Coming down the mountain

A conversation on facebook prompts me to recall a couple of TV programmes I’ve watched in the past (and I don’t remember enough details of either to provide a link, or even a title). Both involved someone from the UK exploring other forms of spirituality.

In the first, the presenter was in India, and found a holy man who was prepared to talk, and who claimed to have achieved enlightenment. The presenter was fairly impressed by some of this man’s statements, and asked if he could teach him more – and the holy man refused, saying that in order to teach, he would risk losing his lack of attachment to the world. In the second, the presenter was trying out the life of a Desert hermit in the tradition of the Desert saints of early Christianity. His guide and mentor for that had been living in a cave partway up a mountain for years, and expected to continue doing that. He said that his function was to pray for the world without interruption (a version, I suppose, of the “say one for me” statement which often accompanies me leaving for a church service when others in the house are staying at home). He wouldn’t normally have accepted anyone else to teach unless they were intending to be a long-term hermit themselves.

I could have gone in one of those directions around 40 years ago. I’d had my initial peak mystical experience, I’d sampled a stack of spiritual practices which promised to produce something like a repeat of that, and I’d developed my own praxis to the point where I could almost completely reliably drop into a non-dual consciousness with, in effect, a mere thought. OK, it wasn’t quite the mountain top of the original experience, but it was close enough for my purposes (and, in complete honesty, lacked the feeling that whatever it was that was “me” would be snuffed out, never to return, which is, to say the least, scary).

I did consider the possibility of joining some contemplative group and taking myself off to a mountain somewhere (and a close friend of mine at the time who had a similar consciousness did, as far as I know, eventually do that with a Zen monastery in Japan). I also considered the possibility of taking on students – there were certainly some people who were hanging on my every word at the time, and who regarded me as some kind of guru. That second path I rejected fairly easily; I did not feel that I had a praxis which I could guarantee would produce the same results as it did in me for others, so would be taking on students in bad faith, added to which the position of teacher was calling to my ego, which I felt was a bad thing. Shades there of the Indian holy man I mentioned… (In fact, I now look at those who teach contemplation and non-dual thinking, and in many cases think I detect people with a problem with ego – I’m glad I didn’t go that way, as I have quite enough problems with my ego without others puffing it up for me).

The first was, however, very attractive. If I devoted myself single mindedly to a contemplative practice, I could reasonably expect to be spending a lot more time “on the mountain top”, and if I lacked ties to the world outside, it would not matter if I died while in a state of ego-death. The trouble was, the initial experience had also given me an overdose of empathy and compassion, and withdrawing from the world seemed as if it would be cutting that off. I will grant that the amount of empathy I was feeling was positively painful, particularly as in most cases I was not in a position to alleviate the suffering I was feeling in others – “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change” was a fine sentiment, but the things I could not change were damaging that serenity badly, so again, like the Indian holy man, non-involvement was a possible way out.

The thing is, withdrawing from the world utterly failed to follow up on “The courage to change the things I can” – not that I was at the time yet significantly aware of the Serenity prayer, but its sentiments were definitely in my thinking and, above all, feeling. So I decided not to, and to go ahead and do the things which were pretty much expected of me, but with a somewhat different consciousness of my place in the world. T.S. Eliot wrote We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”, and I had, in a way, arrived at the place where I started.

OK, I didn’t go in quite the same direction as I might have done if uninformed by mystical experience. I went into Law on the basis that that way, I could work at something which would give me an adequate income but would at the same time help others, and I later went into local politics on the same basis.

One day, perhaps, I will look at devoting myself single-mindedly to going back to the top of the mountain and staying there. In the meantime, however, I have taken on, quite deliberately, a set of attachments (which would probably horrify the Buddhists among my readers) and am content to live with those.

And, just maybe, I’ve found “the wisdom to know the difference”.

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