August Meditations MMXXII
This month marks a decade for August Meditations. Ten years of wandering through the forest with still a desert and an unscalable peak ahead, as someone once described the Path. Perhaps I’m in the desert now, as many things have dropped away. I’ve written fewer posts in the last year. I’ve downsized my living conditions and social interactions. And concepts around who I am are starting to fall away.
For a brief instant I saw my true nature in relation to the self that I always believed I was. Just a glimpse, like that of the coyote that passed outside my window this morning. One moment there and the next the path he ran down was clear. The kind of thing that if you don’t make note of, you’ll forget happened before morning’s end.
The forest referred to above was that part of the Path where, having heard of awakening, I sought to learn all I could about it. That came to a crashing halt when in the middle of the pandemic I began watching ConsciousTV where, time and again, various speakers said there was no self and that nothing could be done to cause an awakening. This left me despondent for a few months. Was all I had been doing a waste?
Around that time, I came across a young woman who clearly had an awakening. I began listening to her YouTube talks, wanting to hear more of her direct experience. After a while it became apparent that her expression of the awakening lacked depth. Her lack of knowledge of various spiritual teachings and basic human psychology meant she couldn’t talk of it in a meaningful way. She also lacked empathy and compassion for the suffering of others. Perhaps because she hadn’t gone through much hardship herself.
I concluded that despite what the non-dualist on ConsciousTV were saying that some knowledge of spiritual traditions and its practice is important. Then, as often happens when walking the Path, I came across Angelo Dilullo’s book, Awake: It’s Your Turn, and his Youtube site, Simply Always Awake. Here, if ever there was one, is a man whose knowledge is expressed as practice.
I’m reading Dilullo’s book for the second time now and incorporating his teaching into my own practice, but there’s much there and I’ve only scratched the surface. Not since Franklin Merrell-Wolfe have I come across someone who has been so clear. Even if you’re only interested in practice from a psychological point of view, I recommend him to you. More importantly, I recommend taking whatever you do know about the spiritual path and putting it into practice. As the late Edgar Cayce once said, “Knowledge not used is sin.”
That’s the last year in a nutshell, spiritually speaking. I add that this year I’ve had yet another physical malady or two. It seems that every year brings a new one. This summer, though, things have been good and I’m hoping that this year’s medical problems are behind me. As to the coming year, there comes a time in life when the future starts to fade, and the present moment comes more into focus. A moment where a coyote runs bold as brass by my door, an eagle lands on the beach ahead of me, and hummingbirds visit the feeder on my balcony. It’s said awakening can’t happen in the future but can only happen now. That because what you awaken too is exactly what’s happening in the present moment. That enlightenment is the now.