Finishing Jan’s book.  And waking up more fully, more deeply.  Dawn taking root.  The holy fallout which I read about in December, serendipitously at the height of a period of suffering, is marking the end of it (see Holy Fallout).  And I’m grateful for every moment of it, as excruciating and destructive as it was.  In fact I’m delighted.  It transformed my mind from the inside out, all the way to the core.  Finally the seeds of luminosity that have been falling on my consciousness again and again can implant and germinate and grow, maybe permanently.  I have that hope now.

Scars Healing

In late November, when this whole “dark night of the soul” was building momentum, I went to the Zen center and heard a story about a Chinese Zen master, Zebo, who challenged prevailing authority.  He was caught and struck with a whip until his body was covered with deep lashes.  He died a few days later, sitting in meditation.

Later that same day, I turned on the television to a scene from Matrix Revolutions.  A soldier was confronting the machines directly in battle.  They swarmed him and covered his body with deep lashes.  He died moments later.

Challenging authority, getting mutilated and killed.

About a week later, on December 3, I had a really crystal clear lucid dream.  One of those striking, joltingly clear dreams.  I was walking along a chain link fence and on the other side was a shoulder-high platform where victims of torture were lying in blood.  They were surrounded by police lording over them.

One man, between the ages of 45 and 50, was lying on his side and chained down.  He was covered head to toe with deep, bloody lashes.  He was trying to hold up one of his legs, because his thigh was striped and he couldn’t bear for it to touch the ground, but he was shaking all over from agony.  His face was red and swollen.  He stared off into space, glassy eyed, and his mouth was open and quivering.  He looked like he was in unspeakable pain.

I put my arms out across the chain link fence.   He was too far away for me to touch him, but I imagined healing light going out from my hands.  I started doing tonglen, a practice of breathing in the suffering of others and returning only light.  All the pain hit me.  It was unbelievable!  Unspeakable.  Just as the pain hit me, he noticed me.  A moment of clarity, of perspicacity, washed over his face.

“Thank you,” he said, and I abruptly woke up.  I remember exactly how he looked, every line in his face, every detail of every scar, more vibrant and real than waking life.   It was very intense.

On December 9, a crescendo of suffering prompted me to admit myself into the hospital.  I entered a psychiatric ward where I soon met an older woman whose body was covered with self-inflicted lashes.  She looked strikingly like the man in my dream.

She related her suffering, particularly how the domain of psychiatry seemed to be perpetuating it rather than healing it.  I shared my perspective with her.  Six months away from earning my PhD in psychology with a focus on emotional suffering and a background in clinical research, and years of experience with the problems in psychiatry gave me a lot to say about the doctors and staff lording over her, turning her suffering into disease, creating an image of defectiveness and fragility where wholeness and unseen strength belonged.  This time, I was close enough to put my arm around her.

I wrote about her in Cut Off: The Role of Compassion in Social Death.  Weeks later, I bumped into her in a gym, and she was doing really well, glowing.  She hadn’t been back in the hospital since.  She expressed deep gratitude to me, but it is I who must thank her.  She gave form to something inside me and allowed me to do my healing in that way, by giving it to someone else.  She was a secret healer.

Earlier this week, I met a woman at the Zen center who had a similar experience with psychiatry, and she gave me the name of a book, Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science: A New Model for Healing the Whole Person, by Ann Wilson Schaef, who bills herself as a recovering psychotherapist.  I cannot wait to read this book.  Schaef believes, as I do, that the prevailing paradigm in psychotherapy is often more damaging than healing, and she explores a new way of enabling others to find release from suffering.  I like her phrase “institutionalized co-dependence.”

Last night, I dreamed of her again.  This time, all her scars had faded.

Strange Ecstasy

Things that once made me wish I was no longer alive are instead filling me with giddy pleasure.  It is very hard to describe.  There is just this interdimensional fissure opening up in every moment that links the events of the present moment with everything else ever, and in full context, in full contact with the currents of light and energy and presence behind our ordinary interactions, everything is really freaking wonderful.

I mean, I ate the Rubik’s cube!  (See When the Unshakable Peace Gets Shaken.)

Suffering, Enlightenment, and Love

Some final words from Jan’s book strongly resonated with me last night:

Enlightenment is sometimes preceded immediately by the dark night of the soul.  The pain becomes so terrible that there is nothing the person can do but give in to the overwhelming thing: sit in the presence of it.  And then–once in a great, great while–in the presence of extreme suffering, transmutation takes place…

Then somebody will come to you, and they will look wounded, and you will remember that same face in the mirror…

And you will stay awake nights with your arms around them inside your heart that is the whole world, and you will take their pain into your heart that can take it.  It will pass through your heart like water through a sieve, and as their suffering passes through you, you will feel it burn like acid.  Then no more.  Then silence, and stillness, outside the lie that time is.

~ Jan Frazier,When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening

I love everyone, everyone reading this, everyone in my life, and everyone who has left it.  I don’t care what you’ve done (or what I’ve done) or what you think of me.  I love you anyway.  I don’t want or need anything else.