I Have Come Alive--Then I Died

LETTER TO ME:

Dearest Ed,

I have been reading all your Notes and they have truly been speaking to me. I just feel like sharing with you, i feel deeply understood by your words.

I am 47 years old now. For the last 12 yrs, I lived with a man, a good man. We started like any couple, fully in love, but gradually, with all the pain that comes from an attachment ( he flirted a lot), i grew to witness it and reached a place with him where we became like close platonic friends. There was a lot of pain but it all went away; i painted, i wrote poetry, i head a team of 26 physical therapists. I was busy and contented, I thought.

Till one year ago, where a young man, 22 yrs, joined as a therapist and we fell in love. I think i must have suppressed so much, i did not realize how many beliefs i had lived with, but they all went out of the window. I told my partner i had fallen in love with this new person and left his home with a suitcase. He was very hurt but there was no holding me back. I was ready to live with this 22 yr person and we even tried. In fact, my boss, for whom we both work (in different capacities) asked us to shift together to another city.

I went crazy. Nothing and nobody's judgment on this mattered to me. But soon i found out he was not as much in love with me or ready to live together as I was, and it all broke down. I became like a 20 year old, madly in love. Now he has gone. I live alone and work, and it was revealed to me, a past lifetime with this person where he died 2 weeks before our wedding. So much is the same this life.

I know better, i understand and even feel the truth of things, as in, the joy and peace of not needing anything; but for some reason, i just cannot let go of this person.

 I was like a spiritual person seeking freedom (I was initiated 15 yrs ago),  but became so dead.

And this person 'kissed alive my dead days' as i wrote to him. And now i am in deep anguish and a feeling of such loss. He has moved on.  I feel so deeply alone and deserted. Some days, there is a quiet acceptance of all things but mostly a deep and unfathomable craving to be with this person. Just trying to live. My heart feels so very broken, so shattered.

I tend to be very intense and very vulnerable in love. And i think i have scared away this person. Even though i 'gave' all the freedom to him. I never held him, never made rules for him, I even helped him to decide to meet an old girlfriend of his whom i knew he felt like meeting.

Feel like a schizophrenic person - one part of me longs , pines away for him and the other part of me made choices that helped him go his way. I don’t even know how to explain this.

Don't know how closure can happen here. How does it all heal? I just felt like talking to you. Something so kind in your face.

much love,

MY RESPONSE:

You have made a tremendous discovery.  Much of spirituality ends in deadness.  After 15 years of spiritual practices, which I assume means meditation and reading about non-attachment, and going into Krishna or Christ Consciousness or such, or to Para-Brahman, and being in a love relationship that died, you had died.  Then, like me, you were “kissed alive.”  Now your heart is torn open and you feel great anguish, self-doubt, second guessing, wondering what you did wrong, depressed and angry.

WELCOME TO THE HUMAN CONDITION!!!!

You see, you are not dead anymore.  Spirituality and a very conventional "marriage" had buried you into a conventional deadness.

Now you are alive but don’t know whether you want that either.  It feels like life really sucks now doesn’t it?  You know of course you can let go of that love you had for this man after a while and return to a living death, or accept that he awakened you to a vital, if painful new life.  

You see, the pain you feel now is the reason most people escape into spirituality, they want to be attached only to some permanent part of themselves, like the I Am “beingness,” or to God, or something else that will not leave them, that will not hurt them.

Or they become like Buddha, searching for seven years to get to a place where there is no suffering, no death, no attachment, just the peace of emptiness and the Void.

However, I think you really like the passion you feel now versus the deadness of five years ago.  You know the peace and deadness of non-attachment, and eventually you can the same peace and acceptance even while being totally passionate, for you will find that the peace of emptiness, of the Void, can contain all the pain and passion you feel now.  You think they are separate and incompatible.

But, once you know emptiness, once you know the peace of having seen oneness, once you can hold steady in meditation, you learn how to relax in it and let all the passions blow through you, sustaining and energizing your life, and yet holding steady during all the emotional storms.

It is all a matter of identification.  What part of your experience, what part of your Self do you identify with?  The personal drama, the impersonal witness or emptiness, or both?  Or neither?  You can learn to accept all and identify with all or part.

Eventually, the passions will begin to lessen as you age, and by the time you are 80 you will be talking like Nisargadatta, where he feels his personhood, passion, and aliveness is all gone.  He was preparing for the great emptiness of death.

In the meantime, you have much passionate life to live.