An email to a friend
You asked me a great question last night. Which was, what is
the benefit of the physical feeling of euphoria that I sometimes experience and
think are spiritual experiences?
To some extent I have always felt guilty about the pleasure
that is a part of the experience which is reinforced by part of the intuitive
knowledge from the experience that I am a lucky bastard and a fuck up.
And I cannot emphasize either of those things enough, that I am lucky
beyond belief and a fuck up beyond belief. Which means the pleasure and
really the whole experience is completely a gift from God, pure Grace.
Together those things are as important for me to know at my deepest
levels as anything else in life and a big part of the benefit of the
experience.
As I have contemplated it more last night and this morning and
now gotten to a sustained strongly euphoric state for a couple hours I have
explored with the experience what the benefits might be.
The answer seems to be that the euphoria or ecstasy is a
result of manifesting my destiny or realizing my destiny of being at one or in
communion with God a.k.a. the Entirety. As such acting from this experience
would look like Jesus or St. Francis of Assisi
or Mother Teresa, etc. and letting the feelings of this experience over power
and heal the scars of trying to live in community with those around me is the
solution for my brokenness, separateness, being lost. The crux of the
experience is that for that moment and however long it lasts I am not broken or
separate or lost, I am one with everything and whole with my creator and found
as well as greatly loved by my creator, while simultaneously knowing I am
feeble and essentially nothing apart from.
And all the above is completely reality. It is not a
spiritual fantasy and I know that because it aligns with what Jesus and the
great saints and mystics have all taught. So my task is to live that reality
and much of my guide for that task is to follow that experience by following
the feelings of the experience and letting them infuse those areas of my life
where I am most broken and acting from that brokenness. When those
feelings infuse those areas and I am thus whole and free to follow them the
ecstasy will be present but much much more importantly I will be joyously
acting from wholeness with everything else or communion and I will want to be
of maximal benefit to whatever I can be since everything else is also part of
the same Whole.
It doesn't have much benefit or maybe any benefit if it
doesn't infuse the areas of my life where I am most broken. And when I do go
back to the broken areas it is extremely painful to go from such wonderfulness
to the intense pain of feeling separated again and broken. It can make it seem
like the wholeness was never real to begin with and can lead to despair.
It also often leads me to want to just enjoy the wholeness
and avoid my brokenness but that quickly leads to the wholeness disappearing
because it is a spiritual fantasy and if pushed far enough leads to despair (normally)
blamed on others for not going along with my unfair unrealistic spiritual
fantasy.
I started writing this the day after my last email but did
not get around to finishing it for a couple weeks.
Before starting let me do a little more "wind-up"
that is probably already understood and not necessary, but will make me feel
better to have said. I do not write to try to convince you or anyone of
anything. I am odd and like the intense internal stuff, I think it is
because I spent so much of my life rejecting it, suppressing it, and avoiding
it because it seemed to make others uncomfortable and thus me unacceptable, if
I shared it. And yet this deep internal stuff was also what I most
identified with as being me and thus I was always rejecting, suppressing, and
avoiding the deepest (and best) me, which I most identified with as being me.
The image that comes to mind is this deep internal me trying
to peek its head out of a cellar and me continually stomping on the cellar door
violently trying to just kill that part of me so that I do not have to feel
like the thing that is most me is hopelessly defective. And I tried lots of
ways to kill it. Alcohol and drugs were my favorite, but I tried to use
therapy and the 12 steps and exercise, and shaming it in myself and others, and
starving it with will power and depriving it of things for long periods of
time, etc. And I still use eating and caffeine, mostly to take off the
rough edges off life but sometimes for much more than that.
I might be the only one in the world to believe this, but I
now believe that deepest part of myself that I was always violently trying to
kill is actually who I am in God and God’s image in me all at the same
time. And the only thing that finally got me to try the absolutely
desperate “hail mary” of surrendering to it, was a very dark despair on top of
the low level despair I had my whole life when not suppressing it.
As I write I realize that my ecstasy kind of makes sense in
this context of switching from being so desperate for so long and trying to
kill the most, if not only important part of me, thinking that was the answer,
to surrendering to and then really embracing who I am in God, is probably the
perfect recipe for spiritual ecstasy. I’ve actually never been looking
for euphoria/ecstasy in the spiritual realm, and I am still somewhat
uncomfortable with it. At the same time it seems like I am supposed to
learn from it. I think I am supposed to learn to let it infuse the
areas of me that are the most separate/broken/lost/etc so that I do not have to
act in a “worldy” ways, trying to accumulate and use emotional currency to
protect myself, which separates me from everything else and is the belly of the
beast where I spent most of my life.
That means that I have to live on the faith that what Jesus
and all the great spiritual teachers have taught is actually the truth, here
and now. And that is extremely hard to do (have faith), even when I get
these regular extremely powerful spiritual experiences that tell me that is
true reality. Then even if I do have that faith, learning to allow this
sacred place in me to manifest itself in my daily life takes practice (like
everything else in life) and even when I am trying hard and doing everything
right in trying to live from it, I often screw up.
Moving on I am very aware a lot of these things I say and do
make me seem off the wall and I may be off the wall, and I am all for
skepticism of me if in a inquisitive manner or even a respectful disagreeing
and contradicting manner. I’m not sure if you were being skeptical or
inquisitive when asking me about the benefits of the physical feelings, but it
is great because it pushes me further into them and at least in the vicinity of
who I think I am in God to look for an answer. So always feel free to go
even further, and as such point out where I seem to be wrong or have holes or
fallacies in my concepts. It is fruitful and fulfilling trying to fill in
those holes.
That turned into something completely different than I was
intending to write about, which is that a part of my last long message made it
sound like I thought I was only broken/separate/lost because of my scars from
trying to live in community with those around me growing up or since and that is
not true at all. I probably went there first because it is what we had
been talking about. The main reason I am broken/separate/lost is because
my first and main priority has always been to protect this deepest part of
myself (which I used to think was hopelessly defective and now think is who I
am in God).
I believe this is the true meaning of original sin, that as
humans our first priority is to protect this deepest place within us rather
than live from it. When we developed consciousness, aka the knowledge of
good and evil, we mistakenly thought we had developed a way to keep this deep
vulnerable part of us protected and still satisfied. However, this led us
to view ourselves as separate and try to gain advantages over our fellows in
order to protect it and then satisfy it, which is the origin and still source
of all sin.
So if what I think is spiritual euphoria that I often
experience is going to do me much good, likely it will be by being so delicious
(as you said from Brother Lawrence) or in other ways irresistible (from the joy
of living it and the pain of burying it) that I will make it a higher priority
to live from it rather than protect it. And over time I will learn
through failure and success how to integrate (live and share) it in more and
more facets of my daily life with people and things I come in contact with.
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