November 15, 2024

 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 done with it. No, you have to experience the death over and over and over before the needle moves a little.


It’s similar with sanity. My attachment to being sane and fear of losing my sanity is incredibly deep and brings up a huge amount of resistance. I have both psychodynamic (i.e., personal history) and phenomenological (i.e., baked into having an ego structure) reasons for this.


On the psychodynamic side, I suffered severe depression as a child of four and needed to be hospitalized for a couple weeks. During that time and possibly before it, I’m pretty sure I lost touch with reality. This really freaked me out but it freaked out my mother even more. Because she relied on me for her own stability, losing my mind threatened my very existence: I needed her to be well so she could take care of me and, if I went crazy, she could not do that. Thus, it was in my best interest to remain sane.


There have been various times during my life when I’ve lost touch with my sanity, or maybe just come close. (I’m not sure if I ever lost it as badly as when I was Age Four but even coming close to doing so was enough to cause severe distress.) These times haunt me and I have a deep fear of repeating those experiences. It was quite literally worse than death of my body.


I’m sure most people would probably regard losing their life as worse than losing their sanity but I am no such person. As a child, I would have preferred to simply die because it was a way out. Going insane was not a way out, it was quite simply destruction without an escape. It’s no wonder I cling to it so desperately.


My need to be sane goes back beyond this current human lifetime. In both of the other lifetimes I remember, it was critical and I experienced times when I lost it. When I was Lucas (my name for the boy who was in love with Griffin), I’m pretty sure I had epilepsy which is kind of like losing one’s sanity. When I would have a seizure, I was out of it but I remember keenly awakening from a seizure and seeing how unbearable it was for Griffin to witness. He was my caretaker and prided himself in looking after me, shielding me from difficulties but he could do nothing to prevent the seizures. He was powerless to help and, more than that, he loved me so much that it killed him to see me suffer. Seeing how devastated he was had a really profound impact on me.


And when I was an orphaned child in the other lifetime and my brother gave me over to the monastery, I’m pretty sure that I lost it then, too. I feel like that lifetime was a long stretch of depression and listlessness punctuated by bouts of insanity. It was a really awful existence on so many levels but my deteriorating mental health made it pure hell.


On the phenomenological side, my mind is part of my ego and ego needs to maintain its structural integrity. It does this by clamping down and holding on tight. Resistance, basically, that is manifested by rigidity in the body. Even if I didn’t have issues from my personal history with sanity, I would still resist letting go of it for purely egoic reasons.


Given all of this, it’s no surprise that I have such an attachment to staying sane no matter what. Sitting during meditation and having the Absolute arise in my experience and put pressure on this attachment has been difficult. I can feel myself contracting in the center of my chest, trying to screw a wound shut to prevent it from opening and subjecting me to the loss of control that comes with losing my sanity. 


What can I do but sit with it? I don’t take a position one way or the other. I let it be and am gently curious about the contraction and resistance and the reasons behind it but I don’t try to make it go away. Gradually, it has been relaxing but I’m sure there is a lot left to see yet. 


Yesterday morning after sitting with the resistance, I understood finally that Being/True Nature/God is innately sane. By being Being, by being the Pearl, we are innately attuned to Reality which is by its very nature sane. Reality is not crazy, although it includes insanity. When one is one with True Nature, though, one sees clearly what is sane and what is not. It takes no effort. You don’t have to think about it or puzzle it out. It just is.


I was riding my bike to work (a 20-mile journey over mostly dirt roads) and enjoying the peaceful beauty and solitude when I experienced the startling clarity of Being. It was like crystal clear honey pouring down through the crown of my head and illuminating everything with precision. Everything was clarity, everything was luminous, everything was light. And this light had substance meaning it had heft. It wasn’t something that could be blown away or disturbed. It was simply what it was. You can’t get more basic than that.


This was a gently corrective (and beautiful) experience. And it was effortless. I didn’t have to do anything to make it happen, nor did I have to do anything to make it continue. This is key. And, while it was important, I know that I will need to experience a lot more of this clarity before I come to trust it completely. Right now, I still believe that I have to work constantly to hold onto sanity. It’s exhausting and I’m ready to give up the effort.


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