The Day I Forgot How to Think

I was 22. I was in a strange place in my life and in my mind. Very little was making any sense anymore. I'd been on an 11 year 'spiritual trip' to find myself and I was staring a giant "fuck you" sign that was inescapable. I'd immersed myself in contemplating the ancients and the contemporaries. I'd studied western philosophy until it had begun to curdle my brain. I had banged my head against the Bhagvad Gita, the Upanishads, the vedanta  and the Buddhist texts in futility sensing a depth of truth somewhere but in the end always failing to grasp that one elusive nugget. I had begun practicing meditation when I was only 12 and in a few years was experiencing all kinds of kundalini experiences. There were days when I would sit down to meditate and get up only 24 hours later. 3 or 4 hour sessions were the more common norm. But no matter what I tried or did or studied or attempted to grasp, it always eluded me. In the end it always came right back to this 'me' in the room and I couldn't escape him no matter how powerful the meditation or how profound the intellectual rationalization. This 'me' became my tormentor, my slavedriver and my unavoidable shadow. I fell into deeply depressive phases for a number of years which would come and go like the ebb and flow of a tide. But on one particular day, when I was 22, a strange shift began to occur.

I was at my worst. I had fallen into a depressive funk more consuming than any prior. My dad was visiting my sister and I at the time and he insisted we take a day trip to Toronto's Center Island. After much complaining on my part they finally convinced me that getting out in the city on a warm summer day would do me a world of good. It didn't. By the time we had taken the ferry and arrived at the Island I found myself wishing I'd never agreed. Still I felt terrible that I was ruining their day for them. So we decided to go separate ways for a few hours and meet up when it was time to go. I made my way down to the Center Island Beach where a long wooden pier extends about 100 metres into the lake. Finding a bench on the pier I sat down exhausted. The sky was cloudless and the lake a beautiful shade of blue. Sitting there gazing out at the lake, immersed in a deep sense of despair and helplessness, I fell into a quiet meditation. People came and people went. A family of chinese tourists even posed around me and snapped pictures. But I didn't care. I was done. I felt so completely beaten and defeated by everything. My will was dead.

When my dad and sister found me, I was still sitting there, I hadn't moved. 4 hours had passed and my skin had turned black in the sun. I told them that I was extremely tired and that I needed to go home. I barely made it back before the fatigue overtook me. I passed out and slept for over 18 hours....

I awoke to a strange gushing sound. It was everywhere - around me, in me. I could still hear ambient sounds like the birds outside my window and the traffic in the streets but all that was in the background. In the foreground of my awareness was this gushing static almost like a white noise. I rolled out of bed and stepped on to the balcony and my mouth literally dropped. Everything was alive. Everything was vibrant. Everything reverberated with and emanated energy. It was like I was seeing the world for the very first time. Sounds were tantalising: each one had its own unique vibration and if I really allowed myself to listen, each sound could take me on a journey of its own. For hours I just stood on that balcony gaping in wonder at what we would normally consider the most mundane things - a fire hydrant, a traffic light, a bird in a tree, a car driving by. But to me it was so miraculous that it was all even happening that I was literally just doing a double take after a double take after a double take endlessly.

At some point, I think I received a phone call from my dad asking when we were going to meet. That's when I realized that up until that point not a single thought had even entered my mind. Now, as my father spoke to me on the phone, I found myself losing focus on the content of the conversation constantly. Instead, my awareness was more interested in the sound of his voice, the timber, the depth, the intonations and the impressions. The words were just sounds and sometimes I would tune in but then tune out again. After some confusion on my dad's side I told him what was happening. He listened very patiently and he understood. Strangely enough, he said he had read a book on this just recently. He wanted me to read it. It was "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. He told me that I had experienced a spiritual awakening. I didn't understand at the time. But I read the book and then I understood.

I remained in that state of emptiness for 4 months after. Thoughts came only when I saw the value in having them. Otherwise they left me alone. That incessant mental chatter that I had experienced since I was a child was now gone. With no means of refering to myself any longer I became free of the need to be anyone. When I met people I felt a genuine joy and sense of compassion for them not for who they portrayed themselves to be but for who they really were which was no separate that my self. Nature too, trees especially became great spiritual teachers. But the Lake remained my master. I visited her often to pay homage for what she had shown me. That state of child-like wonderment, that felt connection with everything living or inanimate and most importantly the absence of a self identity. That was the greatest freedom.

