Conversation

I talked with Don Jones this evening, and it opened up much for me in many ways.

I realize that I went through the Rot when I was 16 years old. I experienced a profound sense of separation, meaninglessness and despair. I could go no futher into despair. I had hit the bottom in every way. There was nothing to hold onto anymore. It was profoundly overwhelming. A deep personal crisis. (Combined with this was a mysterious illness that affected me profoundly on a physical level, which I later discovered was due to several severe food allergies)

And it gave birth to my awakening. It was between Christmas and New Years, and I walked down the gravel road to the mail box. It was evening, dark, no snow, a big wind, and stars above. I experienced the wind as going through the whole Universe. There was no separation anymore.

I experiencing God/Spirit/Buddha Mind throughout the whole Universe, in and including everything. There was no separation. There was no separation between the outside and the inside. Even the darkest parts of my personality was God and Spirit, as much as everything else.

And my pain came from not being able to integrate it into my life. Not being able to LIVE it fully as a human being. And it came from not being able to share it with others. Nobody understood. There was no separation, and yet a profound social separation.

Throughout this was a process of being taken apart on all levels (mental, emotional, energetically) and reconfigured in new ways. The old was fragmented, and a new wholeness took form. I also saw auras clearly and picked up what was going on with other people. At the time, I was not able to keep it at a distance, so this was also painful.

My awakening clarified over the next several years, and I was able to integrate it more but still far from where I felt it needed to be. When I came to the Zen center in Utah, I found another opportunity to integrate and ground it, and it was a very healing process.

And another aspect of the Rot... There is a profound knowing in me that there is nothing I can "do" to find Awakening. I just have to relax into my experiences, melt into this aspect of God/Spirit/Buddha Mind. There is only grace... (although I can set a stage for it to happen, to invite it in).

My search is for integration and grounding, not Awakening in itself. I want to deepen my exploration and experience of - and life IN - both poles of the polarity.