Recently I got an email from a Church of the Churchless visitor who said, “Still read your website. Looks like all those years of meditation are bearing fruit.” I wrote back, “I don’t know whether years of meditation are bearing fruit. I feel more and more barren. Could that be the prelude to bearing fruit? I can only hope.”
Then I received a wonderful response. My correspondent shared thoughts, experiences, and quotations about spiritual chaos, the breaking up of what is orderly and familiar so that fresh realizations are able to grow. I liked what she said so much, with her permission I’m sharing her message almost verbatim here.
Sometimes it wasn’t clear where her own words left off and a quote began. I may have made some mistakes with my quotation marks. But then, the source of a wise statement doesn’t really matter. Truth is truth, no matter from where it springs.
The first part of her message follows. To read the rest, click on the “continue reading” link.
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Hi Brian,
As for your meditation bearing fruit . . .Well, from my viewpoint, it is obviously so. From my studies and personal experience, when a soul makes a breakthrough in awareness the “world” doesn’t usually break out in applause and encourage it to move forward.
The “world” usually tells you to shut the fuck up or says you are weird. “Hey, get back here where you belong.” Or, “you don’t fit in anymore.” And if you are not experiencing consolations within, which is apparently standard for this part of the journey, it can be lonely.
I don’t feel like I can explain my perception as well as I would like. But, for now, here’s just a few things that come to mind.
From Anthony De Mello’s The Heart of the Enlightened: Given the nature of the spiritual quest: “A man came upon a tall tower and stepped inside to find it all dark. As he groped around, he came upon a circular staircase. Curious to know where it led to, he began to climb, and as he climbed, he sensed a growing uneasiness in his heart. So he looked behind him and was horrified to see that each time he climbed a step, the previous one fell off and disappeared. Before him the stairs wound upward and he had no idea where they led; behind him yawned an enormous black emptiness.”
Various yoga or esoteric traditions describe the path of evolution as a spiral, going through complete cycles of seasons on each step. During some of the fall or winter seasons, there is the appearance or feeling you are going down, but the reality is you are still on the same step cycling through all the seasons of that stage. And the seasons are effecting changes in you.
And forces within you are drawing you onward and forward into the next season and cycle, and ultimately into the next step or stage. And even though you had been getting closing and closer to placing your foot on the next step, when it happens it seems like suddenly you are in a different place. And you look back, and like Jon Stewart, go “Whaaaaaaaa?” and rub your eyes. The step below has vanished.
So there is no going back because, like it or not, something within and without is driving you. It’s like birth. You may feel like you’re being squished to death – but out you go, like it or not. The point is, you are now entering into unknown, expanded territory, and it is difficult to integrate the new expanded territory with the old.
You may miss the security of being closer to what you thought was the ground and you may miss some of the comforts and familiarity of prior steps. You may no longer have the fringe benefit of a community supporting you for believing and acting like they do. When the going gets rough, nostalgia makes you long for past, simpler times, when you thought you had it all figured out. When the pressures and insecurity that go with the new territory become uncomfortable, you make some half-hearted attempts to go back down a rung, or even two, to recover that security.
But you discover that the lower rungs no longer provide the comfort you hoped for. The rung below has “disappeared” for you — and there is nothing to go back to. You can only go forward into the new unknown. The familiar One is always and ever present and calling you closer, but it’s hard to believe in the chaos of this transition phase.
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