After 4 months the intensity began to fade. Thoughts began to creep in more and more and before I knew it I was back to being me again with all the neuroses and the complaints and the wants and the desires to find myself. That was an irony that was hard to understand. But something had changed. A lot had been dismantled, and when my psyche reassembled itself it did so with a lot more missing pieces and holes. So I could never again be so completely convinced of the reality of my own mind.

At 27 it happened again. Again lasting for almost 4 months. But this time it was my heart that expanded and expanded until it finally exploded like a dying star in a supernova. Whereas the first experience was categorized by a deep pervading silence, this one was one of sheer felt compassion. Everything I saw from a beautiful flower to a newspaper fluttering in the wind to a dog taking a leak, filled my whole being with so much joy and gratitude for life that I would burst into tears and just repeat the words "thank you". The gratitude was utter and immense.  I cried a lot in those months and so i kept to myself in order not to freak people out. But that also eventually passed. Again my psyche restructered but now the holes were obvious. I never felt suffering again the way I used to.

Last month a shift happened. It was not a monumental one like the previous two. It didnt have any fireworks or feelings of wow. It happened while I was at the computer. It was a split second feeling of "oh". In that one momentary shift I realized that now there is no turning back.

The Reality of Opinion (an opinion on reality)

Where do opinions come from? We have so many of them. We're surrounded by them. These opinions about ourselves, about each other, about people we've never met, about people who no longer exist, about the world we live in. Opinions about what the world should look like, about what we should look like, about what other people should look like. About what we should do, about the right thing to do, about what we shouldn't do and about what should be stopped from being done.

Why do we have opinions? Why do we place so much value on them? People who have strong opinions on subjects, especially if they are important ones like war, oppression, politics or human rights, are deemed worthy of at least a certain degree of consideration even if their opinions do not resonate with the common consensus. Yet those who don't hold opinions are often looked at with a sort of pity or disdain or not even noticed at all, much like a homeless man sitting in the midst of a busy street. "Sitting on the fence" is one of the biggest taboos in our society.

But most essentially, what is an opinion? Its an idea, a perspective, a hypothesis on reality at best. Its a way in which we overlay reality with a certain flavor of ourselves.

Opinions are essentially about feeling comfortable with reality. Its our way of knowing without really 'knowing'. Its our way of bridging the gap between reality and possibility, between the known and the unknown. Its our way of feeling useful and meaningful. Reality happens the way it does without our permission. Famine happens, war happens, death happens, shit happens. Also joy happens, peace happens, freedom happens, good things happen. But even all that is just an opinion. The only reality is that Life happens in all its shapes and forms without reason, without permission, without qualification. Opinions create an illusion of control. Because now we can 'pretend' we know, and if we know, well then we can do something about it.

Many argue that a strong opinion is a necessary precursor to definitive action. That you must feel strongly about  something to affect change and so forth. In order to take a stand is it necessary to take a mental stand or an ideological stand? In fact, more often than not it seems to work the other way around. That strong opinion stands in the way of definitive long lasting change. The kind of change opinion and ideology affects is not real change, not long lasting transformational change. Its more superficial. A same shit different day sort of mask.

Change is not an ideology its a law of Life. Everything changes and nothing can escape this reality. You, I and the world are changing as we speak. We are aging right now, our cells are dying and regenerating, millions of creatures are perishing and million others being born. Not one single inch of the Universe is static as we speak. Even a human body at rest is a warzone of millions of cells battling bacteria, tissues regenerating and vital communications happening between the various nervous centers.And as you read this, a million stars are dying and a million others being born and countless galaxies are collapsing unto themselves.

Witnessed through the narrow keyhole that is the individual's perception, reality is something we can perceive, breakdown, analyze and address. From this perspective war is evil, fitness is key, cancer is an enemy, organic food is our salvation, pedophiles deserve no sympathy, everyone should vote, high self esteem trumps low self esteem, patriotism is a virtue etc. We slice and dice our experience of Life as we go along craving the tasty bits and balking at the bitter ones. At the very very least we all are expected to formulate our opinions of right and wrong, good and bad. We believe this sort of distinction is the basis of civilized society.

