My nephew died suddenly in the Fall of 2023. And in the previous year and a half we had been assisting our neighbor next door in many ways, due to her rapidly deteriorating memory. It got to the point where the State judged that it was unsafe for her to be living alone, so she was moved to a memory care facility. At the time my nephew died, her house had been vacant for a couple of months but was still full of her belongings. These two events had me think that I did not want my wife or children to have to clean out all of my stuff if I, too, died suddenly. I did a major purge, tossing all sorts of stuff from closets, bookshelves, and the attic, and emptying electronic devices of pictures and old emails, keeping only what I was fairly sure that I would want in the, possibly short, future. There was also one individual who I needed to apologize to for a long-ago, very intense argument right before she moved to another State, and I did so. This entire process was very lighten-ing, and the sense that I may leave this place at any time has continued to grow since then, and this has been particularly acute in the past few months. Several weeks ago, I felt the need to create a contact list of the people who I wanted to be notified if I did depart that my wife did not have contact info for or, in some cases, even know. I printed a copy and showed her where it was.
I described this briefly in a few online groups that I have long participated in. In the last one I stated that I felt “complete” with this life. The use of that word had a real finality about it. Almost immediately, I felt amazingly joyful.
For my entire life of deliberate spiritual practices, some 51 years now, I often struggled with the question “What the f*** am I doing on this planet.” In the earlier decades, I would often feel like I was strapped the front of a fast-moving freight train and could only see the track directly in front of me. So, I almost always knew where to put my foot next, but had no idea where I was heading. This was totally frustrating, but I could always feel the direction toward my unknown destination and rarely lost the sensing of it. In the same way, I sense this state of completion. It’s just there, present.
This sense of being complete has brought to the fore a true sense of freedom, since there is nothing that I have to do, to want or to be. For a couple of days it felt like joy was bursting through the top of my head and outflowing everywhere. A cascade of insights have followed, which have expanded and become a bit too complicated to include here in their entirety. But I’ll start with the portion that feels coherent enough to share, and that relays an overall sense of the journey to this state…and that begins a long time ago.
The experience of separateness was ever-present when I was very young. I suppose that sad and lonely were the common labels that I had for myself back then. Regardless of what I may have called it, it seems to me that that feeling extended back before my development of language. I would describe it now as being compressed by an overload of sensory experiences that created a kind of boundary between me and the world around me, despite living in an active household with my parents and five siblings. We all did get along reasonably well so there were no enormous stressors, though I found out much later that my parents were barely scraping by financially.
I remember waking up one summer morning thinking “Another endless day. I hope I make it. But how will I make it through an entire lifetime of endless days?” When I was around 6 or so, I heard about something called “retirement” and I longed to be retired from that day until I did retire, one day before turning 65.
By my early teens, the inflows had, for the most part, subsided. And if they did begin to emerge, I could usually block them out by deliberately staying busy until the incursion faded away. Focused attention, on anything, pushed them into the background. In my later teen years, marijuana and hallucinogens provided me with a few friends who were a stabilizing group for me and they kept me from feeling quite so alien. And the drugs were also a way to slowlyreacclimate to those non-ordinary experiences, though at that time I was not relating them to those earliest experiences. To keep it short, I started doing yoga in 1973 and weened myself off of the drugs, as the impact of my yoga practice bore fruit in the direction of my unknown destination. I continued cultivating this way of sensing, and over just a few years I came to be experiencing my existence here as the constant flowing of energies, though I very rarely spoke of it. I was luckily introduced to the “est training” in 1975, and used both it and yoga to explore, clean out, and develop different aspects of my psyche and being. I continued my explorations with other inquiry groups and practices, and continue to do so to this day.
Yes, I am heading somewhere with all of this.
At my youngest brother’s wedding reception, I was talking to my new sister-in-law and my mother. I don’t recall what I said, but my sister-in-law looked at my mother and said: “Has Justin always been so serious?” Her response was: “Justin was born serious.” That was not the word that would have occurred to me as a child, but it did aptly describe the space that I inhabited back then. And at some point, in my 40’s I think, my mother, with a kindly hint of exasperation after some comment that I made, said: “Justin, you were as old as the hills the day you were born!” In that moment there was a deep, silent sense of its truth. But things were beginning to lighten, ever so slowly, over time. I had met my dear wife at the yoga center where I had been living, and was still participating. There had been an immediate sense of swirling motion that rapidly became falling in love, that became a deep sensing of relatedness that still exists today. Our two children followed and inserted an ongoing vibrant joy into our lives.
Overall, what I am seeing now is that my life appears to have been on a slow, but steady, trajectory from a dense gravity and that seriousness, towards today’s lightness and joy. The recent statement of completion has put a period at the end of that journey. It feels like a real freedom from any purpose, direction, or intent in this life. And now there is often a widening of my attention sphere, which slides over some gap into a space where perception is present…of a clear, pristine, and empty space, while I am wide awake in the world.
I will now weave a very brief summation of the last few years of this journey to completion, using selected ideas that I have presented in past posts.
