Jason’s MS Blog

After the last treatment. Spiritual confluences and revelations.

April 10th, 2009

The last lumbar puncture on Wednesday went about as smoothly as possible. You know that feeling when you are nervous about something and then when it is over you think, ‘why was I nervous about that, again?’ Sort of what it was like. No problems to report after (ie no headaches or pains) and no side effects other than I feel really good. Well actually, last night I woke up at about midnight and felt very uncomfortable – especially on my left side – and irritable, to the point of anger even, but it passed after half an hour or so and I went back to sleep. Another perhaps hopeful sign that things on my left side are waking up! But there are some other things moving that are responsible for feeling good (and possibly waking up), too – or maybe it is all just working together…

In any case, I have wanted to share what has been happening on a more spiritual level. I have found myself thinking a lot about how to share this, and I couldn’t come to any kind of conclusion – so I thought I would just share my experience and forgo a lot of mental/intellectual stuff (which has been processing in my head around this). Anyway, I had mentioned in my previous blogs the spiritual journey that this trip seemed to be for me, and how terror of a very deep kind seemed to be what I was getting in touch with. An existential level terror that I had throughout my life associated with my Mom (not that she did anything, of course, just that I had associated it with her) I had been aware of and had worked through a lot and doing a lot of work on here. But about two weeks ago I realized that whenever my Dad would come over to my room (usually Mom has been my caretaker in the mornings – roughly 9:00 to 2:00 – and Dad from 2:00 to 8:00) I would experience a bodily terror around him. Then I had a powerful dream one night where I was playing with my Dad’s father (my grandfather) on a farm on a lovely, quite warm, late spring/early summer day and my grandfather jumped into a pool of clear, cool, lovely water with a few strands of straw floating on it. I jumped in after him and the feeling of being immersed in that water was stupendous – peace and joy and love – the kind of feeling you never want to leave. And I saw my father sitting across the way from this pool inside behind a pane of glass. It was a very emotionally charged dream and a day or two later I understood that the terror I felt with my father was terror that I had gotten from him that he had gotten from his father (and perhaps he from his, and so on - I didn’t see that far). And when my Dad came over that day I was able, and it felt right, to ask him directly if he had felt terrified by his father – to confirm what I had intuited. He said he had, and we had a beautiful talk about it. Bringing it out seemed to dispel the terror in me, too, and I felt it much less in subsequent days.

At the same time I was reading the book ‘A New Earth’ by Eckhart Tolle. This book has been showing up in my life all over the place for the last year or so, but never had it felt right to read it. Then I found it in the small collection of books they have here, and I borrowed it. Reading it was a journey in itself. What he talks about is what might be called ‘spiritual awakening’, which he explains is just the consciousness that whoever ‘I’ am is not who I think I am, or my experiences or anything else – ‘I’ am the consciousness that sits behind all that and is aware of all of it. I am the ‘I AM’, if you will. I won’t say any more here because Eckhart Tolle says it much better and also as I said before I don’t want to get down in intellectualizations. My experience while reading the book, though, is what was astounding. Eckhart Tolle in the book actually says that reading his book is transformational in itself and that its purpose is not to play with ideas, which are in the mind, but to serve as a transformational tool to help get beyond the mind to the ‘I AM’. And amazingly, I got it!!!!  Somehow I was able to step back from my mind and my experiences and observe them. All I felt at first was a relaxation in my shoulders, roughly between my armpits – I can feel it now even as I pull back and observe myself writing this. And astoundingly, this was the exact physical location in my body where I felt the terror! I was a bit overwhelmed by it all, and just went on with my day – this was Sunday – but I began practicing stepping back from my mind and emotions and everything into this little place of relaxation between my armpits. The next day I continued practicing and began to notice that if something happened that would make me feel badly in some respect, if I just watched and felt what I was feeling and tried to get to the place of peace, whatever it was I had felt would just dissolve. I had to practice ‘doing it right’ because it was a skill I was very new at and it didn’t work right away all the time. But it always worked. And what is more, I began to notice that as I got bolder and tried to do it with stronger emotions, after the emotion had dissolved I was left with a residue of not only a feeling of peace, but often a little burst of joy as well. As I continued practicing during the day, the peace and joy became more sustained, and I noticed that I was more at ease with everyone, laughing more, being silly and fun – enjoying life! And this was happening with everyone, most noticeably with my parents!! I also noticed I had more energy and felt lighter. This thought of lightness of course brought up the thought of ‘enlightenment’, a term that I have disliked more and more in recent years. It had always come across to me as some unattainable spiritual peak that only a few ever reached and that mere mortals like me wouldn’t have a hope of ever attaining. I also had had the rather cynical thought that anyone who claimed to be enlightened was, by definition, not – the very act of claiming it precluded it. (I had heard, on a related note, similar things said about understanding Zen and/or quantum physics – that anyone who claimed to understand either by definition didn’t). But then I looked at my experience and thought that I liked the kind of ‘enlightenment’ I was experiencing a lot better. It was (is) so simple. More like saying ‘take it easy’ or ‘it’s all good’ or something like that. It felt like a little child going over to a friend’s house and asking “do you want to come out and play?”, that suddenly life was not so serious anymore and where I had been the child who is sad and won’t come out to play because they had more important things to do – like practising violin in the common caricature – I had returned to being the child that just wanted to play and have fun. What a wonderful feeling! “Be ye like little children” – isn’t that close to what Jesus said? So I feel very much like I have been reborn into a new way of being that is at once simpler and more profound and is full of joy and peace – real joy and peace and not derived from external things. In fact it has beome much clearer that external joy and pain are really the same thing – both keep me away from the space of peace and joy I can be in in an instant when I step back from either of them. They are transient where what I have found might be called eternal – not in some high falutin’ sense of eternal like I had imaged that word before – but in the sense that the awareness, the ‘I AM’ is not affected by anything transient – it is that which watches the transient come and go be it a cloud or death itself. Many more thoughts and realizations and connections have come to mind, and Eckhart Tolle’s book brought almost all of the spiritual ideas and sources of wisdom that had most influenced me together in one place: Among them the Bible, in particular the prophets and Jesus, A Course in Miracles, the Tao Te Ching and the poetry of the Sufi master Hafiz, among others. So it felt like the end of a phase of spiritual development for me and a transition into another. A final marker of this came on Monday night – really Tuesday in the early morning – when I had one of the most powerful dreams of my life. I was talking with my Dad in a very impassioned way, pleading with him to try and convince him of the reality of spirit. I was so animated I had tears running down my cheeks and finally something shifted and he got it, and with tears streaming down I ran to him to embrace him and right before I hugged him I saw he was me – I was hugging myself, and our embrace was beyond description. It then took me a full hour to wake up, and I felt drained as I have rarely felt before. This joy and happiness has continued all this week and it has been a blessed week. I continue to practice this new skill of ‘being present’ to everything, and a world of new challenges and realizations opens up.

It seems fitting somehow to be able to write this on Good Friday. And I thought of a nice connection with my experience. In the same way that I felt the ‘eternal’ peace and joy in the same place in my body where before I had felt terror, it occurred to me that the suffering we experience acts as a gateway of sorts to link us to the eternal in precisely the same way that Jesus’ passion led to his resurrection. Easter blessings to all.

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