It’s been a while. For several months this year, I was walking across Germany and into France. I did it for several reasons. It seemed fun, I was seeking “spiritual wisdom,” and I had nothing better to do. It was a big challenge. It was something I decided to do basically on a whim. After 55 days on the road, I reached my limit. For various reasons, I was no longer able to continue. The week after I returned, I wrote this entry below. It never felt finished to me, and I didn’t feel like I was able to dig back into it. At some point, it faded from memory, and I got absorbed with other things. After spending so much of the last year pursuing a “spiritual path,” I felt blocked in that direction. I threw myself into a materialistic life again. I started doing comedy again, and I pursued other interests. After 2 months of walking 9 hours-a-day/7 days-a-week, a vacation was necessary. Grounding myself was necessary. A change was necessary.
Now, I don’t know what the future holds. The path constantly changes. Life always takes us in directions we can’t expect. Here is the entry I wrote back then, just after I returned to my old life.
A week ago, I had to make the decision to return home to Berlin. It wasn’t an easy decision. In the end, it wasn’t a decision at all. Starting the walk was also no decision. Funny how that works sometimes. More and more often. Not to say I have no agency over my life, but rather that by giving up agency, we become free.
At the end of the tour, I did make a choice. I chose to come home, but I had to make that decision based on the information available to me at the time. For a few weeks, I’d noticed some intrusive thoughts starting to appear in my mind. For more than a few weeks, I’d been physically and emotionally burned out. I didn’t see so many people. Once I entered France, I didn’t speak with many people. I was walking 9-hour days, 7 days per week. At some point, I realized that the timeline for the rest of the tour meant I would have to adhere to that schedule for the next 85 days if I was going to fulfill my commitments in June. Things began to add up. At some points, the intrusive negative thoughts escalated to something approaching paranoid delusions. I found myself confused and dissociated and feeling that the world was against me. It worsened for a few days, then receded, but it destabilized me to the point where I was no longer confident in continuing. Ultimately, my health was more important to me.
On my last day of the tour, after I decided to head home, I opened my last Yogi tea to read the message on the teabag (and drink the tea).
Wisdom is Listening. Foolishness is Telling.
Something I will tell meditation students, or random strangers who indulge me in conversation, is that there is no need for us to suffer. Many people hold onto their suffering. They feel comfortable in it. It does give us a degree of safety. It is the known. It gives us identity. Who would we be without it? The unknown is scary. What if there is nothing out there in the dark? Who am I without the trauma that formed me?
At some point, the tour became my suffering. I thought there was value in following a difficult path and doing something challenging. I thought it would lead me to some greater understanding. By taking on something greater than myself, I would make myself greater. Or at least understand myself more, my limits, and what I needed to survive. Well, I did do all those things. Last week, I reached a limit that I decided I was unable to surpass.
Zen is simply reacting to whatever is here in this moment. I saw the information before me and decided that the best decision was to listen to what I had been telling others. This was wisdom. This was acceptance. This was letting go of attachments.
This walk was no longer my path. At some point along the way, it became just another attachment. Another idea I thought was the truth of reality, but was actually just an illusion. There is something totally freeing in letting go of our suffering. What is beyond the edge of knowing? Liberation. For me, liberation from a physical, mental, and emotional challenge that I had known for weeks was not enjoyable, and did not accomplish what I hoped it would accomplish. But I was resolute to continue. Who would I be if I didn’t?
Well, I can tell you. I feel remarkably free. A friend expressed to me a month or so ago that they wished they could leave their life and work behind to seek an adventure, just as I was. I can dispel this notion for you. A walk like this is a full-time job. There IS something valuable in a walk like this. But if you seek a freedom different from your work-life, you will be quickly absolved of this illusion. In some way, that is the wisdom that it offers you. Repetition and the mundane serve to break you down and bring you back again and again in a way that we usually seek to avoid with a newsfeed or an inbox. Surrendering again and again to this does serve a spiritual wisdom. Can you make friends with the present moment, even if it is boring? What about if it is actively painful and tedious? When you make that a full-time job, at some point, slowly, it becomes a bit oppressive. I guess that was when I began to break. At some point, I could no longer make a space for the challenges that it presented to me.
I don’t really believe the purpose of life is suffering, or pain even. Why is it that the simplest wisdom is always the pill that’s hardest for us to swallow? “It couldn’t actually be that simple,” you intone. In the end, our life isn’t about what we do with it, as much as it’s about the people we share it with. What’s the point of spiritual enlightenment if you don’t have love in your life? I thought there was something noble about trying to give away a life I loved to try to pursue something outside of myself. That’s the thing about spiritual enlightenment: there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to achieve. You can’t find spiritual enlightenment outside. It’s not outside the self. There is nothing outside the Self. You don’t find it by looking for it. You find it by removing the illusions that separate you from it. When you realize that this is it, you realize you only need to be here.
If you could only break down the invisible barriers that you have placed around your mind and life, preventing you from living life authentically, you would be enlightened. In effect, everyone is enlightened. It is our true nature. And also, we are mundane. Non-duality is a bitch. Both are true. Neither is true. Those statements do not conflict with each other. Not suffering is not being without pain. Not suffering is being with pain. This is life, just as it is. It simply arises in each moment, and we are merely the space where it is observed. It is always now. There’s no other time. There’s no time at all, actually. This simply is. Always. Never.
