So the days pass in prayer and study. The world beckons and you respond, ever bent on forgiveness and grace, and little by little seams appear, the mighty illusion grows thin as a blanket that’s been washed too many times. Pull one thread, it might all unravel. And so you ask yourself what lies beyond awakening, what kingdom of light, what treasures the world can’t know . . .
The games we play don’t ever seem to end. It’s a circle we traveling. Or perhaps a mountain that grows by a foot each time we scale an inch. Yet the fog clears for a moment, the egoic self drops away like blown rags, the mind becomes bright as a prism. There is no mountain! This is it!
And a moment later something – black lagoon-like – reaches up and clings to that ethereal, that otherworldly joy. It hisses “that’s my enlightenment, nobody else’s.” Then the mountain comes back as if it never left. We see how we are deceived. With that wanting, that possessiveness, Heaven disappears like snow from a thousand centuries ago.
Never underestimate the depths which need to be scoured! Never forget that what you’ve made to lurk down there is vicious indeed. Never forget that you made it for just one reason – to keep Heaven at bay and death the most faithful attendant.
For years you dream about waking up. A monastery high on a hill, a little ashram in some sugary corner of New England. It’s a good dream but then one day, no reason, you see it’s nothing but a dream. So a little real work begins. Without realizing it, you’ve made a decision. Now there’s a path. Now you’re onto something.
More time passes. You aren’t a monk but it’s okay. You know more about God than your kids do but they’re a lot happier. That’s okay, too. The old urges – for food, for booze, for naked bodies – dissipate. Something is happening. It’s hard not to feel excited, not to harbor just a little tinge of pride.
The old dreams come back in a new form. You’re going to be a teacher. Your little farm is itself the ashram. This was always your destiny.
You welcome the form and brush aside the familiar content. This time it will be different. Everything attests to your capacity to be new. It is your will.
Then one day you have a dream. It’s a bad dream. In it, four men are being executed and you just watch. They are being slowly strangled as you stand and stare. You know it’s your dream and that you could end it but you don’t. You watch and let it happen. One of the men tries desperately to repent before he dies. One tries to make death come faster. One is resigned. One tries to hold the end at bay, hoping against hope that you will change your mind.
This is your dream. You can choose life or allow for death. You know this. And very cool, very calm, you lift a camera you didn’t know you had – but upon hefting learn you have always had, for it is God’s gift that you create – and you take a picture of the dying men. The photograph becomes famous and you become famous. What you can never say – what you can never allow anyone to learn – is that you set it up yourself.
The first morning you wake up from that dream, you can’t write about it. You can only allude to it. The next morning you do write about it, but you are careful with your pronouns, a not-so-subtle effort to blame your readers, to involve them in your guilt.
What is this awakening that can at once be so near and immediate that you spend days in its healing presence, the next thing to an angel, and then disappear so utterly you feel nothing but shame but despair at having ever once courted such a childish fantasy?
And what is there ever to do but go back to the shelf of books, the little prayers? One recalls Moses being gently guided to remove his shoes as he drew near the burning bush. One is comforted by Saint John of the Cross who praised that dark night which led him surely to the secret ladder, to a house at rest.
Thus one works as the sun rises, drinking bitter tea, and navigating the sentences that arrive desired but also – somehow – unbidden. In them one catches a glimpse of what remains hidden, the God I serve in this dream we dream together. I make the familiar offering. You make it, too.
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