Anyone who attended Saturdays Satsang experiment, please supply some feedback.
How many found what I did valuable to them?
Did it work for anyone? Did it help them feel freer to experience loss, sadness and depression?
Did anyone plunge into those feelings and find comfort or bliss at the bottom? How many felt more or less connected to me as a result?
Realizing the Manifest Self--the Life Force permeating our humanity--and the Unmanifest source from which it arises.
My father died on Father's day. I was just getting ready to call him as I always did on that day, when I received a call telling me that he'd passed that morning. This coursed through me as you spoke of your own father and form being emptiness and emptiness being form.
ReplyDeleteHow many found what I did valuable to them?
ReplyDeleteDid it work for anyone? Did it help them feel freer to experience loss, sadness and depression?
Dear Edj,
i didn't understand all what you are telling but when you were speaking i was submerged by a mixing of very deep sadness and in the same time there was you love who embraced all that !
i was remembering about my father 's death ... when i was fourteen. I loved him very very much and we had a marvellous and fusionnel relation .
But he got depressed and the relation with my mother was more and more difficult . And a day he killed him with a gun when i was at school . Nigtmare ... i could not saw him when he was died so it was like a bad dream that was not real .
During many years i was feeling so guilty to have not be able to see how he was sad and help him to feel better ...
and yesterday that feeling has came back with you ! you seemed so unhappy and i could not help you . it was horrible !
i was thinking perhaps it was my projection but it made me all the day with deeply sadness and burst into tears ...
Today this sadness is always there but less deep and i am feeling again your love presence across it .
thank you Edj
sylviane
Yes, Edji, I identified with you deeply. Like you, I mourn the loss of my younger body. I am 74 now. Who is that old lady in the mirror? Surely not me! My knees hurt. Sometimes I dream about running freely through lovely fields. I mourn the loss of my mother last year, whom I took care of, and of my father, and of intimate relationshps, and of friends, and of preious pets, and of the presence of children who have left home. Even of plants and trees that have died in my yard. I have nine beloved cats. Two of them are 16-year-old "little old ladies" who wander around together, chirping contentedly at each other. Their mothers and grandmothers were mine,too. They can't last much longer.
ReplyDeleteWe need you,Edji, to lead us to the realms of comfort and bliss "at the bottom" of all life's sorrows, because you have been there and we have not. We need to experience that which redeems life in this vale of tears.
Serena
Oh God, I hadn't thought of what it would be like to mourn the loss of a younger body...SHIT...that brings up a lot of other emotions with it. Thanks for the foresight Sylviane.
DeleteLikewise, Lila. I get so much enjoyment from running and climbing and playing around outside with this currently capable body that I can't imagine how much it will hurt to lose these freedoms! And youthful lovers, friends, all of these will go away! That must be so hard and I am feeling some fear of these losses. All the people and things I love must be pulled from my life sooner or later. Such pain in loss going on with this sangha right now!
Delete-rich
You know, there are actually many good things about having lived past ones "three score and ten". A lot of stuff that used to bug you doesn't bug you any more. There's a broader perspective, more patience, fewer rough edges. There's humility and hopefully wisdom and greater compassion. There's the sense that we're all in this together and that we're ultimately one. It is crystal clear to me that my "presence" hasn't changed or aged one bit. It's not even "mine". That's a great comfort.
DeleteSerena
Did you record the satsang ? :)
ReplyDeleteStill plunging...
ReplyDeleteDear Ed,
ReplyDeleteon saturday you share with us how did you lost your father and I was in tears while I was listening to your story.
I remembered the time when my grandfather died. Lately it is a bit easier to remember, a bit easier to talk about him. I could not do it more than 15 years after he left. I loved him so much and we spent a lot of time together. He was 83. He was so strong that I couldn't imagine that he would not came out of the hospital... I did not visit him during his last days and I can't forgive myself since then. It was 20 years ago, but even now my tears are streaming as I writing this letter. I did not say goodbye to him... I was not with him. I did not see him. He did not see me. I was so stupid. It should have been much more important than spend the time with my girlfriend. I am unable to forgive myself at all. Nobody do this with somebody whom he love.
That was the story which I recalled on saturday and it was so deep emotion in me that it was hard to feel the space around it. It is working better now, as I write these words. I feel "I am" now, behind these emotions.
Sometimes it happen to me recently, I feel the "I am" behind the actual situation.
Mostly behind anxiety, I can feel it. It is much more harder when anger or rage arises.
It is a soothing sensation that anything can happen, I am. No matter what it is, because I am.
It is a presence behind this world and in my hearth simultaneously.
Ed, I would like to ask that when I start to listen to myself in such situations which are full of some emotion (rage, anger, anxiety, fear), it is escape from the world or I may do it to feel that "I am", whatever happens?
Somehow the sense of I am is mixed with the current emotions in these situations.
With the gratest gratitude and love
Sometimes spiritual people, whatever that means, want to kill" the personal self, or they use the word "ego," or the phrase "separate self."
DeleteYet it is the personal sense of self that should be most empowered by one's spiritual practice. There is something about loss, death and despair that brings most of us to silence, a deep silence and feeling in touch with that personal self.
Yes, one can find the impersonal/personal root of self in the I Am, which is an amazing partf oneself, but that self is most powered by love for another, loving and needing another, as well as by their loss.
after to be stayed at home for 3 days i was going and walking in the park near . My heart was totally cleaned , empty , like a great space with nothing in it , no feelings but all the peceptions were very intense : color of trees and leaves , light of sun, smells , bird singings . It was like i descovered that for the first time ; very intense physical sensations but no sadness and no love , only emptiness and a great strenght , that one from Edj !
ReplyDeletesylviane