Sunday Morning Coming Down
Oct 16th, 2005 at 12:53 pm by Susie
Compassion is the keen awareness of the interdependence of all things.
–Thomas Merton
Blogging virtually demands that I appear to be a much angrier and hostile person than I am, and it depresses me when people actually believe that’s the sum total of my being. “I’m really a very nice, calm person,” I bemoaned to another blogger recently.
“I can understand why they think that but yes, I believe you’re a nice person,” he said.
“I work at trying to be compassionate,” I said with a sigh. “My friends get so mad at me that when they hate someone, I’m always the one who talks them out of it, gets them to admit that people are mostly just misguided.
“”The thing is, these people who are running the country into the ground are so… evil that in order to get people’s attention, it seems to require that I amp up the most negative parts of my personality in order to persuade readers, and it affects me.” (Like being an exorcist, I suppose.)
Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies.
–Matthew Fox
I come from a verbal, sarcastic family and although everyone’s much kinder than we were when we were young, the habits are still in there. Blogging brings all that out again and it’s something that, given my druthers, I’d rather have as a memory. Like Shane, I thought I’d hung up my guns forever.
This is especially hard on me because of a little something I like to refer to as “The Cosmic Fuck.”
A few years ago - October 3rd, 1999, to be exact, I had what they call a “religious experience.”
I’d been praying, but it was more out of utter desperation and bitterness than devotion. After a devastating breakup, I was truly at the end of my emotional rope, and I finally let go of the illusion that I could figure things out. I couldn’t, and I was drowning. Deep down, I knew it.
Writer Anne Lamott (who is what I like to call “a cursing Christian” like myself) says there are really only two appropriate prayers (because the nature of God requires Him to know better than us): “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank You, thank You, thank You.” I want to argue with that but I can’t.
My prayer that morning was somewhat closer to the former variety, something along the lines of, “Dear God, If You could see Your way clear to helping that other miserable shit of a human being to whom I am obviously far superior - because after all, here I am, praying for him when he’s such an asshole, it would probably be a good thing for the world and his future victims. Oh, and if You could make him bitterly regret losing me for the rest of his miserable life, that would be good, too.”
Here’s the thing: I actually thought that was a good prayer. After all, I wanted to help someone, right? But then something strange happened.
It’s almost impossible to describe, and for a writer, that’s an abject admission of failure. I can only nibble around the edges of it, it’s too large to digest. (Psychologist William James talked to a few people, and got a pretty good paper out of it, though.) I suppose if I’d been a different kind of person, I’d have thought maybe I was having some kind of psychotic break or otherwise losing my mind, but instead it seemed I was finding it for the first time.
I’ve done a lot of psychedelic drugs when I was a kid and I’d had a mere glimmer, a tiny taste of something similar but nothing like this. An overwhelming Benign Force filled the room - and me. I remember there was a powerful light that expanded into the entire room, and feeling that I was a tiny particle in some vast, shimmering sea. That all of us, and everything, was connected and that my life until then had been largely wasted on a comical, mistaken notion that it wasn’t.
I remember laughing out loud at the realization. I’d spent so much of my life wanting to be special, trying to stand out and here was a delightful gift: disappearing into something so much larger than myself wasn’t an awful thing. How silly, I thought, that I’d spent so much of my life in terror of it.
There was this overpowering feeling of love that penetrated every part of me, every molecule. I felt this Being’s complete and loving acceptance of flawed little me, the kind of fucked-up person who used a prayer to attack someone she still loved.
Damn.
I thought the whole thing lasted maybe a half-hour or so, but when I looked at the clock later, it was more than four hours that I sat there in this exalted state.
And it didn’t go away for a long time. The experience completely changed me. (For one thing, it healed my heart. I didn’t have any more scores to settle.) It made me, I dare say, a better person. For the first time in my life, compassion was real, not an intellectual construct. And it pervaded my life.
It’s one of the reasons I can’t ever stay angry at people. Because no matter what horrors they perpetuate, I know their evil is only an error, grounded in the illusion of separation from everything else. I know it, because I know it in myself.
The whole purpose of religion is to facilitate love and compassion, patience, tolerance, humility, forgiveness.
–H.H. the Dalai Lama
As the years passed, though, it became much more of a challenge to sustain that pure compassion, that transcendence. Eventually, I had to come back down to earth, where I endured a dull ache they don’t address in the DSM-IV (and remind me to tell you sometime about trying to discuss this with an HMO shrink): Knowing there’s more to existence than the mundane, but losing that sense of direct connection to the Universe. I can’t un-know what I know, but I don’t feel it the same way now.
From what I read by other Cosmic Fuckees, I’m not alone in the longing and yes, even depression that follows when the intensity finally fades. Come back, I sometimes plead. Help me, help me, help me. People who know something about these things tell me most people don’t experience the Cosmic Fuck once, let alone twice. (The implication being, I guess, that I’m some kind of spiritual glutton for wanting more.)
It’s difficult to balance the lessons of the Cosmic Fuck with the so-called “reality” of hardball politics. Our nation is in a fight for its soul, and fear makes us fall back on the same tactics used by the opposition. We tell ourselves we can’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
But such is the nature of the paradox: after all, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Mahatma Gandhi moved political mountains with love. We know it can be done. Why don’t we try? Is there a way we can live with one foot in each world?
