wisdom...

When I was in High school my father asked me what I wanted to be “when I grew up”. I told him I wanted to be wise and experience as much of the world as I could. I remember being jealous of him for having fought in Vietnam. It was an experience I knew I would never have. I would never go to war nor would I want to but in my innocence I was still jealous.

It’s as if I was born with Shakespeare’s words, “All the worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players...” instilled in me creating a safety net for my spirit to romp and play, knowing I could always leave the stage by retreating back to my real world, the sanctuary of my inner world. This allowed me to live to emotional extremes knowing that I was not what was happening, that there was a part of me that was always safe, deep inside.

I was a strange kid and would spend hours on my bed thinking or meditating, solving the worlds problems. At the age of fifteen, while most kids were dating or playing sports, I was reading books like the Communist Manifesto or the Koran. I was listening to Chopin, Mozart, and wouldn’t go see an American film if you paid me. By the time I left home at the tender age of eighteen I was ready to gain life experience, never to look back. I have always taken care of myself.

When I was twenty-one I met a man and quickly fell in love (which is often the case for me), he was everything I had dreamed up, (how little did I know back then the ease in which we can manifest) except for one thing, he had a girlfriend but even that was not a problem because they had an open relationship. Where most people would walk away because it was too messy or they thought it was “wrong”, I walked right in, fully engaged intrigued by the complexities of the feelings and interested in shaking hands with jealousy. Jealousy became a close friend and I learned all about her intricacies.

I guess one could say I’ve been an emotional junkie or a life experience junkie but I was always aware of what I was doing and only sometimes did I loose sight of the light. Yes, there have been times I wanted to die and contemplated suicide because this world confused me and sometimes got the better of me but even in that extreme emotion there was so much to learn and to bring back. I know what it feels like to want to die and when someone comes to me feeling that way, I can taste it, feel it and smell it.

It’s funny to think where I am now, where the smallest prick of feeling other than bliss or happiness, sends me reeling inside myself to see what the trigger was and what my ego is attaching to. This is the work. This is the blessed work and brings to mind a passage I recently read in “Autobiography of A Yogi” by Paramahansa Yogananda. It takes place while Yogananda is in search of a guru and he comes across a sadhu, (one devoted to a spiritual discipline) and becomes engaged in a brilliant conversation. The sadhu says to Yogananda, “ I have long exercised an honest introspection, the exquisitely painful approach to wisdom. Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverizes the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers. The way of ‘self expression,’ individual acknowledgments, results in egotists, sure of the right to their private interpretations of God and the universe.”

In all my wisdom, I know nothing and I wouldn’t change it for the world.