So, each act of constriction is a danger. In meditation, I perceived this almost viscerally. Each act of doubt or judgment, I felt, brought me back down, back in, out of the samadhi state and into small mind. It is not that judgment is bad – judgment is important, and essential for moral behavior and aesthetic originality. But when one is in a contemplative place, and at one with being, judgment causes the ego to arise and assert its illusionary individuality; it shuts us off into critical mode, where we comment on style rather than being mindful first of truth. It is the "I" that judges, the same "I" that forgets that it is only a convention, that really the molecules of my body and brain are in no discernible way distinct from the other molecules of the universe. They happen to be gathered here, and have given rise to consciousness. But surely the greatest error of ‘spiritual' dualism is to suppose that our souls are separate from the world.
That illusion of separation, and the pain it causes, is healed by awareness, or religion, as some people understand it. The sorrow caused by being a lonely ego can be healed by realizing that one is not a lonely ego. For many, this realization occurs in love, when the "I" and the "you" are bridged. For others, this happens in contemplative practice, when the "I" and the "You" are bridged, or when the "I" ceases to exist as a separate entity at all.
Langston Hughes wrote, in the poem "Luck":
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Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone is flung.
To some people
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And so, my own doubt, possibly the greatest one of my recent introspection: that religion is a balm, or a salve. Possibly more substantial (a bone) than love (a crumb), but ultimately an all-too-wished-for substitute. That I want to dissolve my own ego in the All primarily because I don't like myself. (Just as my favorite fun activities are those in which I "lose myself" in the music or visuals or sensual experience.) That the projection of God is only a projection of our great need to be held, cuddled, loved by our distant or dead parents. Bad enough, I thought, that I seek to overachieve and impress others so that I can earn their love, like my six-year-old self getting love for being clever. My perception that being radiates love, that all human interaction is just a clearer or more obscure exchange of yearnings for love – this awareness makes whole a void. Is it only that? Only a consolation?
I had a dream early on in retreat in which I saw the retreat leader, Rabbi David Cooper, arrayed like some guru with flowers and devotees. I tried to communicate with him, but felt myself pulled away, that reality stripped away and replaced with a white liminal space. A spirit guide appeared – who else, for me, but Lou Reed. Lou said, "You think that's reality? I'll show you reality." And I flew through the white space to a primeval scene of cavemen, naked cavemen, fighting some sort of creature. The biggest cavemen were like offensive linemen, guarding against the beast. The nimbler ones were in back, throwing spears. Lou asked me where I fit in. And I realized that I, along with one other effeminate, wimpy, gay cave-fag were running for cover. We took refuge in a delicate place of women and aesthetes, pathetic excuses for men.
And I thought in contemplation that this pain, this pain of not being masculine enough, of being gay, and of being excluded and unloved from the community (maybe as a result, maybe not) – this pain was "reality." Under the good speaking voice I honed in school, behind the knowledge I used as tools to earn the love of my students, at my foundation: this pain.
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