Jed Talks #3

flying and tear down the goddamn curtain

“As to your pain,” I reply to the anguished young man, Zeke, in a way I hope is useful to all gathered, “it’s a blessing if you can put it to good use. You can deny and distract from your pain in a million different ways, or you can go into the pain and see where it takes you. Until you do that, your pain makes you a victim and provides an excuse for inaction. Maybe your particular challenge is real, or maybe it’s the same dynamic I’ve seen a thousand times before. I’ve seen people in hospices and prisons and wheelchairs who didn’t make excuses for themselves, and here you are with every advantage – young, fit, clever, approaching an age where actual awakening is actually possible – but you’re 4F because of flat feet. Rotten luck, dammit; no spiritual warfare for you.

“Maybe your spiritual solution-providers have confirmed your self-diagnosis, but what they should have told you is that this is ego’s standard ploy; make excuses, justify failure, create new attachments, find a convincing reason to sit down, shut up and keep your eyes closed. Fear teams up with vanity so you wear failure like a crown. We spoke earlier, I know you’re a bright guy; educated, sincere, tenacious. I’m not trying to insult you. On the contrary, I see you as a particularly viable candidate for transition to adulthood, but before that can happen you have to achieve full-frontal death-awareness. That’s where the unthinkable becomes the inevitable, where your polarity reverses and you’re drawn toward a future that currently repels you. Until we open our eyes and see who and what and where we are, we’ll never have an informed understanding of our situation and no forward progress will be possible. Once we open our eyes and see our situation clearly, all the ties that bind us to this juvenile identity dissolve and the way forward opens up. It’s not fate or karma or luck, it’s a journey of small steps, each one its own journey. You feel paralyzed because you’re looking ahead when you should be focusing on the next step. It’s like walking a tightrope; the trick is to take it nice and easy, one step at a time, and try not to look down.”

APOWERFULLY-BUILT YOUNG MAN named Zeke, in his early twenties and wearing a Texas A&M shirt, explains to me and those assembled that he has suffered for many years from a kind of “soul-level pain”, and that he’s the victim of anti-spiritual forces which have forged in him some bond of earthly attachment too powerful to break. He’d totally wake up if it were possible, he assures us, but alas, his circumstances are uniquely challenging and the way is not open unto to him. This type of creative rationalization is both common and effective. He has constructed an ego-flattering narrative around what amounts to nothing more than his own spiritual inertia; the tendency of an ass on a couch to stay on a couch.

Peace, happiness, compassion, and contentment have become synonymous with spiritual success. The goal of modern spirituality is not to escape from the dungeon but to make yourself comfortable within it. Many spiritual teachers seem to endorse this view by acting as buddies, counselors and life-coaches, dispensing fluffy love rather than the more effective but less popular tough love. If you’re unhappy about some issue, whether it’s a bad relationship or bad karma or a bad hair day, you just tell your spiritual mucky-muck about it and instead of hitting you with a stick or zapping you with a taser or simply being honest with you, they will help restore your sense of peace, happiness and serenity. Your relationship, karma and hair still suck, but now you’ve had a sip of sugary spiritual Kool-Aid, so it’s okay. These teachers want you to be happy because they want to be liked and thumbs-upped. Me, not so much. I don’t care about your drama or your happiness or your thumb. If anything, I’d like to see you go the other way. My wish for you, if I had one, would be that you become unhappier, that you spiral down into a mortal despair that reaches suicidal intensity. If I were personally invested in your transition, I would hope you achieve that level of burning discontent because only then will you address the underlying cause and not the superficial symptoms. Only then might you break out of self-imposed bondage instead of continuing as a single zombie in a vast undead horde.