Dress rehearsal for “dark night of the soul” is the best way I can describe what I’m in the midst of. It would be facile to name it depression – the witness in the observatory clearly sees it as the clinging to an identity that is slipping from my grasp. How else can you describe a headlong rush into despair after a profound experience of deep peace and equanimity – the culmination of a day-long silent mindfulness retreat?
A release from the bondage of layers and layers of defenses, of a false self, of my self concept is interpreted by these same prison guards as a descent into the bowels of hell.
My torturous relationship with water is symbolic. “You know,” I blurt, “I am afraid of water.” These incongruous words are uttered as I don a life-jacket to slip into perfectly breathlessly still shallow waters to snorkel. After all, I have kayaked in tumultuous rapids in narrow (read: unrescueable) gorges (yes, while my heart leaps from my chest). And with those words, I slip off the bow into the harbour of Phi Phi island ninety minutes before the tsunami.
It is said that the enlightened beings known as bodhisattvas retain a grip on one desire - that of compassion – in order to remain tethered to this world. One day, Buddhists say, they become gods. They drop the body, drop the mind, drop the heart and dissolve as a wave into an ocean.
More than anything I am afraid to be swallowed up by a vast ocean. I have carved out a ripple I call me and I want to live out that fantasy a little while longer. I carefully patrol its borderland and mend its fences.
The witness smiles knowingly: She is not afraid to be swallowed by the ocean.
No, I am afraid to be the ocean.
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