Imaginal Journeys in the Underworld

  The issue that’s been arising for me over the past couple of weeks has to do with my desperate attachment to sanity. I cling to my sanity with a sense of desperation, betraying my belief that my own mind is the source of sanity, rather than Being. This is similar to my mistaken belief that life arises from the physical body and that the ego self is the source of action. Life doesn’t arise from the body and the ego is not the real doer. Likewise, sanity does not originate from my mind. Still, this is a deep-seated belief, one that I hold onto with a passion infused with terror. The Absolute causes us to confront all of our attachments. In the past thirty years of doing spiritual work, I’d experienced many, many, many kinds of death of attachment. Ego death, death of my attachment to my body, death of my attachment to life, death of my attachment to my object relations, instinctual pleasures, etc. Of course, you don’t just experience a death of an attachment once and then you’re do...

  I spent much of the meditation teaching myself not to resist the darkness that was consuming my consciousness. It wasn’t all that different from other kinds of darkness I’ve encountered on these journeys but it triggered an instinctual fear in me that harkened back to my very early childhood. I was always afraid of the dark when I was growing up. I think this is because of my inner experience, that of being surrounded by a ravenous darkness filled with unseen and unspeakable things. It terrified me. I equate it with the stark and absolute isolation I experienced, born into a family of people who were entirely blind to their inner nature. I faced an unhappy choice: Either become like them and enter into a life of suffering or resist and be consumed by darkness. Needless to say, it wasn’t much of a choice. What infant/toddler could tolerate being devoured by darkness? It was either insanity or depression and I chose depression. Depression because that was what joining the so-called...

  I’ve been aware of the weight of my superego lately and it reminds me that it’s not just my own but one that’s been inherited from past generations, most recently my father and mother but they received it from their forebears as well. I feel like the voice of mental commentary in my head is mostly my superego and I’m growing tired of its chatter. It thinks it's so witty! Well, it feel old and trite to me. I like meditation and other times like during physical activity when it disappears and there is nothing but silence. Sitting during meditation today, I held the weight of the superego in a light but curious fashion, not trying to do anything to it other than invite understanding. This is the essence of inquiry and it never fails. What is revealed is almost always unexpected, yet it also makes sense.  I see my habitual, cynical, witty persona as being informed by my superego. It is characterized by disdainful, distancing, acerbic and sardonic thoughts. There is a weariness t...