One for you, now:
Author's Note
This collection of aphorisms, short notes, reaching toward inner surrender are offered to you with great respect and love, by someone who is also a brother, an uncle, a friend, and ...
Someone who wishes you well. Everyone has their own experience, and not everyone can easily or perhaps ever slip into mine without some translation. It might not make any sense. And it might seem hopeless to try, if differences are so great.
Still, there is a need. Here we are in the latest crazed age, and there is hardly a soothing wise voice to be heard. A few pieces of music might help, maybe there is some poetry to be found I don't know where. I find myself browsing for relief and never finding it. My intention?: Try this!
Have you observed reading scriptures or certain spiritual documents, written from a certain kind of a voice, that you actually can open to a random page, and it speaks to your particular situation? I believe we all suffer from the same broken, or at least intrinsically immiserating, emotional regulation system, and the same solution, however expressed, in whatever situation or language, answers the suffering and brings a kind of relief.
The voice that soothes with perfect, perhaps irrational wisdom is the voice of the sincere seeker who has discovered a path to inner surrender. The voice that doesn't have a relationship of identification with, a posture of attachment to, a moral, judged position in a moral judged world, that is a voice that is internally free. To be actually capable of universal love and wisdom, which could heal us all, requires letting go of whatever you think you are. Good or bad, you are not that; you are the all encompassing light of consciousness, the unspeakable divine flame, the un limited.
My own path in this direction has been through forests of anxiety and sensitivity to negative emotion -- now I think perhaps partly due to dietary carbs, partly to nighttime hypoxia from apnea. Perhap it's my own unique metabolic physiology but symptoms include night-time nightmares and headaches within 24 or 36 hours of even a tablespoon of sugar. Meaning: always. From childhood until recently. Because I always was a sugar freak.
So you take a basically healthy person, twist up their emotional life with constant low-grade anxiety, and have him explore deeply and forever to try to figure out how to resolve it by cognitive and spiritual self-management, for 30 or 40 years, say: that's exactly me.
So my simple-carb metabolism has supported, nay, driven, a lifetime of seeking and finding inner peace. If such a person can do anything constructive with this, then hopefully, if you also suffer or have any kind of emotional or spiritual hunger or need, you can extract something useful from what I have learned and brought back for you. The positive lessons from my experience may be applicable beyond the dietary.
I have found regular, but always temporary, success by putting out sincere effort under a truly wise teacher following a valid, effective path, and it seems to me that the history of these small victories may aid others, perhaps also you.
Perhaps the story begins in college. My intent and focus was to discover the highest good, extracting what the West offers by way of wisdom (summary: Nietszche says, make up your own; William James says, if it works for you, it's true enough.) This is a call for introspection, at best, so then I went to the East, to India, found a Guru, Second Teacher, learned a bit about grace and humility and stillness, lived in his ashrams for a year or two.
I asked, he answered, told me, Study what interests you. My own highest good, my dharma, is a life of intellectual exploration in service to the world. And that's been my life since, modulo practical demands. Yes I feel licensed to develop inspired, even outrageous, opinions and ideas in seemingly every domain (why, don't you feel the same way?) from math to physics to molecular biology to vowels to humor to play. Yes an unlimited scope of interest, yet wherever the spotlight lands, intensely interesting. Perhaps not coincidentally, interest is itself anesthetic (releasing dopamine). But generally my hunger, what I want to do is, to figure out what's really going on, what's the truth. Proving it to other people is not always my forte', but I really want to know what the real truth is, in whatever I'm thinking about. I will noodle and re-think and fuss over a subject many times trying to get deeper and farther into it, to the dismay of loved ones who have heard each story so many times before. Perhaps I have a bit of Asperger's in me, but so, it is said, does any engineer or scientist. It's all good.
To me the most interesting thing for a suffering human being like we all are is actually the difficult-to-impossible task of emotional self-management. How to run the show in here, and maybe not suffer any more or quite as much, or better yet find meaning and happiness, or even better yet, find bliss and serenity. Given my own simple-carbohydrate-driven metabolic anxiety, that is to say, an unresolveable, eternal, medium-intense burden of constant misery and suffering, I might have some findings to share. That's what I'm trying to do here.
After India, I spent a couple decades slowly developing, you might say, baking, on my own spiritual path, by nibbling at Second Teacher's writings, a few sentences before bedtime every night, and here: It gave me anxiety and nightmare free sleep for decades. There is something about the right voice, which brings relief.
Have you noticed this? People have a voice. Most of the things I have to say and write come from a curious but somewhat urgent, pure intellectual voice of advocacy. Trying to figure stuff out, and hopefully bring people along with what I'm figuring out. Not soothing. No relief. Somehow my intellectual posture could never capture that mystical, right voice. Really, I could spend a lifetime and never be able to speak with the simple, saintly wisdom which would soothe myself, let alone others. Believe me I've tried it, the results are not pretty.
It seems this mystery of the miraculously wise voice is associated with (cessation of) self-attribution within the cognitive/emotional regulatory system. And self-attribution is a process which can seem hard to stop, if you're used to it.
Yet it is possible, I believe, and I think I can share how; anyhow these notes show, and share with you, some records of my own process, in hopes they may be a relief to you as well.
So the habit of my last 15 years or so has been: to spend a work week accumulating greater and greater desire for liberation; to go, burning with misery and desire, to a Friday night program in my meditation tradition; to chant for 20-45 minutes, to meditate for 20-45 minutes; thus prepared, to go up to the Teacher's place at the front of the room for the personal moment we call "Darshan"; to bow down shamelessly in the long stick salutation and mentally greet my teachers who I imagine to be, who I inwardly relate to as if, present there, in the form of their photographs, maybe a candle, maybe their shoes, and at that moment, to seek with all my capability to learn something that the Teacher can teach me now.
