(At some point I will
write a full history of my Seeking and the mess of the life I led,
but for today this will have to do.)
Early in 2016 I hit a
huge depression, again. I suffered with depression since my teenage
years, so this was nothing new, but this time something was
different. I was totally dissatisfied with 'life' as I knew it.
Nothing interested me any more.
This came about after
an illness hit me in late 2015. I had been going to the gym, working
out and losing weight, and was in pretty good shape. I was 'sitting'
daily for at least twenty minutes and watching the thoughts rise and
fall.
The illness lasted
about six weeks and that was long enough for my mind to spin me right
down the rabbit hole of listlessness, despair and pointlessness. If
I'd had an off switch, I'd have seriously considered hitting it and
ending it all right there, but I had one responsibility that I could
not reject and that was to my wife. I promised her that I would not
leave her to struggle on her own as she became ill twenty years ago and
has needed care since then.
My only reason to live
was to provide for her. It was not much of a life, as anyone trapped
in depression can tell you. I had to keep going, so I turned once
again to my 'spiritual quest', or Seeking, as I had so many times in
the past.
I was originally
destined for the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1975, but the Seminary
and I parted company after my young ego caused enough problems for
them to expel me. I turned my back on the church after that and began
Seeking in earnest. I investigated and tried everything from
Witchcraft and Kabbalah to Rosicrucianism and Spiritualism. My
parents threw me out when I was around 18 (that ego again) and I ended up living in a
squat in London for 6 months, eating in soup kitchens and having my
first real run-in with the Law.
After time that
included several years in the British Army, and a failed marriage, I tried to
settle down with my new, wonderfully sensitive wife, but my ego
caused more trouble and I nearly blew that on more than one occasion.
Still Seeking, in the
1990s I discovered Buddhism and learned to sit and to focus my mind
in a small NKT house in Cheshire. I attended some weekend courses and
progressed well, even getting taught by their small Tibetan leader,
Kelsang Gyatso. People now tell me that they are a 'cult', but back
then they gave me a good grounding in training my mind.
I never liked the
bowing and scraping to statues and pictures, it felt like 'Catholic
Buddhism', but they set me on the path to enlightenment. I left them
after a couple of years, read several Zen books and then sat on my own for
almost two decades, through depression after depression. Until that
last one.
I realised I had to
sort this out. I had to fix 'me' somehow. That's how a lot of Seekers
feel, I suppose. We had moved house and the only meditation groups up
here were NKT and Naqshbandi Sufis. I opted to try the Sufis, and I
am glad I did.
Their root teaching is
about dissolving the ego in 'Allah' or 'The Beloved' and attaining
Union with the Divine Essence. I tried to sit and relax and feel the
'transmission', but my mind wandered so I went back to watching my
breath to rein it back in. I 'opened my heart' in the way they
advised and found I was starting to benefit, so I stepped up my
practice from 45 minutes a day to two hour long sessions a day. Just
sitting.
Over a period of almost
three months I worked hard and gradually chipped away at my ego,
allowing it less and less control over my life. Things I had studied
in Zen for years started to make more sense. Sufi books also made
sense. Their idea of Enlightenment includes this overwhelming Love in
Union with the Ultimate and I was ready to go for that, if it
happened, but I was impatient and years of building up my egoic
defences had left my root personality quite sociopathic. I had now
started to feel 'emotional things' and knew that it was cracking. I
could almost taste the breakthrough.
I remembered the Zen
teachings about 'not pursuing states' so I began to reject the
'desire' for them and to concentrate on pure, burning personal
inquiry.
“Who am I?” was the
focus of my meditation. The answers came and were discarded when
disproved.
I am not this body. I
am not in this body. I am not my personality. I am not my desires. I
am not my thoughts. The fire of inquiry burned hot. My body
temperature stayed elevated too, some kind of side effect of the
meditation, but I did not sweat. My wife started calling me her big
hot water bottle.
One day, I had mailed a
package, listening to the birds calling, and returned to the medical centre to wait for her. I sat down and just looked out the skylight
window and waited. Just sat. That's all.
After around five or six minutes I realised I had not had a single thought. I looked around me
at What Is and just Seeing was happening. I had no desires. I had no
further thoughts, and when one eventually arose it was just “I Am.”
No mystical bells,
whistles, Angels or waves of Love. Just This. Just What Is.
That night I told my
wife what had happened. She asked if I was sure this was
'Enlightenment' since it didn't match our expectations. (She was
Seeking too). I agreed to take further enquiry and check.
I grabbed three books off the Kindle Store and spent that night and the
next morning working through “Gateless Gatecrashers”, “Awaken
Now: The Living Method of Spiritual Liberation” and “Liberation
Is: The End of Seeking”.
When she came down at lunchtime, I just leaned close to her and whispered: "I Am Awake".
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