Last Year My Mind Exploded and Now I'm in Spiritual Puberty Again

‘Listen. You have this thing in you called a personal will. It’s what motivates you to want things in life—career advancement, affirmation, fancy cars. And it’s not bad, that’s just how people are. But sooner or later you find out it can’t be satisfied. So then your personal will gets you into spirituality, because that could be the source of some other prize you could obtain. That’s why you’re listening to me. And that goes on for a period of time, and that’s also not bad, that’s just how things go. But the spiritual life only really begins when your personal will starts giving up on this, when it starts to fall away. You’ll resist this, because it’s terrifying and unexpected. But at a certain point it’s the only way you can go forward.’

Meditation is a weird fuckin’ hobby. You study every bit of your mind for years. And then one day, that mind disappears, and you don’t know anything anymore.

The feeling of wholeness is simple and immediate. It’s that the promised land is right here—nirvana and samsara are one, as they say. All of the mystics throughout history who have talked about how we are with God right now, we just don’t have eyes to see it? This is what is being discussed. And this is, in my experience, staggeringly obvious once all the obstructing bullshit is blasted away.

Good spiritual teachers will annoy you by telling you it’s not what you think, and now, I see the precise reason why. The experience is primarily characterized by the vanishing of one small limiting part of your mind—precisely the part that does things like, say, wanting spiritual experiences to happen so that life will be different*.* Thus, imagining it with a typically structured mind is like searching for darkness with a flashlight, to borrow a metaphor from Julian Jaynes.

What’s different is the way I get things done. When I face a challenging task, I surrender to it completely, and it feels like the momentum of the universe is getting it done, that a “me” is not responsible. Sometimes this leads to a level of output that is abnormally high.

It’s not that I don’t have the will to do things. It’s that my will is different. I feel plural, like my consciousness is an ongoing system, and that decisions arise from that system, rather than being dictated by a controlling ego. This is not so strange—it’s the loveliness of a normal flow state, when the human system is trusting itself rather than monitoring itself. But having it as the baseline—experiencing flow as your basic state, regardless of the simplicity or complexity of the task you’re engaged in—is wild.

What’s actually important to me is that you really understand that this is a real possibility, for you, in your life. If you practice with honest diligence, with tenderness and patience and determination, one day you will understand that you were completely wrong about everything. And you will be so, so happy about that.

If you read this whole thing and you’re like, cool, where do I start, the best general meditation book on the market is currently Original Love, and I’ve also heard great things about his app, The Way. Some people seem to find this blog post I wrote helpful. If you have more concrete questions I’d be happy to answer them via email; if I’m not qualified, I will pass you to someone more qualified.