On madness and spiritual development

January 21st, 2010

(click it to enlarge it)

How could one

hope to understand

the scope and nature of

one’s own consciousness,

of human consciousness, stellar

consciousness, Consciousness itself,

without exploring every corner and crevice,

without passing through periods that looked very

much like lunacy to others? Without spending days and

nights alone in the desert, the mountains, a cave, Times Square,

the madhouse,  jail, on a cross, literal or figurative, of one’s or

another’s making?  Without traveling into the jungle to drink

ayahuasca, without long hours in the sweat lodge, on the

zafu, on a sadist’s rack? Without both the occasional

and sometimes sustained company of angels,

demons, wise women, shamans,

curanderos, enlightened

animals, the madman

in the next

cell?

One couldn’t.

If there is such a thing as

enlightenment — and there is —

the path there travels through terrain

more various than the silken booths and sunny

two-tops of the tea room at the Ritz-Carlton.  The soundtrack

is dulcet at times, death metal or dirge dense at others, more silent

than space for nearly-infinite spells.  Pray for realization, and you put

yourself in the hands of forces beyond yourself — or which seem to be beyond

yourself, anyway, when they choose for you twists and turns and torments

that you couldn’t have imagined when you uttered the prayer, feel certain

you can’t endure when they are underway, and — unless you are very,

very rare, and almost no one is that rare — beg to be released

from, again and again, maybe not early but ultimately

often, and with the most heart-felt

conviction.

But if you

ask long enough and

earnestly enough to win space on that

train — and it does take some doing, as consciousness

doesn’t accept casual apprentices — you aren’t allowed to climb back off.

If you were, the trip wouldn’t work. Who would endure prolonged

imprisonment or electrical torture, sustained insanity or

sorrow or the loss of one’s eyes or limbs

or beloved child?  No one

would.

What you discover

in time is that those terrible tormenting

forces — like everything and everyone else — are part

of yourself.  Part of the Self.  Ultimately

not only beneficial, but

beloved.

Scroll down

a few days and you can watch

Dr. King speak the night before his death.

The quaver in the voice when he says, “I have been

to the mountaintop” isn’t affected.  If you’ve listened to him

and watched him long enough, you know the difference between

his preacherly moments and his authentic emotions.  All that blinking

and swallowing when he says, “I may not get there with you, but

I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the

promised land” — that’s not because he ate Mexican.

That’s because he loves his wife and children

and knows he’s on his way away

from them for

a while.

That’s the

bargain Dr. Martin Luther

King, Jr. made.  There was a long period

earlier in his life, after Birmingham, long before Memphis,

when he came to fully understand the consequences of going all-in

with a process he began in greater innocence and ignorance in Montgomery.

The assassin’s bullet was shown to him, and he was given some time to think

about things.  He made his decision consciously, as his conversations with his

best friend Ralph Abernathy and others revealed.  I believe his reward, given

the terrible climax of the journey, was being allowed to know when

the moment was at hand, being given that time to prepare

his own heart and mind and soul.  That’s the

knowledge you see in the video

from Memphis.

There’s a bullet

waiting for everyone on the spiritual path.

It comes in myriad forms, sometimes it ends the body,

sometimes it doesn’t.  It always ends the self and dissolves one

into the Self.  The Sufis and the Taoists say one teaching the same way:

“Die, and stay dead, and go on living.”  Whether you’re wearing a

meatsack or not when you’re done with that is inconsequential.

You’re the sky, music, out of time,

beyond mind.

That’s the

spiritual process.

Accept your death or fight it,

no matter, it’s coming.  Embrace the

torturer or scream in horror, that might hue

a moment but won’t sway the result. The difficulties

along the way are guaranteed, darkness a certainty, terror

built in and beyond the control of anything so small as a person.

And that’s perfect.  Because your feet become hooves, and

then the tracks of the Tokaido Railway Line, and the

train takes you all the

way home.