Rather, it feels to me like I have used this as a crutch, and it is time to put that crutch away. That this process will necessarily be difficult and painful in no respect means it should not be done. I have to learn to walk, either again, or more likely for the first time.
Still, I do continue to want to share some ideas from time to time, and here is one.
A few days ago I was doing my Kum Nye practice after watching Jim Jarmusch’s “Mystery Train”, which is billed as a comedy, but which is quite serious in its own way. He deals continually with outsiders, with qualitative outliers, with people external to whatever system they find themselves in.
And for me there is an affect to this sense of rootlessness. I remember the feeling-tones of the 1980’s, the sense of fear, the emergence of punk rock, the wondering what is or could be next. These feelings were very much on the cultural surface, or so it seemed to me.
They seem now to have gone underground, but I think if you look at the fierceness with which leftists cling to their falsified religion, or the attendance numbers of horror films, what I think we will find is that we have almost collectively decided not to talk about certain things, to not feel certain things openly, to not go too deep.
And yet there is this feeling current which remains, and perhaps grows stronger for not having been consciously seen, not consciously felt. I feel it. I sense it.
And it occurred to me that my meditations have to include this cultural element, this “verworfenheit”, this anomie and nameless fear.
And then it occurred to me that ALL genuine spiritual paths have to go through a trackless place, where all the old signifiers fall away, where there is no form, there are no reference points, where there is a sense of universal and complete loss, and sense of being lost. “The dark night of the soul”, as I think St. John of the Cross called it.
The Buddha had to traverse modernity. So did Jesus, and Lao Tze. Nothing has changed, really, except the scale of the problem.
In the Buddha’s time, society was organized around tribes and clans and families. When he left his home, he was a nobody to everybody. When he sat under the tree and felt alone and abandoned, confused, hungry, and fearful, nobody comforted him.
The task of deep growth is indeed a daunting one. But it is all the more magnificent for it. Thank God it is not too easy. All of us have been given the chance at a great, noble victory.