Emptiness for Dummies: A Do-It-Yourself Cosmology
St. Charles County, MO
Disclaimer: I don't endorse any philosophy, practice or religious system. Human systems are flawed, and their implementation leads to cruelty and bloodshed. I'm non-spiritual but recognize those aspects of religious practices that science has found to be beneficial, like meditation. Below are my conclusions from lifelong, self-directed study. Your conclusions may vary.
After four years of practicing meditation for thirty minutes a day, I awoke one morning with the most intense feelings of peace and joy I had ever known and probably will ever know. It was like a flash of energy akin to the one that scientists in recent nuclear fusion experiments observed; It was a tiny glint of brilliant light, a moment with fathomless but still unrealized potential.
Mega blasts of dopamine and endorphins flooded my pleasure centers and I felt like I wasn't on Earth for somewhere between two and ten minutes, but my recollection of time is spotty. I bathed in outer and inner light as the morning sun poured through the window. It was and is my only experience of true serenity. I recognized my own insignificance and it came as a relief. The pressure is off when you're not the center of the universe.
I had read about the state of samadhi, a feeling of seemingly unattainable bliss. Did I experience it? But how? People have practiced and contorted and struggle to reach that state their entire lives, climbing mountains and crossing deserts searching for self knowledge. I had crossed deserts and climbed mountains in search of an understanding of the universe. How did I get there in four years?
That morning I felt completely free from attachments and desires. I took comfort in the idea that there was a whole universe that functioned whether or not I was aware of or understood it. I felt open and aware. I understood that I wasn't in charge of everything. The universe and I were in the shared process of becoming. The feeling was temporary, but the neural pathways forged by those fleeting moments of lucidity and the thought processes they kickstarted, are still there influencing how I think and what I do.
I was raised as a Catholic, although I managed to avoid a religious education. After I got through first communion in a slammin' polyester leisure suit with big floppy pockets for my rosary beads [photo redacted]. I didn't have to go to "Thursday school" anymore, which was two more hours of school after school which was a complete bummer. I was too weird and asked a lot of questions. I didn't believe or understand any of it, and the nuns didn't seem to want me there.
My grandmother, who worked and lodged at a hotel nearby in the Poconos, also kept a bedroom at my aunt's house where I used to sleep when we went to Pennsylvania to visit. She had some glow-in-the-dark rosary beads on the headboard and, affixed to the wall, was a small wooden cross with a glow-in-the-dark Jesus Christ prostrate but just floating there on the wall. When the lights went out, it certainly scared the bejesus out of me. It was supposed to be comforting, but to me, who craved to be alone, it was disquieting. According to adults, God, Jesus, scores of saints and assorted angels, the Devil, scores of assorted demons, all of your dead relatives, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus and Big Brother were all watching and waiting for you to fuck up. No pressure, though. Nighty night!
I figured it was a good idea to stay out of both God's and Satan's way (not to mention the priests). My parents misguidedly made me go to church when I was in high school until I was eighteen, which predictably enough made me loathe it and everything associated with it. But it did make me curious about what other people believed, after high school, I started reading about world religions.
The first time I heard of meditation was in 1977 when I read about TM and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in a book about the Beatles. That's significant because the most famous band in the world introduced countless millions in the west to Indian music and culture through George Harrison's songs, "Love to You", "Within You, Without You" and "The Inner Light". I really liked "Within You, Without You", especially the sound of the tabla drifting in and out of different time signatures.
The Beatles needed some headspace in a heady time. They sought an alternative to the endless party and looked inward after their manager Brian Epstein was found dead in his apartment in 1967. They seemed to find some peace, but the association with the famous yogi to the pop stars would turn famously sour during their trip to India the following year. Still, whenever I heard Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr refer to meditation in interviews, they said it was helpful and that they continued to meditate when they needed it because you can do it anywhere. I noted that and put it in my kid brain to bake for about eight more years. I didn't know any gurus in my town and I would have benefitted greatly from a practice like that.
It wasn't until I moved to Missouri as a teenager that I encountered the idea of meditation again. A teacher named Gene Weathers, a genuinely brilliant guy who, like me, was visually impaired. He taught the program for "gifted" students in my new high school. I was too much of an academic underachiever to be in that group officially, but Gene recognized that I was bright and arranged for me to attend his class during my study hall period. I met friends I could talk to there and I felt a sense of community in my new home.
