I originally wanted to be dramatic and write this post on some sort of logical interval (i.e. a year). However, recent internal events compel me to write this in the present. For those of you who know me at all, you know that a close friend of mine decided to end our friendship in June of last year (2015), in wildly dramatic fashion. This post is not a history of that occurrence, but a chronology of my personal transformation under what has been one of the most internally trying times of my life.
The nature of the friendship was codependent. I relied on him, and he relied on me, and it was more than just resourceful reliance, it was also emotional reliance. It was the classic “A” pattern codependency, and being that there were loved ones involved as well, it fulfilled the Karpman Triangle rather spectacularly. This was the backdrop for a really out of control interaction that led to him leaving.
In the wake of that, I was left wholly bereft. A person with whom I had irresponsibly fused some of my personal identity to had basically rage quit and taken his ball and went home. Except the ball was supporting my shanty-town of an identity, which subsequently came crashing down. It took about a month for me to regain full functionality (with therapy), two months to regain composure, and it was around three months that I started rebuilding my sense of self.
I would like to acknowledge several books (and the authors) that helped me rebuild this sense of self as a truly independent internal structure that was independent of any person except myself.
- The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem: The Definitive Work on Self-Esteem by the Leading Pioneer in the Field by Nathaniel Branden
- To Be a Man: A Guide to True Masculine Power by Robert Augustus Masters
- Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton
- Practicing Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton
- Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin by Gabriella Kortsch
- The Power of Your Heart: Loving the Self by Gabriella Kortsch
- Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte
These books helped me reestablish a sense of “me-ness” that in the continuing months I would be able to subsequently build on. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Casey Capshaw and his work with the AMP podcast (which is on iTunes, but is now defunct), and Mike Hrostoski in his generous broadcast on Periscope. I highly recommend most of these resources to anyone who needs help rediscovering what it means to truly connect with yourself in a healthy and meaningful way (with obvious gender limitations with some of the resources). I cannot promise they will help you if you are in a codependent relationship, as it is easy to be distracted by codependency and develop a false sense of security.
The consumption and integration of the material of these books and resources took several months, and was delayed by two other different personal relationships that I was involved in. With the evacuation of these relationships from my life, I was left in a relative solitude. This was around month six of my reboot. This is about when I posted the post How Do You Value Your Time? In the months following that, using my new found sense of self, I was able to confidently find a female partner with whom I am happily in a relationship currently.
This brings me to about February of this year. Having always been a personal growth type, but having been distracted by rather poisonous and inhibitory situations, I found myself with a newfound security, but lack of underlying substance. There was a “me” but who was I? This is the more existential version of the question, not the foundational version. This led me back into a search of my youth, a deep exploration of personal spirituality.
In my teens, I was deeply inculcated in occult philosophy. I ultimately abandoned it when I couldn’t buy the “myths” that it was peddling anymore. After that I studied Ayn Rand objectivism, and from there Wilberian integralism. I moved into a “hyper” rational objectivist view of reality until about the time where I entered into friendship with this person. I had adopted Zen Buddhism as my dharma about a year before meeting the friend on whom this post is predicated. Zen allowed me to exercise a level of ontological abandonment (the epistemic fallacy). This lack of ‘certainty’ of knowing is partially what led to the events of my codependency.
Around February I received an email about a course from Ken Wilber on how to prepare for death (such as a sudden death scenario, not the Im-getting-old death scenario), created in concert with an author who was an expert on Tibetan Death Traditions. This was the little kick I needed to reexamine what had been, up to that point, a purely epistemological view of the world (a messy, disconnected hazy version of reality in which that which is known is all that is, never reflecting that which truly is, and in which that which is known is not ontologically secure in any way). I have not completed the course or accompanying book quite yet, but it provided enough motivation to revisit the Wilberian integralist point of view which I have always been fond of.
So I reread Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution and found the critique of a worldview I had adopted so completely moving (it is simply amazing how my cognitive development over the years facilitated a reading of the critique that I simply could not process at 21 years old) that I have moved back into a contemplative mode of existence for about the past 2 months.
Up until this point of my recovery, I had had a satori, which, in checking around, seems to correspond to the fifth bull. After a few months of death contemplation (a subject that I had avoided out of nihilistic dread before), and with the provocative words of SES created a frame in which I believe I have very recently had a realization of the sixth bull. And I can feel the pull of deeper and deeper, higher and higher transcendence calling to me.
And all this is to say, as the title so states, that I have moved from an utter sense of desolation in my solitude to an existence on the brim of spiritual dissolution. I can feel the pull of infinite causal awareness. It has already been something I am experiencing more regularly, and in my solitude now, I use the time to cultivate, like a gardener, a self-flow that reflects the infinite causal ground from which all things arise. I liken it to Kinhin, the Zen walking meditation, but instead of it being in a Zendo, I cultivate my Kinhin as a living meditation, flowing, interacting translogical experience in my solitude.
Tickled by the notion of a 140 characters as a poetic limit, I composed a series of poems on twitter that I want to make sure are not lost to the annals of my twitter ruminations, and so I will recount them here in order as a commemoration of everything I have been through.
Eros from me
Agape from you
But Phobos for thee
And Thanatos my rue
I pulled us up
You stretched us out
I held you tight
Then did you route
Our codependency
Sounds almost dialectic?
Fusion does not abide
You and I
Yet together we discovered
And then forgot
Our Original Faces
I’d like to say
That I am alone
Without you
But I remembered
My Original Face
So instead
I am just sad
That you haven’t
Remembered Yours
In the dark night
That shrouds our Sangha
The silence that
Rings so loud
I will hold a candle
So if you Remember
You can make
Your way Home
I write this story to serve as a demarcation of my progress, to commemorate and honor myself in the trials I have endured, and to hopefully serve as inspiration or possibly even a mild guide to other people facing a similar situation.
The world is illusory.
Brahman alone is real.
Brahman is the world.
If you are scared when you are alone, that is ok. You have simply forgotten that you are divine. Work everyday to remember your divinity, to remember the face you had before you were born. Work tireless to realize the world as your sangha, and never in your solitude will you ever feel alone again.