On the Love side of the love/joy oscillation, I’ll start with some lines from Love, Joy and the Observer:
In my experience, Love and Joy are experiences of motion and are reflected in Being and Becoming. Love is the motion that I experience moving, metaphorically, towards the depths of Being, Unity, Oneness, Singularity. In me it most often is evoked by a sense of deep resonance with a particular person within whom I sense a shared energetic home that brings me back in the direction of my original separate sense of self, and perhaps beyond…The depth of resonance with a particular person, or sometimes a group, varies the strength of the gravitational energy that pulls me towards that locale. The farther back in my particular evolutionary journey that resonance lies, the greater the gravitation, thus the greater velocity of that motion, the greater Love, that the person evokes in me. Love is not, as I see it now, that frequency range itself, but it is the motion toward it.
With love as the “motion toward” and the end point as a sense of deep relatedness, I bring you back to the loneliness of my youth. Back then I often sensed a loneliness in others, perhaps because of the space of quiet solitude in which I mostly resided. But I was sensing a resonance with that place of deep quiet in them and though it was not always apparent in their observable demeanor I could clearly feel its presence in the background. I don’t recall experiencing a “moving toward,” perhaps because I was so embedded in the energetic state of quiet that there was no distance to traverse. But when people were actually experiencing sadness, I could listen to them in such a way that it seemed to relieve their suffering to some degree. Today I might describe that as “meeting them where they are,” and thus I provided an experience of relatedness that appeared to leave them more at peace. It was not uncommon, with the few friends that I had, that they would open up about their current dilemmas or suffering. But it also happened with people that I did not know so well, and sometimes with relative strangers. I was an open and willing listener for the weary. And perhaps because of that space where I tended to dwell, I attracted those who needed an ear. I always felt better at seeming to have soothed them, but it also seemed to anchor me more in that weighty region of sadness.
On the Joy side – also from Love, Joy and the Observer:
If love is the motion of an individual towards Unity, or its resonance within another, to me Joy is the motion of the individual towards the Unity, the One, the Singularity with and through the Many.
On the Many, I will point to the post I Love Therefore I Am:
“It certainly seems that I am the We of those I love and who love me, both the living and those who have passed on. I am sure that it extends beyond them but it certainly begins with those with whom I most naturally resonate. I am a fluid singular I that in some way is that We, as our resonances are always entwined.”
And lastly to Integrating the WE:
So, I’m now seeing that before I could consciously recognize that I had always been “Integrating the We” of them, I had to have integrated myself to some degree. I had to do the work of extracting what was not essentially me in order to get close to the range where essence-to-essence resonance would be the norm and I could then see them in me, and as me. Time has also clearly played a part in that. But now, as I bring them all in, I am enhancing this I to be more whole, in the acknowledgement of their contribution to this I. How many will I be able to include as sustenance to the WE that I continue to become? It seems like the more of the essence of this emerging WEcosystem that I bring in, the more folks I include into the I/WE-ness of which I am aware, the more accessible my affinity is, that agape, to reach out and sense the joyful selves of others in my environment right now. I can then actively invite their energies into this evolving I/We and gift back to them the vibrations of this enhanced Self to which they have contributed. And note that they too are composites of relationships accrued in their life’s journey and thus the vastness of the ever-interacting WEcosystem becomes more obviously intertwined. The more Selves-aware I become, the more Self-aware I become and the more Selves-aware all of the WEcosystem becomes.
I often don’t know where these essays will end up when I start writing. What comes to me, as this one has been revealing its words, is that my journey through this lifetime, from mostly heavy seriousness to mostly light joyfulness, always with ever-present oscillations, may actually have been my primary intent for being here. I have allowed myself to be inhabited by many lovely souls, and have marinated in their essences, which has presenced my love for them and the joy that their presence in my life has evoked in me. They are now part of my WEcosystem, as I am part of theirs, hopefully becoming more joyful and Selves-aware. It thus may be that the entirety of my experience on this journey is this internally experienced energetic, thus outwardly invisible, aspect of my purpose. The intensity of that train analogy above, tapered off a bit after I started the blog, then disappeared almost entirely when I finished the book a year later. So perhaps all of these writings were suitable enough expressions of my internal energetic experiences, manifested out in the “real” world, to satisfy my intent in that way too. And it declared itself complete. I have always said that sharing is one of the fundamental traits of very young children, and therefore innate to human beings. It brings them, and most often those around them, joy. And whether or not my writing has brought joy to those who have found it, any insight that loosens the gravitation of the heavy and solitary will assist in the lighten-ing that will more fully let the joy in.
I have always known that writing provides me a relatively stable, though temporary, lily pad on which to balance for a time – while attempting to reach out into the next unknowns and bring forth their words, from this one’s perspective, as it transits them on its way to some grander fullness of joy. And it appears in this moment that I have transformed from the childhood space of a deep, dark and solitary-singular, to the wide open spaces of a composite-singular, dancing amongst the joy-filled fields of the Many. So, I now see my writing as my external contribution to the joys of the larger WEcosystem, the Many.
I am done
Frequency Soup
RIP