The Dilemma of the Quiet Ones

Many stay in the background at Satsang, or stay even further behind just reading this blog.  They may never have a real teacher an perhaps never a deep love relationship, for such are too frightening and challenging.  What to do> Love them, accept them.

Sometimes they find it easier to establish closer relationships with other members of the sangha, and that is their entry to returning to love.

TO ME:

Hello Ed,

My tendency is to sit in the back row, like I do in satsangs with you, not saying anything or risking engagement. With your help, I have located the sense of happiness, which is sometimes blissful. However, I usually cannot maintain it in the presence of others, at least not for long. I experience that happiness "internally", but not expressively. There is no love in that bliss, except perhaps in a generalized, non-personal way. So even these experiences of happiness become justifications for not engaging others. That happiness seems to decrease to the degree I engage. My paranoid reaction to this is that I believe people "take" or "block" that happiness to the degree that I engage them at all. Solution: stay in the back row.

Likewise, I don't know how to engage you authentically or how to ask authentic questions, if there are such things. I've written to you previously, mostly about "the void behind", which was my preoccupation. I knew even then that I asked those questions wanting not merely a verbal response, but some validation from you or some indication that my question revealed I was special or advanced. Now, I don't feel much compelled to ask questions, as any verbal answer is only just that. But that too provides me the necessary internal justification to stay quiet and remote in the back row, seemingly safe and unseen.

What I'm describing is obviously different than your directive to "shut the fuck up". This is characterological, full of the narcissistic tendencies you wrote about recently. Even though I can see this, I'm left in a bind– I cannot seem to engage you authentically, and sitting in the back serves primarily as a defense against such engagement. I move slightly toward you and then immediately pull back at any perceived slight and take up my customary position. I vacillate between envy of the circle of regulars around you, but then I feel relieved not to have to deal with the relational shit you describe in your recent post. Of course, I do this not only in relation to you, but to all others. (Also, since my computer camera and microphone don't work, I have a fine excuse to remain in the shadows. The many sound and connection problems at  online satsangs also provide good cover.)

I struggle even to stay in the room, much less to enter the fray of relating and inevitable injury. I feel stuck, or maybe I'm unwilling to feel any more vulnerable. I'm at the point where it seems the only viable spiritual path is to sit in the company of a realizer, but I feel that something more is required on my part. I don't want to love because I feel that I only lose love in trying to connect, that energy is only taken from me, and that the happiness I experience must be denied and sacrificed to feed ravenous others. Since this happiness is too precious for me to allow those losses, I remain where I am, feeling my hidden occasional happinesses, my internalized blisses, my private experiences of spaciousness, expansion, and release. But none of these are realization.