Right now, we have only this exploitive, bastardized, politicized and watered-down parody of faith in the public arena - on both sides. It’s so far removed from what I knew that October day.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…
And see, that’s the interesting thing about grace. You don’t earn it, you don’t deserve it. (Its very randomness is what makes it grace.) As I sat there, imbued with divine love, I realized oh by the way, I was a miserable shit of a human being. I was a person who couldn’t love, I was keeping people at a distance. Yet my Cosmic Lover was embracing me, reassuring me, saying, “You just didn’t know any better, that’s all. You know now, so just don’t do it again.” Go now, and sin no more.
I try not to. (Some days are harder than others, but I do try.) And no matter what I write about George Bush or Judy Miller, no matter how angry I sound, I’m still fighting to find compassion for them, too.
Think compassion, grasshopper. Compassion.
Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for sharing your experience with us. Your words, arising straight from your own experience, ring true and bright. Yes, love lies at the core of who we are as living creatures. That realization leads one to oppose the degradation of life, of what we identify as evil. Paradoxially, we often find ourselves with the choice of using the tools of violence to oppose that evil. I don’t have the answer to that paradox, except to recall the sense of love that was the origin of awareness, and to trust the subtle strength of love to penetrate hearts.
“It’s one of the reasons I can’t ever stay angry at people. Because no matter what horrors they perpetuate, I know their evil is only an error, grounded in the illusion of separation from everything else. I know it, because I know it in myself.”
That’s a good way to be. Wish I could say that.
Have you ever read ‘A Course In Miracles’? The sentiments you express here could have been lifted straight from that book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_course_in_miracles
I’ve got some PDFs if you’re interested.
I don’t understand why you think you have to be “angry and hostile” to blog. I mean yes, you have to be “angry” about a war that has killed tens of thousands of human beings, or a response to a hurricane that left hundreds more dead and hundreds of thousands homeless, and you definitely have to be “hostile” towards those responsible, not no angrier nor more hostile than you “should be” in “real life”, as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t do religion, so I’ll leave that for others. But I can add:
Smart+snarky+liberal = SEXY
Suze,
Happened to me, too.
Short circuit
there simply must be a short circuit in my brain. a blown breaker. something. i have a lot on my mind. monkey goes into [minor] surgery tomorrow. i’m having major tremors in my hands. not just the shakes, but really strong tremors in both hands, but …
Susie, what you experienced sounds very similar to the Zen phenomenon of Satori — a sudden blinding, liberating flash of enlightenment brought on by a spiritual, emotional or intellectual crisis.
It happened to me at about age 18, but only that one time.
Thanks for telling us about this.
BTW, it’s entries such as this that set SG apart from all other blogs.
After reading this, I’d guess you’ve got at least three books in you. I predict an interesing journey.
A powerful recounting. Thank you for sharing so personal an experience.
I suspect that this is what being “born again” or “attaining enlightenment” or “[choose the appropriate phrase for the tradition in question]” is actually about.
As opposed to what seems to happen to those who boast of having been “born again.”
(I mistrust those who boast.)
‘99 was a bad year for all of us, I think
[we don't even want to visit the fifth redhead (the half Irish half blackfoot who dyed her hair black) incident, but as I recall I torched up a fatty and moved on]
August 1999 was the Grand Cross eclipse in fixed signs, and the shit hit the fan for just about everyone, it seems.
http://www.planetwaves.net/another.html
And a shaman emailed me today to say that there’s another big something-or-other alignment (once in 26,000 years) coming up next week.
So Iz, what is it?
I’m reminded of what Georges Gurdjieff said about prayer; someone asked him, does prayer work? He said: If you mean, can you get something you want by praying? No, not the way almost everyone does it; but if you prayed in the proper way, it might produce changes *in you* that would make the thing you desire possible.
A very nice side of you, Susie.
Susie, I don’t know who you are or where, but I can sympathize.
The thing about folks like us is that we feel deeply. And others just … don’t.
I have no understanding of the people in the current administration, but I think I know a little about you, and it’s good.
beautiful post.
beautiful writing. re-orients my thinking/feeling toward our common human essence.
somehow your words grant a degree of separation from my anger with these scoundrels and the core of my feeling/being.
i have had this experience as well. this experience is the source of all of our creative intentions, hopes, and dreams.
peace is not only possible, but present, in every moment, eternally and reliably. surrender to it is the challenge we all face.
the day after 9/11 i had an epiphany of sorts and i began an experimental movie i have just finished. you can see exerpts from it at the link below.
http://www.imaginarymuslims.com
thank you for your courage and hard work.
it is worth it, it is essential to the Beauty of our species and planet that justice be sought and truth be spoken
(blogged).
C.S.Lewis wrote a book about it, “Surprised by Joy.”
Yes! Those of us who have been blessed with the same awareness of the infinite that “knowledge” not the old cliche, ” I believe in,….” it’s a realisation a meeting up with an old friend,that all encompassing love which is inside of us and everywhere else.
The knowledge that whatever we’re going through now is irrelevant in the
field of time and space.
That loving voice that say’s, “it’s OK my daughter or my son, never mind, this pain will pass”
Hot damn I could go on all day attempting to describe the feeling and never come close.
But I’m with you and I understand.
As you said it’s hard to keep it fresh as this ugly world pushes it’s way back into our existence.
Peter Gabriel nailed it with his song Solsbury Hill.
“Son, he said, grab your things, I’ve come to take you home”.
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[...] This was the question I was struggling with when the Cosmic Fuck came to call. And when all that light and warmth filled my heart, I knew then that what felt like such grievous sins to me (the person on the receiving end) were only mistakes. Expecting someone to be capable of more than they are is akin to expecting a two-year-old to know how to drive a car - it’s simply beyond their capabilities. (Or mine, for that matter.) [...]
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