In case anyone is reading...

... I will be on retreat for the next month, posting again mid-January. Have a great holiday and happy new year everyone!

Spirit and the Search for Romance

I've just come home from a first date. Just coffee, you know, about 1.5 hours of "who the hell is this person"?

Am I the only one who feels that the modern practice of "dating" is just a little bit absurd? Back in the day, when we lived as extended families in caves and what not, they didn't have a local Starbuck's where you could meet up with someone who is still virtually a stranger and try to spark "chemistry". Things were a little more intimate from the get-go. There were clan gatherings and sexual initiations and aunts and uncles constantly trying to set you up. That's the society in which the emotions of romance evolved.

Whenever I get back from a date with a new person, I feel sad. Years ago, when I was younger, less experienced, and more desperate, this sadness was covered up with excitement or lust or self-doubt ("Did she like me? Boy she was hot. Will she see me again?") Now that I can cut through that, things are different.

This is the core sadness, the heart of sadness, the basic spiritual longing deep within all of us. It is the old, deep, primordial ache of the original separation from the One. And it comes out after a date like this because of the expectation and artificiality of the situation. Romantic love is a spiritual phenomenon, whether we know it or not. And when it fails to blossom - even if there is still a chance it will blossom later - it reminds us, forcefully, that we are fundamentally alone.

And yes, I had a good time and might see her again. Thank you very much. :-)

Putting it all aside

I have a job interview tomorrow.

Talk about the ultimate on the spot experience! Here I will be, under a microscope, being judged by people who will control whether or not I will brought into their fold - whether or not I will receive money from them, get my lifeblood from them, become one of them.

And yet these are the times in life when we are encouraged to be the most dishonest. "Don't mention this", we are advised. "Make a big deal out of that. Sell yourself!!"

Sell myself? If I present a picture that is distored, that has been tailored to please a particlar audience, am I selling myself? If I put it all aside - my spiritual beliefs, the way I genuinely connect with people, even the blotches on my record - will that lead to the best outcome for me? For them?

Finding a job is a stressful experience. We all need to work to survive, to take care of ourselves and others. For myself, having left my last job in exasperation several months ago and with a giant student debt looming, there is a lot riding on what happens tomorrow. But will I really do myself a service by begging, by playing the part they want me to play at all costs?

What if we could go into a job interview seeing it as a spiritual practice? One being of light and awareness, going to encounter other beings of light and awareness, to see if we connect in the right way. Nothing more. And trusting, fully trusting, that the more authentic we can be, the more authentic the outcome would be.

Now that takes guts.

Deep feeling fascination

Well, I had a talk with one of my teachers today that was something of a wake-up call (he's good with those). Yet again, I have been fascinated by fascination.

It is so easy to find something to attach to. What are you good at? Dancing? Singing? Arguing? Seducing? Writing a blog? Whatever it is, you can become fascinated by it and attached to continued success with it. Like a drug, you need to keep increasing the dose to feel good from it. Or, what are you bad at? What frustrates you more than anything else in this world? You can become fascinated with that too, wrapped up in the story of your inferiority, deriving a perverse pleasure from the idea that someday you will achieve the impossible goal - or perhaps, from the idea that you are a miserable wretch who never will.

Lately my fascination has been with meditation and chi. Yes, I am good at working with chi. Very good, in fact. So good that it becomes a roadblock and a high. I can make myself stoned just with the power of my thoughts. And even when I avoid doing that, the high finds other ways to penetrate my consciousness by taking other forms to fascinate me with. Only in rare moments of true, deep clarity do I escape the siren's call and just open to the raw beauty of existence.

What does it take to truly drop the ego and detach from everything? To lose obsessive fascination, and develop the ability to just be and enjoy?