I had poetically poignant moment today. Not that the very life I live isn’t full of symbolic gestures of beauty, but there was a moment today when my words actually sounded poetic to another “actual” human being.
“Sediment of the Soul”… that was the particular phrase that caught the attention of others. Invoked through the context of rigorous honesty, I was attempting to convey my experience with transformation. I find that my most pregnant opportunities for transformation lie in my encounter with struggle and more… that I, more often than not, recognize the spirit of my struggle – it feels familiar. It is an old friend; its taste reminds me of my former selves, an inescapable history of self-identification. When I face struggle its like the sediment of my soul is stirred and darkens the waters of experience. It’s blinding; clear direction is lost. I literally fumble about peoples lives, knocking people around, aggravating, offending. I come face to face with core unskillfulness – a powerlessness that courses through… AND, that’s my signal to completely, utterly, let go. My experience is than in “letting go”… with practice (mediation, prayer, spiritual community, service) with each additional stir the sediment dissipates or is re-integrated a little more so that less and less settles on the bottom. The water of my soul is being purified.
BUT… not in the moments I make lewd gestures about sex or piss my sister off in a bout of projected frustration. All that happened this week… Super unskillful. Utterly desirous. Whatever. I think I’m becoming a Buddhist. If I started talking about “sin” you think I’m uneducated so… more dots…
On a similar topic, a really weird sensation flowed through me last week. It was an encounter with a former self in a super real, somatic, alternative-reality, visionary way. (you know…right?) It was brought on by a powerful experience of deja-vu. The deja-vu was me walking into my classroom knowing I was in deep trouble and being confronted by my two bosses. It struck me heavily; I literally stopped in my tracks walking to my desk. I tasted my fear, and looked around my classroom. I was alone. I started speaking over myself immediately. I told myself that nothing was wrong at all. I started praying immediately and thanking God that I wasn’t in trouble. Here, I got a deep vision of a former self whose fear was real because he was in trouble and I felt a deep sense of gratitude that this was not me. The heaviness of that experience stayed with me all day… I still remember… It was unmistakable fear. I’m convinced it flowed from an old piece of hard wiring sending messages that would have formerly applied to my experience – attempting to psychologically protect me from the harm of failure, tragedy. It was the fear of failure or doing something wrong, or being found out or something of the sort, but it was familiar and intimate; It was my history – the sediment of my soul.
iamadam 