There is a perspective however that seeks to align itself more closely with reality than opinion. This perspective that I'm speaking of is not apathetic, nor devoid of emotion or passion. This perspective doesn't seek to divorce itself from the "evils of the world", it doesn't seek to isolate or distance or detach. This perspective sees the world as a single complex organism and Life as a flux of energy. From this perspective, Life is. Plain and simple. It doesn't qualify any further because it realizes its own limitations to fully grasp the totality.

This perspective recognizes that the individual is only a single infinitesimal aspect of the whole. Yet, it also sees that the individual embodies the potentiality of the whole, much like a single seed in a fruit on a tree contains the potentiality of an entire tree within it. This perspective grasps that the individual is not an isolated entity but rather an instance of infinite circumstances, energies and matter coinciding at a single moment, for a single moment.

It sees that everything is hopelessly intertwined. That birth brings death but also death brings birth. That oppression leads to freedom until freedom turns into oppression. It sees people put more stock in their ideas and beliefs than in realities - as a result they live in memories past and future aspirations. It sees that we've convinced ourselves that life is a survival game, that happiness is some future state, that people are inherently untrustworthy and that the planet we live on belongs to us - to destroy or save as we deem fit.

But most essentially this perspective admits that thoughts and ideas, from the loftiest to the most base, are only figments of imagination. All our beliefs, our opinions and who we think we are is the stuff of dreams.

This perspective doesn't hold on to opinions strongly and seldom feels the need to enforce its will. Although many people dismiss it as a dithering, an indecisiveness or a "sitting on the fence" it is quite the opposite. Consider the metaphor of a tightrope walker traversing a line hundreds of feet in the air. On one side lies a dark chasm which contains all the base traits of evil, apathy, lethargy, ignorance, hate etc, On the other lies the equally dark chasm of virtue, goodness, compassion, righteousness. Separating these two is the fine line of reality that the tightrope walker traverses one step at a time with utmost attention. If his attention wanders towards the chasm of virtue and he begin to think himself virtuous he falls, and vice versa if he identifies with a vice, he falls. Each fall in the end is only a figment of his imagination because when he snaps back to reality, there is only the tightrope and the one step he is taking.

This is a perspective that is intensely open and prepared to respond to whatever reality presents. It is capable of action that is unmotivated by agenda and compassion that doesn't serve some self purpose. It is a perspective that knows that it can never really know and it is at peace with that. While opinions may exist it does not give its allegiance to these opinions allowing them to exist freely within the space of its own awareness.

Without Love

(Written in the Winter of 2007)

Without love -

Those moments, they seemed so strange to me.

The night poured forth her melancholy

Into a despairing heart deprived

Of all that which it had ever strived

For, and thinking that it had attained,

Awoke one day to find naught remained

But the heart-shaped shell that had survived.

And without love -

Dreams turned into petty ambition,

That faithless void, my soul’s condition,

The poison they call Reality,

My drug of choice it now came to be.

And for many years, thus afflicted,

My ailing heart remained, restricted

By all reality couldn’t see.

Yet without love -

I rose one dawn to the morning air

Steeped, though I was, in a cold despair

The rays of a red sun warmed my breast

I felt something stir within my chest

And then, as I watched the sun emerge

My heart burst forth with a giant surge

Of love. I knew, then, that I was blessed.

With love -

Life became, once more, a gentle dream

And I, the dreamer, I’d always been.

On a journey new, did I begin,

A life in service of Man, my kin,

For a voice now whispered from above,

And as I listened, I learned that love

Is found not without, but from within.

~ shi-bu

The Song Without a Sound

(Written in the Spring of 2006)

Last night I woke up from a dream

And watched the Moonlight softly stream

In, streaks of silver silence all around.

And with her silent melody

The silver Moon, She beckoned me

To listen to the Song Without a Sound.

And lying there I knew the day

Had come when it was time to say

Farewell and to prepare myself for death.

A Moonbeam fell across my face

A gentle kiss of Moonlight grace

I closed my eyes and took a final breath.

And as the Moon began to sing

I felt the world and everything

Inside, begin to fade and disappear.

Till naught remained but Her and I

Suspended in a starlit sky

As She whispered silver secrets in my ear.

Enchanted, in Her spell I lay

And felt my soul being whisked away

To places that my eyes would never see.

We danced together through the night

On winged feet that took to flight

For distant dreams beyond Infinity.

~ shi-bu