About 3:40 Levine starts talking about the traditional Buddhist paths to surrender. And he talks about surrender near the end, but for my own purposes I would call it “the end of continual struggle with a self sustaining victory”.
The four means he discusses are ecstatic sex, long term meditation, death (e.g. the Tibetan Book of the Dead and what might be called “Death Yoga”), and trauma.
Pondering this, and my own experience, and my INTERPRETATION of my own experience, I was wondering tonight if trauma could not just be a part of a spiritual path, but an INTEGRAL part of it, a planned part of it, a chosen suffering which was a necessary precondition for creating the struggle and the strength to do and become interesting.
What if people have horrible things done to them do so as a matter of a life plan which is intended to point them in the direction of Enlightenment, of a break from the compulsive attachment to this world, this way, this place, this time?
What, I was wondering, is WONDERFUL about feeling unloved, abandoned, and under constant emotional attack?
It is a bit different, I suppose. It creates what we might call after Churchill the “Solitary Tree” mindset and aptitude. It forces creativity. Over some time horizon it creates a capacity for the recognition from one’s own experience the suffering of others. I have felt what most people have felt. I can relate on some level to most of the people I meet on an empathetic level.
It creates grit. Nobody who is worth a shit is without courage and determination. Those qualities can come in many forms, and for some go unrecognized. But those with those qualities, I feel, recognize their own.
I am someone capable of jumping into the abyss. I am not sure what to expect, but it is far from clear to me that the abyss can take from me more than I can take from it, or that I have more to fear from it than it has to fear from me.
Can one take nothingness from nothingness? Is this not the definition of creation?
Few thoughts. I’ve had a few, but am far from drunk. I’m now actually going to go hit my journal.