He said, "You guys have got brains and it's my job to teach you how to live with them." He taught us mind relaxation and imagery techniques. This was brilliant mentoring for teenagers whose brains generally idled a little fast and made it difficult to relax. I needed to learn how to not be distracted by the whirring, buzzing and crackling in my head when I came to rest. I had to learn to be in the moment, which was a challenge. Only when engaged with music did I live completely in the moment. I read a lot of Hesse, Vonnegut, sci-fi, jazz magazines and a bit of anthropology.
He said to me, "Anger will eat you up." He was referring to living with partial sight. I was a teen in a mental health crisis at the time and anxious to start life anew. But this idea of his would rattle around in my head like a little brass bead until it found the little hole in the middle that leads to self knowledge. It routinely slips out and the process begins again. Now I know that succumbing to anger consumes energy that you need to function in life.
He also said, "When in doubt, defer judgement. And then, defer judgement. And then, defer judgement."
I joined a well-known sect of Buddhism and I practiced it for a few years. I chanted and learned a lot from the experience, but there was a lot of magical thinking and a culty vibe from the organization and its members that I didn't care for. The chanting was okay, but there was too much structure and sentiment for me. I thought I needed that, but I found out that I really didn't. I liked the incense and the polished wooden beads. I'm not really a joiner.
Hardships in my life, including the 2008 financial crisis, led me to meditate regularly while I figured out what to do with my life next. I learned how to do it by going to the library and reading books. Among the ones I really liked were by Jack Kornfield and Swami Vivekananda. The former is a present-day Buddhist, professor and author of many books about Buddhism that taught me about Buddhist thought and practice, and the latter a 19th century Hindu monk and philosopher who stressed tolerance of all religious views and was a skilled communicator of ideas. I liked his open mind and positive attitude. My big take away from that period is “Suffering is caused by desire; if you desire less, you suffer less. And we’re miserable because we take refuge in impermanent things, which makes us more miserable.” I wanted to free myself from the prison of ego that perpetuates my ability to bullshit myself.
I tried different kinds of meditation, with a mantra and without, with a god and without. I contemplated emptiness and impermanence as Zen Buddhists do, which I liked. I sometimes devoted entire days to meditating. After a while, I started to feel different. I began to renounce attachments to behaviors, practices and beliefs and to rid myself of illusions. I strove to find objectivity and truth. I shed myself of unreasonable desires and found like a little less complicated and onerous. I earnestly sought to look beyond my likes and dislikes and prejudices to experience things as they are. This is the closest I get to spirituality.
In my patchwork cosmology, I envisioned not a dualistic, omnipresent being who is either utterly detached from human affairs or your best friend, but rather the equation that represents the unifying theory of the universe that physicists and astronomers have sought for centuries. I came to the conclusion it was a good bet that scientists will crack the code. In fact, they're getting closer every day (and let's hope they find it before humanity destroys itself). The universal principle idea has a much better chance of being provable, knowable, objective truth. Consciousness and our sense of self are likely a biochemical phenomenon. These ideas fill me with a sense of wonder, not fear. As long as I have the capacity to learn, I need not despair.
Something in me opened up. Over the next few years, I shed my attachment to eating unhealthy food, drinking alcohol and using tobacco. I stopped participating in 98% of popular culture. I read more books through self-directed study. I learned new skills and created more and more new music. I conquered fears, created more challenges for myself and overcame obstacles. I learned to manage a feeling of self-consciousness that is Kryptonite to the creative process. I'm still on the same path, seeking the middle way between extremes.
I don't meditate at the moment, but I can do it whenever I need or want to. Am I happy? Sometimes, which in my book is pretty good. I'll take it where I can get it, but that's not the objective of life for me. I want to enjoy what there is to enjoy and suffer what there is to suffer without getting too focused or attached to temporary physical and emotional states. It's how I stay sane, or at least mostly sane, anyway.
After my experience, I realized that you can't just keep meditating expecting to recapture a moment like that. Transcendent moments can't be conjured up or aimed for. If you're just trying to recapture that feeling, you've missed the point. Feelings of happiness and joy are wonderful, but they are also fleeting and temporary. Like everything else, happiness (indeed, any emotion) is a transitory state so don't get too attached to things along the way or you may suffer. Nothing stays the same, so engage with what's happening here and now. Life must be about finding meaning in the here and now.