entity

I loved to sit on my own in quiet solitude or silence, contemplating space, searching for meaning in objects or simply trying to remove any thought at all from my awareness. I embraced a God that my parents did not talk about. I craved quiet. In order to meet this need I adapted my routine to every situation doing things like memorising a single motorway bridge while in the car and keeping it in my minds eye as the sole focus of my attention until we reached the next one.

It was a very ordinary day at nursery school in my life as a 3 or 4 year old child, but it was also the day that probably changed my life forever as this was the day that I became ‘different’ The teacher was telling the story about animals. We were listening in silence and I was for some reason listening to the story with my ears while having my eyes focused intently on a drawing pin and finding I was enjoying the light headed sensation that the focus of my intent seemed to be giving me. The more I focused on that pin the more engaged with this story I became and the more light headed I became. The room rearranged itself into an animal, children and teacher kaleidoscope. Myself the other children and animals all joined each other to became part of the story and I had the sensation of being above myself and everything else. Everything was perfect, peaceful colourful and somehow seemingly interconnected and I felt very part of this. When I think of heaven this feeling is it. The next thing I felt was a jolt, The teacher was asking if I was OK and what had happened, and the morning carried on while I sat alone feeling confused.

This was not the first time I had had this experience, although it was something that normally came in the early morning, along with colourful floating shapes that drifted around my bedroom. I also used to bring the experience about to entertain myself. I believe the only reason I remembered this early experience so explicitly is because I was asked to describe it to various psychologists throughout my early years at school. The experience felt so natural and right that I feel sure it is not unique to me, and is common in young children who like myself just accepted it as normal but more usually forgot about it in later years. My memory of how to achieve such states possibly only still exists because of all the fuss that was made about my description of this one. It was the re-living of the experience that was disturbing to me and not the experience itself. From this moment on I ‘doubted’ myself. What was normal had become ‘abnormal’, ‘fanciful’ or just plain untrue, my life became a puzzle to be solved and I am almost certain that the self doubt that exists in other areas of my life exist because of this. The broken bits that Joe Bray refers to in his recent post. https://josephbray.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/broken-hearts-in-the-forest/ I would like to add that I have an ordinary life, run a business and have a family, have never used drugs or had any mental health issues.

As an adult I have gone through a period of stress and anxiety due to some major personal life changes. During this time I have re-discovered my spirituality, Meditation and some of my earlier experiences of altered consciousness. These are welcome and feel natural although the surrounding life circumstances are harder to live with.

This is a post for all sufferers of stress and anxiety, as well as those who as children were able to experience OBEs and other altered states. Please share your own story.

Read More about Tom Wootton: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/bipolar-advantage/201207/how-i-found-ecstasy-in-depression

Consumerism: Faith in material objects of desire

If there is one religion that unites the human race it is ‘Consumerism’, a faith so powerful that just about everyone wants to follow it by showing of their latest acquisitions and evangelising them.

When Neuroscientists ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on an Apple fanatic they discovered that images of the company’s products stimulated the same parts of the brain as a deity might for the religious- while some evangelists of Apple might read the Bible on the ipad, worship of an acquired object is a worrying phenomena.

Douglas Harding Continued

Thanks Fiona.

I went to one of Douglas’ workshops about 10 years ago. At that time he was profoundly deaf and this severely limited his capacity to participate. Nevertheless, I was aware that I was in the company of someone who, in time, will probably be considered on of the greatest mystics of the past several hundred years. Which amounts to nothing really, as it is not about having rubbed shoulders with some celebrity guru. Indeed it is not about him at all. It is about you, about me, and our ability to bear witness to our own true nature, to our divinity.

What I found disarming was the simplicity of seeing into ones own real nature. There is no need to spend 25 years staring at a wall, no need to read arcane scriptures; no need for purification, transmission, merit, accomplishment, or anything else that needs practice. It is simply noticing the ‘no-thing’ which is aware of what is seen, heard, felt, etc.

And its simplicity is the problem. It’s not exotic enough for us; it does not come with bells or whistles. At the same time, paradoxically, we don’t want it because it is too radical. It threatens the hegemony of the ego, the ‘I, me, mine’ that sits on the throne, and pretends it is God.

‘Is that it?’, I said,  and went back to my usual ways.

To glance inwardly is all that I need to do, and I can do it in an instant. Indeed I must do it in an instant, and only for an instant. I must do it again and again, in each instant that it occurs to me to do it.

That is where the practice lies. But I can’t be bothered to do it again and again. After all, what’s the point? No host of angels singing, no celestial light. Just the simple presence of what is, free for a moment from the tyranny of the little ‘me’ who wants to believe that it is ‘I’ who have been the seer, the hearer, the feeler.

