The Space Between

I leave my friend and begin the drive back to Laurelwood, feeling a numb sense of displeasure.  Seeing the familiar hills and buildings, my core constricts in resistance.  I pull my purchases for the pilgrimage to India from my trunk with resignation.  Thoughts begin drip-dropping around me of the week I face up on the Genie boom with the paint sprayer, heavy roller, tedious hours of scraping and caulking and sweating.  I imagine myself slinking into the café not wanting to make eye contact.  I try to picture my future here – a forced cheerfulness to earn my keep by enticing others to join us – and everything feels like the familiar restriction of a caccoon I have outgrown.

Then the sensation of the podcast I had listened to on my drive gently surfaces.  I am not my thoughts.  My thoughts belong to the legion of egos in me that must distinguish themselves to survive.  They thrive on creating enemies, opinions, preferences, anything that defines me as what I am not.  And if I believe that what they is all that I am, I am destined to a vulnerable existence – cut off, competing to survive, lonely and forgotten.

I admit that I cling to my story as who I am – my resume, my Linked In profile, this blog.  I have written about the power we all have to change the story we tell about the events in our lives, but I feel embarrassed that after years of meditation and months living in this community, I had completely forgotten about self-observation, about witness consciousness, until someone slipped me a copy of The Power of Now, and I curled up with it on my bed and drank a long, pure pull of exactly what my soul has been longing for.  I have antagonized this community, I have fed anxiety over the pilgrimage, I worry about my financial future, I analyze the power out of my mystical experiences, and I rage against the qualities in the men I meet and above all in myself that deny me the experience of sustained intimacy.  I see service as exploitation, I see prayer as subjugation, I see my mind as my greatest asset and most reliable tool for survival.  I, I, I.

All of this is true, of course, but only at the densest level of existence.  My whole life I have been mysteriously drawn to wisps of another world.  The poem “Silence” that moved me so deeply as a teen that I transcribed it by hand and kept it by my bed for years.  The Dave Mathews song about “the space between”, whose lyrics all seemed wrong, but whose title evoked a sense of homecoming.  Sandra Maitri’s analysis of how our self-concept develops in response to the trauma of separation from the divine, and provides a unique map to uncovering our truest self.  Chellis Glendinning’s portrait of the development of civilization away from a oneness with nature towards agriculture, bureaucracy, and technology that pit us increasingly against it, each other, and ourselves.  And now Eckhart Tolle’s description in The New Earth of the ego’s development as we humans explored our unique level of consciousness, and its inevitable dissolution as we find our way back to universal consciousness.  Gnosis and Ananda share the teaching that forces were created to bind us to this earth because otherwise we never would have stayed, and now that it is time to ascend, we have forgotten the abundant, all-nourishing beauty of our true selves, that which lies behind “yours”, “mine”, “us”, and “them”.

I am so afraid to let go because I will lose the lie that has kept me safe in a world of conflict and contrast: that even if no one else can care for me, I can care for myself.  The only story I tell about my life that is useful to my soul is that, left to my own devices, I am a tremendously poor caretaker of my spirit.  I obsess, I blame, I fantasize, I brag, I criticize, and I dream beautiful dreams of how perfect everything would be if it were all the way I want it to be.  All of the nurturing I have received, and all of the true inspiration and wisdom, has come from the space between, the space when I stopped and let something else through, especially when I was with someone else who did the same.

There is nothing more I want from the world.  I ache to share the experience with others, but if I cannot, I will seek it alone.  I aspire to use my mind as it was intended – as a tool to move me from where I am to where my heart and spirit know they need to be.  The rest of the time, I will do what I can to coax my mind to stand down, so I can simply become aware of what in me is watching my life.  In those moments, everything is dazzling.  And complete.  There is nothing I can obtain or experience in this world that brings me anything I don’t already have.  I accept the challenge to continually seek this experience in all the moments in which I believe it cannot be found – in heart-break, beside cruelty, up in the boom with vaporized paint coating my lungs, submerged in sadness, inflamed with infatuation, consumed by fear, abraded by jealousy.  How can the space between bring me home – to the experience I believe so many have called “finding god”?  How can I learn to live there more often and more deeply – in what I believe so many have called “enlightenment”?

My mind does not like these ideas one bit.  It does not like this place that shows me myself and leaves me alone with my pain.  It does not like the 2+ hours a day of sitting in silence.  It loathes spending my savings to do under-staffed, inefficient labor.  And it rages against the thought of walking dirty streets to a squat toilet, rumbling along a cliff’s edge with no proper sleep, living on rice and dahl, and using mouthwash in the shower to ward off microbes – and then coming home broke and unemployed.  But my soul is sighing relief over my reluctant surrender.  I know it because the one place I find nourishment is in silence.  Finally, I am becoming still and present, watching the sadness and resistance with new serenity, and allowing the grief and fear to tear through me in a more complete and cleansing way.  I am turning towards that space as my truest self and companion, understanding that if all I have is my mind, my circumstances will be intolerable.  I am being humbled.  I am learning faith.  And I am braving my body’s worst fears to root into the ancient, sacred seat of humanity, bathe in the Ganges, and meditate in Himalayan caves.

Nothing that lives goes quietly to its death.  But what was born to serve my awareness in navigating this world has become its oppressor.  As long as I believe my obstacle is these people, this place, this society, or even myself, I will remain frustrated and trapped.  As Eckhart Tolle says, we left Eden when we tasted the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.  Our bliss ended when we gained the capacity to judge “this” as better than “that”.  I embrace India with an intention to slip into what is, let it dazzle me with disorientation, and taste an ancient world that has long sought freedom in its rightful place: the space between.

Nancy

“In Ganges, woods, Himalayan caves, where men dream god.  I am hallowed, I am hallowed, my body touched that sod.” – From “My India” by Paramahansa Yogananda (the final words he spoke before leaving his body)