Circling the drain

 

Fifty years ago, I was lost.  I had been led into life choices that were against my best interests, but at age 17 I had no self-empowerment.  I did as I was told, or as I imagined was expected of me. 

I broke free, and then stumbled around for a couple of years..now what?  As it so happens, the crowd I fell into vibrated with one answer.  Go to India, if you want your life to change.  You will never be the same.

Each of us is led by our circumstances.  Occasionally, we suss that things are awry and muster up courage to take a radical step, to make a radical change.

My job paid me once a month.  I gave notice, and with that one month’s paycheck in hand, I bought a cheap plane ticket to Amsterdam and began my journey.  There was little change left in my pocket.  That first night, I found a place to crash among shrubs.  The next day I wandered a bit around Amsterdam before hopping a train to Germany.  And so my odyssey began. 

I had prepared myself to see the Holyland, by converting to Judaism before leaving California.  This gave me an avenue to settle in Israel, a heart’s desire.  I was torn, between moving on to India where my life would supposedly change radically, and staying in the Holyland where I felt Christ’s presence, and where I discovered communal living in the form of Kibbutz.  While at my last job, at a University, I had kept an eye on publications that reported on the communal strain of lifestyle so popular at the time.  Here in Israel, I wanted to know what this ancient culture had to say about that lifestyle.  And so I took the necessary steps to become a kibbutz member, and experience it from the inside.  I liked it.  I liked it a lot.  It seemed to offer a safe harbor for my insecurities, my unresolved inner wounds.  I could daily sit in the communal dining hall, and in the crowd my loneliness and unworthiness were somehow soothed.

But eventually, after a couple of years of belonging to and in a kibbutz, I knew that I had not yet earned the freedom to settle.  There was that restlessness within.  While journeying across the Mediterranean and in the early months of kibbutz life, a random acquaintance with a woman, appearing as an other-worldly being, initiated me into meditation.  I had sat at an LA Zendo before, but through her spiritual energy and transmission, this time something profound began to happen.  Years later, in Kathmandu, I would run into her again and see she was very much not an apparition, but a flesh and blood person running a chai shop and being an anchor for the ex pat community in that city.

When I finally did arrive in India, to begin my search for that promised transformation, I had heard that the Dalai Lama was settled in the north Himalayan Mountains.  I was curious, and so upon my arrival in India I took what was meant to be a brief stop before exploring the Ashrams in the low lands.  I would not move on for another three years to come. 

Those years were spent in deep spiritual journeying, led by highly accomplished and authentic Tibetan high lamas.  The years passed, variously sitting in class listening to the ancient texts explained, and going into isolated retreats.  In truth, I would never be the same.  Here I seemed to come into my own.  All the years previously, I had been delving deeply into Christianity.  Not only the New Testament, but also studying the Old Testament, plumbing their depths.  This continued when I returned to the west, with my new mind, a new concept of reality and my place in it.

With mantra firmly in place, Om Mani Padme Hum, I stayed above the swampland of most emotions, harboring only the not-yet dislodged deepest rooted ego-centricity.

I went back for a refresher, in 2008.  I sat at the feet of an old friend, a lama, and, with his guidance, did ever-expanding meditations into the infinite fields of the inner and outer worlds.  I heard the tradition (from the Jataka Tales)  that, when Buddha Gautama was alive, a Being from a distant galaxy came on a beam of light and sat in his presence during his teachings.  That Being of light, purportedly, marveled at the teachings and wisdom of this Holy One.  This little anecdote taught me so much about reality beyond our tiny planet.  I grew to know deep things.  I absorbed them, and held them close throughout the following years.

And now, though in different garb, these teachings are becoming widespread.  There are so many people, many podcasting on YouTube, who are in communication with extra-terrestrial beings.  Their teachings are collectively reaching thousands and thousands of souls around the globe.

There seems to be no need to take baby steps.  The ancient and elemental teachings of the Four Noble Truths [Suffering, The Cause of Suffering, The Cessation of Suffering, the Path to the Cessation of Suffering] upon which we meditated, sitting at the feet of these high Lamas, the Geshes, seem archaic, outdated, superfluous.  For me, it was learning to crawl before I could walk.  These awakened me to the very essence of reality.  Now, I presume, those who are awakening have awareness of these elementals from previous lives.  They jump into the Ocean of Samsara and fly (pardon the mixed metaphor), soar, to find release at dizzying heights.

My solitary inner-monk’s life has brought me to a place where I seem to be living in isolation, among a population of people unaware and unprepared for the place my inner self inhabits.

Through the internet, I hear extraordinary messages and lessons coming from galactic beings.  These seem to be messages that I have been waiting to hear.  And yet, though other hearers seem to be riding the swelling waves of intergalactic societies and the wisdom beyond ours that they bring us, I seem to be circling the drain.  I hear, I understand, I have heard so much of it before, and yet as others harness these extraordinary spiritual tools meant to purify and elevate us, I seem to remain numb.  I cannot participate.  I hear, I know, but my consciousness can only dwell in an ocean of love, without activating these higher energies that are being transmitted, transferred, and which seem to transport the cohort, listening the same as I do.

What is wrong with me?  As I accept these energies graciously extended to us by Arcturians, Paladians, Sirians and such. my stubborn weaknesses become distilled, so clear in my mind’s eye, yet unmoving.  I see the generational karmic imprints.  I can isolate the times I felt rejected, uncared for, from age three all the way to just a few years ago by an ex lover.  I see, in the history of my recent progenitors, that same rejection being played out.  It is my ancestral inheritance, and that of my daughter.  I want to isolate it and surrender it up, as our teachers tell us we can and should do, if we so choose.  I choose!!!  It does not leave me.  Those same painful memories keep circling and circling, yet they will not be flushed.  What is wrong with me?