So I have to admit that I’m not ready for such a radical, simple message. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’m much more comfortable with the delusion that I need to practice, to purify, to go on retreats, meditate harder, longer, better. That way I can continue to turn away from seeing who I really am. Because I know that to see who I really, really am will cost me, as Douglas has said, precisely everything.

My First Zen Retreat: Asleep at the Wheel

“Then Jesus cometh with them to a plot of land called Gethsemane; and he saith to his disciples, ‘Sit ye here, whilst I go yonder to pray’…and he cometh unto the disciples and findeth them asleep, and he saith to Peter, ‘Could ye not then watch one hour with me? Watch ye and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.'”
St Matthew 26: 36-41

Well, I couldn’t even watch for five minutes, let alone one hour. The whole four and a half days were a battle with sleepiness and torpor, like an endless car journey trying to keep from falling asleep at the wheel. Over the period of the retreat we meditated for over forty hours, and for a mere 20 minutes of this did I experience any clarity. The rest was a struggle to stay awake.
Anyone who has tried to stay awake late in the evening so as not to miss their stop on a bus or train, or to avoid careering off the road will know what an exquisite form of torture that is. Every fibre of your being just wants to slip away to bobo-land, and mustering up the resolve to stay awake is an agony.
At one stage I decided to count my pulse for one minute to entertain myself. I made five separate attempts, but never even got as far as fifteen seconds, before slipping into unconsciousness. (My pulse was running at about 48 beats a minutes, as I estimated later.)
It seems my mind didn’t like the utter boredom of just sitting there for hour after hour, with me trying in vain to make it stay attentive to my breath or the feeling of my body sitting there.
And during the brief intervals that I wasn’t assailed by stupor, it raced and ruminated over nonsense. For example: on one day I took a second helping of food at the meal before being granted permission to do so by the teacher. The cook took me to one side and gently pointed out my error. Well I got 72 hours out of that one. Was she getting at me? Had she singled me out? I was going to have to keep an eye out to see if she picked on me again. And then the self-justification: I hadn’t done it maliciously. How was I to know the rules? What did the teacher think of my transgression? Were they talking about me in whispers? And of course, because the retreat was silent, I couldn’t run it by my roommate at night. So I had to keep it to myself, and fester and ruminate and project all sorts of motivations onto the hapless cook who was only putting me right.
So the whole time was an alternation between sleepiness and pointless loops of negative thinking.

I had come to the retreat with high ambitions. Nothing less than full enlightenment was going to do. I had no idea what that might have been, but I knew I’d recognise it if it happened- there would be an amazing overwhelming realisation that this was ‘it’ and that all my problems and worries would be swept away at a stroke. That sort of thing.
So I was setting myself up for disappointment. I’d heard of a guy, Kenneth Madden (there’s an interesting interview with him on conscious.tv), who had ‘awakened’ after three days at a Buddhist retreat, and I wanted some of that.
So as the retreat came towards an end, and the fog of sleepiness still hadn’t lifted, I began to see the enterprise as an utter failure. Which of course it was, by my own expectations. And then I remembered something I had read in Hubert Benoit’s The Supreme Doctrine (probably the Carlsberg of books on Zen). Of course I didn’t remember the quotation, but I had grasped the gist of it. Indeed in reading it again in the light of my experience I understand it more fully:

‘Self-observation reveals that I am instinctively striving to succeed all the time; that, whether my actions are egotistical (winning, enjoying, gaining admiration, etc) or altruistic (supporting someone else, becoming ‘better’, eradicating my ‘faults’ etc), there is this continual instinctive struggle to achieve a ‘good’ outcome, striving towards some ‘higher’ objective. I am continually agitated by ‘upward’-striving tensions, like a bird beating its wings without pause in order to climb, or to prevent the wind from forcing it to the ground. I behave as though my ‘hopes’ were valid, as though the true good I really need (Realization, satori) might be found by fulfilling them. But the opposite is true; my hopes are deceptive and are part of an infernal circle in which I struggle uselessly and exhaust myself. All my efforts to lift myself up are just ignorant acts of resistance against the joyful, spontaneous transformation which my Principle is always ready to bring about. Perfect Bliss is not waiting for me on high; it is down below. It is not waiting for me in any seeming triumph: it lies in what at present looks like disaster. Perfect joy is waiting for me in the total annihilation of all my hopes.’

The Light Of Zen in the West: Incorporating The Supreme Doctrine
By Hubert Benoit. Translated by Dr Graham Rooth; pp108-110.

He goes on to point out that we shouldn’t try to engineer disaster to liberate ourselves, as that would be as manipulative as striving for success.

Rather, it is in understanding that success has never freed me in the past, and that each failure, each humiliation, if properly understood, moves me one step closer to letting go of my life.

In any case, once I realised that my so-called ‘failure’ to meditate properly had just rid me of one more cherished illusion, I relaxed a bit into my life as it was just then.

And in the meanwhile, the experienced meditators were just sitting there, watching the river flow.