In the words of Jean-Luc Picard in the classic Star Trek TNG episode “The Inner Light,” “Live now. Make now always the most precious time.” I recommend watching the episode if you’ve never seen it. Again, it couldn’t be that simple, could it? Could the most essential wisdom be the most frequently shared? I believe it is. In a world where the greatest mysteries in existence will never be solved, we should live our lives as best we can, share them with loved ones, and enjoy them, dammit. In the end, that’s all there is.
That’s everything I wrote then. I wanted to mark it down, to encapsulate it in stone, to make sure I wouldn’t forget it. But then it felt too destabilizing for me to embody it, to sit with wisdom. I couldn’t even really hold it when I returned. To read it now, more than three months later, I’m still a bit shocked that I find it so coherent and soothing to me. I feel like I got it all down, with some exceptions.
The third Zen Patriarch said, “If you wish to know the truth, only cease to cherish opinions.” It occurred to me after I returned that, at some point, I had come to love my opinions about the world, spirituality, and the nature of reality. I had come to see them as dogma. Infallible. Truth. This is not the way. We should always take everything with a grain of salt. The only thing we can know about the spiritual pursuit is that it is, in its essence, unknowable. The only thing we can count on to be consistent is change. At every level of pursuit, our beliefs and ego become more and more subtle. There is no such thing as a “spiritual vacation.”
When I came back, my psychologist told me I was at higher risk for a psychotic break. I guess she was probably right. I was anxious and dissociated, and the boundaries between me and everyone else had begun to break down. I was surprisingly functional, but not very present, lost in my thoughts. These days, I think that in trying to break down myself to understand my true nature, I eventually hit a layer of unhealed trauma within me that became stronger, destabilized me, and caused me to be dissociated and confused. In trying to pursue “enlightenment”, I was trying to destroy my sense of the self. Upon returning to reality, I had to reestablish my sense of self. It wasn’t always a pleasurable process, but it was useful. I learned new tools for grounding myself. I faced my fears. I enjoyed life. It was good work.
Adyashanti said, “To know the truth, you have to be more interested in it than in comfort.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t available to me at the time. We need to be able to expand our zone of discomfort until there is nothing we cannot face. What a profound challenge that presents for us. To face it, we must be fearless. To understand that we truly have nothing to lose. What this journey taught me is that I still have fear. No matter. I still have air in my body as well. The bravest thing we can all do is to admit that we need help sometimes.
As far as the future of me, or of this blog, is concerned. I only don’t know. Perhaps I will write again if I still have things to say. I am not sure. Maybe this entry is a coda. In many ways, it is. I was a different person when I started this blog. I had a different idea about purpose, and I had big dreams about changing the world. I hope my dreams are a bit more grounded now. I needed to come back here to write this. I’ve left many things unfinished in my life, but not this any longer. When I ended my tour, I closed this last chapter. Sorry that it took so long to write about it.
On my final day in France, the owner of the bed and breakfast asked what I would do now that I was going back to Berlin. I didn’t know how to answer that, I hadn’t thought about an “after the walk.” He wished me good luck for my future anyway. It struck me then like a bolt of lightning. I thought the walk had been creating my future, but in many ways, it had been putting it off. It wasn’t until I returned to Berlin that I could begin actually to build it. What a gift. When Picard returns to his old life at the end of “The Inner Light,” he finds that it’s just there waiting for him—a second chance after leaving it behind for good. He’s changed, but he survived. It was the same for me. I slid right back into my everyday, wonderful life here.
Of course, there are many more things I learned on my walk. Maybe I’ll share more of them sometime. But I’m not special. Everyone should pursue their own idea of themselves. That is something that has become remarkably clear to me. Only in our pursuit of discovering who we are do we truly find ourselves. You shouldn’t follow me, nor the Buddha, nor anyone. You are only pursuing yourself. Your good work here is simply being you. And you are already your highest self. I recently re-read Siddhartha by Hesse. He already said it all much more eloquently than I ever will.
“The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect or confined at a point somewhere along a gradual pathway toward perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment. All sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life. It is not possible for any person to see how far another one has already progressed on his path; in the robber and dice-gambler, the Buddha is waiting; in the Brahman, the robber is waiting.
In deep meditation, there is the possibility to put time out of existence, to see all life which was, is, and will be as if it was simultaneous, and there everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, I see whatever exists as good, death is to me like life, sin like holiness, wisdom like foolishness, everything has to be as it is, everything only requires my consent, only my willingness, my loving agreement, to be good for me, to do nothing but work for my benefit, to be unable to ever harm me.
“I experienced by observing my own body and my own soul that I sorely needed sin, sorely needed lust, needed greed, vanity, and the most shameful despair to learn to stop resisting, to learn to love the world and stop comparing it to some world I only wished for and imagined, some sort of perfection I myself had dreamed up, but instead to let it be as it was and to love it and be happy to belong to it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Bye for now.
-Tim
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