Few of us enjoy being alone with ourselves because nobody likes a liar. Cue cell phone lights and entertainment. Cue talking about ourselves to other people as though we’re relating. More like, if we can convince them we’re real, maybe we will feel it.
We so fear being alone that we shun the actions of aloneness by trying to make them shared efforts, group efforts, communal—if we are at all educated in experiencing from aloneness, that is.
When I talk about my “spiritual” experiences to people who meditate heavily or otherwise consider themselves spiritually knowledgable, I am all but guaranteed to get a response of, “You need to find a guru or a guide who can teach you about this.” It’s clear that the first thing they hear is a taboo being broken, which clouds the rest of what they hear. The disconnect strikes me as particularly funny when I talk about the body spontaneously moving into yogic postures that are based on my health needs and the educated one responds, “Have you thought about taking a yoga class?”
When I say the educated one, I mean all of ‘em. Every single one thus far. All of these “in tune” intellects are actually out of tune and this repeating conversation is a perfect recording for them to hear themselves, but they don’t. Not even when I inevitably respond with, “Why would I take a yoga class? I can turn this on and off at will. If I just shut up for a second, this energy comes to life in the body and does this. I mean, have you ever wondered how those yoga postures came into being in the first place? This is it.”
Falls on deaf ears. Problem one is that I need somebody to tell me what’s happening, because that’s how they think they’d deal with the non-mechanical, would they were to stumble into it, i.e., through the mechanics of insecurity. Problem two is that my personality is such that they find I am not a serious person. If I were more the serious type, I’d likely be revered as an enlightened master, not told to find one. Both are silly, so why bother with the serious face?
Anyone else see the irony in a culture that has evolved the relatability of their mainstream Jesus character to a more relatable copilot than patriarchal overlord, producing rebels who leave the church because of its antiquated strictures for something even more relatable and freeing, only to fall in with the Must. Have. Overlord. mentality?
This same robotic sentiment of the spiritually educated plays out with those well-versed in hallucinogens. When I tell the story of that time I did a “hero’s dose” of shrooms to a psychonaut, even if I think I’ve made it clear that I was alone from the very beginning of the story, they ask who was with me when I took them. And when I tell them nobody, I was alone, the red flags go up because this taboo-breaking subculture has a taboo: you never trip alone. That’s crazy, they say. You always need a “shamanic” guide or a guardian who has done this before. They further, all of them do, inevitably, interpret my experience as a bad trip, which I do not. I wouldn’t know good from bad, having never done them before.
None of this is the case with the uneducated or inexperienced. Talk to them and If they think I’m crazy, it’s me they think is crazy, not my rule-breaking, and they’ll tune out on that basis. But if they’re interested, they’re enthralled because they haven’t programmed themselves not to be.
How different our relationships would be if in speaking with one another we always listened without coloring the communication with our background. When it comes to matters of aloneness, education meant to build you corrodes.
Do you hear that?
Is your inner voice prescribing an argument against it as you read?