God Blind

I woke up this morning with traces of "The Fear," an anxiety that thins the air and flattens vision. It is thoroughly familiar to me, and as I woke to it my first thoughts were, "Oh, crap, Heather was right to doubt me when I said I was on the verge of deconstructing depression." I think the next thought was, "I'll show her."

So I sat for several hours, not so much to put the screws to "The Fear," but because I was wanting to experiment with engaging the experience. I have been practicing with open-eyed meditation--my tradition of vipassana is always taught with closed eyes--and today I also wanted to see what would happen with concentration if I could find a really comfortable physical posture. I ended up laying on the ground with the portable heater, and though my concentration didn't improve much, I did notice how "held" my body felt, tight and unnecessarily constricted. With my Rosen worker's voice in my head, I looked for what was pleasurable and let my attention be with that, rather than fixating on the pain or "problems."

When I arose, there was still a underlying sense of disconnect, that made it a little hard to feel communion with Heather, but I also noticed that there was not the despair or panic that has often accompanied The Fear. Somewhere in my awareness, like a circus clown in a crowd, I was aware of the insubstantiality of The Fear, and the substantiality of what I have to label as God. Not a real personal God, but not a Glorious Nothingness either, something with enough quality to not be the empty expression of emptiness. Under The Fear was a sense of lightness and continuity, and an understanding of both the ephemeral and essentially empty quality of the Fear, as well as the essential divinity of the total experience I was having--or was having me.

This sense of pervasive divinity--often more of a thought or conviction than experience--has been crystallized by Adyashanti (website) in his writings and talks, and is beginning to really take chunks out of this big old hoary oak tree of a depression that has pinned me to the ground so much of my life. The basic efficacy of understanding that all experience is divine, each thing or happening has exactly the same amount of divinity regardless of its form, is that if you are living a life of seeking God/Buddha/Essence, then wham! you got it! As Willie Wonka sang:

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and view it…
Anything you want to, do it…
Want to change the world, there’s nothing to it.

Meaning, you don't have to run away from anything. Nothing. Nada. You never have to make a move away from any single experience you have. You never have to move out of yourself or the experience, at the absolute base level. You can rest knowing that it's all essentially safe. Even the pain is as wet with essence as the joy; the ignorance as much as the wisdom. You simply can't escape Essence; you've already found what you're looking for, it's just that, in things like depression, you become God Blind. In snow blindness, the trees and the mountains and cabins and deer and bear and rocks and sky and clouds and dirt and friends and lovers and cactus and Chinese markets and Buddha statues and arms factories and dolphins and hub caps and knee caps--none of it disappears. It's only that your eyes are clouded, and when you forget that, you forget God, and that's why depression is so, so painful. Essentially we are suffering because we have forgotten God. All the symptoms--the irrational fear, the physical aches, the lethargy, the despair--all are tolerable and lovable when you don't lose track of their essential divinity, and the divinity that surround them and you, and is you.

So I think the antidote to God Blindness is remembering, which must be cognitive and embodied. Your body has to remember that the constriction of breath, the tightness of stomach, the bleariness of vision, are not finite--they're phenomenon embedded in an infinite flow--and that you are not reducible to these experiences, and none of it is simply reducible to a hellishly disconnected suffering. When such remembering happens, then the you're not tricked by the pervasiveness of the snow to think that you are cut off from God. You can relax into the cold, and make skillful choices (hey, let's get the heater!) but out of a place of grounded faith, not in a desperate scramble to escape a pit.

This morning, I could recognized the God Blindness as a thing in itself, a process just like that time when I watched a throat cold set in, with steps and stages and particular dynamics. One more wild expression of God, that clown juggling in the crowd, grinning at all the chaos, that helps shock you awake and remember.