When people go through the illnesses of loved ones, they often speak of all the loving and wonderful lessons they learned.
When my father had his stroke and then needed a feeding tube inserted into his stomach and then three weeks later coded and then had to have a trach and then had to have a different feeding tube and then started having hospital psychosis and then and then and then… I didn’t think there was anything loving or wonderful I was learning at all.
I was angry.
And I got more and more confused and lost and despairing and cynical. I’ve always been skeptical, which I think is healthy, but cynicism was not my usual mode.
Fast forward over three months later, and he is home, tube free, and making more progress at a faster pace every day.
In the meantime, I started my deep dive into tantra yoga philosophy, and I really committed to that after the new year.
But I kept landing in the same dark, nihilistic corner… painted in by the banality of it all.
Wondering what could possibly be the point of being human if all there is is pain and suffering awaiting each and every one of us sooner or later.
Life is cruel. That was the only conclusion I could come to, and if there is some sort of thinking/creating God, he/she is even crueler.
I do not believe in a God or Universe who “sends us lessons.” Bullshit. First, that’s mean and if I believe in any God it is LOVE. Second, it’s illogical in the context of free will. Life happens, and if we are lucky, later, looking back, we can create meaning from suffering, we can write stories of our own making about why what happened was ultimately important or “right” or whatever, because that’s what humans are at their core — story making machines.
Thank goodness, because this capacity to create story saves us, I think, from going insane.
I’m stubborn. It’s one of my more positive traits, I believe. I believe it has saved my life over and over and this time, wrestling with these ultimate things, it would prove itself my strength yet again.
In trantra yoga, the ultimate underlying reality (worshipped as Goddess but just for the simplicity of anthropomorphism that humans respond so well to) is awareness.
All is awareness, and we, then, are ultimately that same thing — awareness.
Awareness then has experiences through our individuated material bodies.
But ultimately we are already that awareness.
And here I am sitting in that dark corner, thinking, if we are already that awareness, WHY DO THIS!?!
But I had an intuition that the answer was in this tantra stuff… if I could just pull the right thread.
Here’s the thread: Awareness is two fold and a lot of people forget the second part.
Firstly, awareness is the noticing that we expect it to be, but the second attribute of awareness is actually about ACTION.
Awareness is, by its nature, constantly creating, destroying, resting, starting over.
Sound familiar?
I STILL wasn’t getting it, until…
I was lying in bed, sick, and my husband was gently rubbing my back so I could fall to sleep, and instead I entered into a deep and peaceful state of meditation.
Suddenly my skull was full of the universe, and I realized, oh, right! It has been there all along. If awareness is this cycle of creation, destruction, rest, and starting over, it’s literally written in the stars.
And from that cycle — from the very nature of awareness — eventually we, quite simply, get to the evolutionary point from which humans arise.
Lying in bed, the universe in my head, suddenly, a PEONY flower arose and unfurled in my skull.
The peony can only be the peony. Period.
I can only be this human.
I’m not here to “be taught” or to “ascend.”
I’m here, simply, to be awareness and to allow for the natural cycles that are born of the nature of that awareness.
My peony self is teacher/dancer so that’s what I’m here to be awareness through.
And when I die, I will simply continue being the awareness I already am, but, as Ram Dass says, I will remove the too-tight coat of this human experience.