For many years the inner exchange has been me offering something to them. Cash in the box, to make it realistic, of course; would it pass the sniff test if you don't think your teachers are giving you something that is worth something? But offering something interiorly, something greater and greater, each time: whatever I could now imagine as being more and greater than the last time. My spiritual knowledge and growth, I have thought, could perhaps be measured by the nature of my inner offering. After mentally making this offering, I remained open inwardly, and without exception something would come to me, that was some deeper insight, some knowledge, some change in perspective, something apparently I had bought with my gift.
For example, I offered the embarrassment I felt on doing this full-body, on-the-floor, face-in-the-carpet, arms straight, hands together, gross violation of personal dignity and over-the-top signal of excessive subservience. Noone else does it, or even comments on it, clearly I get no points with anyone from it, but Who am I, trying-to-be-humble Tom, to be so vulgar and ostentatious in such a display? Anyway I thought Oh Guru, what shall I do, I offer you, I give you this feeling of embarrassment. And I got an answer right away: Don't worry, it is scripturally prescribed.(Guru Gita verse 28). That was easy. Rest in your duty.
I always get an answer right away. It's like, in that state, emotionally prepared by a good, long, devotional chant, intellectually prepared by a good long meditation, now before the Teacher's place, forehead on the carpet, my sincerity, preparation, intention, and openness somehow meets their wisdom and some alchemy occurs to bring me a deep and satisfying, wiser insight, something I could never invent in my usual mind.
Gradually I offered more and more. Some emotional stuckness. My relationship with a difficult person. My suffering of the week. That my intentions not be greedy. That my choices be selfless. Then, things with which I felt a sense of identification. For example, the wrinkled inner forehead of intense concentration, is a sensation a person can sense while concentrating hard on some task, and it is something I have felt as a sensory feedback indicator of the presence of my own most focussed, determined, striving concentration; I identified with that sensation of the wrinkled inner forehead. I offered that. And answer came, you are That (inclusive). To put it in words, Yes I am that, for sure, but that doesn't limit what you are, you are All.
Every time, some higher deeper truth and insight would come to me. I think sincerity and intensity of purpose found its appropriate context. I would go back to my seat, and sit and ponder what I learned and received and sometimes I would write it down. It seemed to me over time there was a theme of increasingly thorough and complete inner surrender, though that may not be apparent to a reader today. From a thick stack of those notes accumulated over those 15 years, during a health scare (resolved by a stent), realizing the significance, to me, of sharing this before I die, I typed them in here.
"Notes from (a forehead) on the ground" is an edited subset, aphorisms which could perhaps stand alone, or be understandable by others, mostly outside of the jargon of a certain Hindu-derived, Sanskritic tradition, which by the way I do not officially represent nor here advertise: find your own way. "Darshan Notes" is how I thought of them, and the unfiltered superset keeps that name. The new title, a riff on Dostoevsky, brings a wider resonance, while communicating the same profundity that I've felt, so it's for the wider audience.
You may wonder, What is your intention, Tom, with all this religiosity and God talk? Intellectually, I am actually an atheist. My Dad's Dad would say, I'm from Missouri, I'll believe it when I can see it. I'm with Grampa (Mom too, see #4, here). In the normal understanding of entities and relationships and existence and reality, there is actually and with certainty no god, let me just say it. No, it's not a matter of unknowability like the agnostics say, it's not possible-but-unknown whether there might be some kind of supernatural entity floating out there, invisible because maybe it's hiding behind a planet or some star, whether shaped like an old man with a beard or otherwise, listening to, much less delivering on, children's on-bent-knee and adults' however-expressed prayers, verbal emissions of grocery lists, like Santa in his workshop, somehow somewhere. No, there isn't any doubt. That's NOT true. Obviously.
Why do discussions of religious life and experience have to always walk tippy-toe around this question of the existence of God? Of course not. We all know what "exists" means, rocks exist, trees exist, and, obviously, God does not exist. I say let's get over being unable to say that.
Still, there's something else actually going on in this domain, and it's a different matter entirely from entities that might or might not exist and whether they do or don't. I think that what it is is the apparently unrelated but universal problem of emotional self-management, and that religious or spiritual practices, teachings, stories, experiences all have the primary and essential purpose of helping us with our own emotional self-management. So although upon entry to this subject, for scientific clarity, I do have to declare the baseline facts, it doesn't mean there isn't a baby in that bathwater to be pulled out.
And Second Teacher said, you have to be an idiot to be an atheist, and I won't argue with that, being happy to be rather on the dumb side in many ways, what can I do? Nothing in these Notes is authoritative or intended as other than personal, subjective, and observational, and actually as data for scientists (current theory here). I hope you are your own kind of scientist, seeking truth and Truth in your own way, coming from where you come from, with the abilities and limitations that you have, just as I come from some place with some abilities and some limitations. Seeking truth that is true enough, and with it relief, an end to the inner suffering.
So I offer these notes to you, so maybe you don't have to mentally suffer quite as much or as long as someone like me, and maybe you can find and hold onto some of the happiness I have also touched in these years, decades, of seeking, and with my forehead on the ground, of finding.
Bless you; may you suffer as little as possible, may you find great, true happiness, irrational bliss and serenity, effortlessly, may you know and rest in your own Self.