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Dear Reader, I had many serious disagreements with the work of Adi Da; especially the ways in which he felt justified to perpetrate tremendous violence in the name of spiritual awakening. Still, a few of his concepts have had a catalytic influence on me and deserve to be clarified and reinterpreted in the non-hypermasculine context of our Waking Down work. From this perspective, I hereby take one such concept, "The Desert of Experience," and offer it to you in a way that, hopefully, will honor the unique incarnation of Divine Being that you are. One more note. This essay is short but dense. I suggest you read it slowly, and try to metabolize each sentence before moving to the next.
The Futility of Experience From one perspective, the entire realm of Experience is an empty desert, a meaningless field of endless alternations between pleasure and pain in a desolate and impersonal sea of quarks and neutrinos. But this is not the whole truth of the realm of Experience. It is, however, the truth of a particular moment in the awakening process when the Being is deeply Rotting out of hypnotic enthrallment to the romantic experiences and adventures of (your name here). Perhaps you have begun to encounter The Rot. It is usually characterized by a feeling of utter hopelessness, which cannot be assigned a reason. The Rot is the ultimate existential crisis of the Being as it journeys from unconscious enmeshment in the field of experience to Conscious Freedom crucified in Life. If you are indeed enduring that most sacred passage of The Rot, welcome. Here in our work of Whole Being Awakening, we understand and welcome you and your genuine experience. Perhaps you have grown weary of spiritual experiences. If you say, “Who cares about one more glorious experience of the Divine? None of that ever brought the fundamental transformation I’ve been seeking all these years,” we will understand. If you say, “I can’t make myself go see one more spiritual teacher, or give myself over to one more spiritual teaching; I’ve had it with giving myself away,” we will understand. This is a place where such things can be spoken and truly understood. If you are Rotting, you are being prepared to understand what I mean by The Futility of Experience. This Futility is not based in the fact that experience exists in the field of change, and is therefore impermanent. Rather, the Futility of which I speak is born of the realization that, until now, your entire motivation to engage in relative existence was for the sake of avoiding pain and yearning for happiness. Which is our natural and helpless motivation until it simply is no longer. The motivation of avoiding pain and moving toward happiness is destined to self-destruct because it is a fruitless process with a fruitful outcome (the Rot). One can never fully avoid pain because pain is an intimate and inextricable aspect of Being. Nor can one ever attain complete happiness, because there will always be a limit to the height of any wave in the ocean of creation. The search for endless, perfect samadhi is doomed. Contemplate these words for a long moment: The Futility Of Experience. The Futility Of Experience. The Futility Of Experience. Are you connecting with that? This very phrase invokes an awareness of the larger field of Existence in which Experience itself is only one aspect. It suggests that there is something beyond Experience. It suggests a larger process in which our previous engagement with Experience has run its course. Are you feeling that? You see, as long as you have not even begun to question or doubt your entire relationship to the field of Experience as a whole, you are still (from the perspective of your own future awakened consciousness) fundamentally enmeshed in it. But sooner or later, after you have had enough Experience, you will inevitably get bored with it. You will begin to put it down in the same sort of way that an infant tires of its rattle. It no longer holds any basic fascination in itself. You are ready to notice something larger. The Futility of Experience. Are you bored yet? © 2002 Ted Strauss |
