I Can Has Enlightenment?

Anyone who has ever attempted to meditate has dealt with the concept of “monkey mind.”  The monkey mind, by Buddhist reckoning, is the conscious mind that is always chattering and jumping around, scratching itself and throwing coconuts while we are trying to get our spiritual groove on.

There are a number of ways to deal with the monkey mind; my favorite has always been distraction.  Give the monkey something to do so he’ll sit still – this is one of the benefits of movement-based meditation as well as mantra and chant.  The conscious mind gets involved repeating words, and the deeper levels of the self can step to the foreground for a while.

In the last few months I’ve come to understand myself a little better.  I’ve learned that while the idea of being the enlightened, peace-oozing spiritual guru-nymph is very appealing, I’m just not the type.  It’s one thing to try and improve yourself, overcoming issues and laying down baggage; it’s another to try and rewire your inborn inclinations entirely, to cheat the world out of the self that God helped you fashion for this lifetime.  There are aspects of my personality that I have simply decided to accept and, in fact, to capitalize on, instead of thinking of myself as somehow less-than because I don’t fit into a particular mold.  Molds are useful for cheeses, not so much for people.

I have discovered one very important thing: while I have an enormous capacity for strength and power, I’m also a bit of a toddling spaz, and I’ve decided that the monkey mind metaphor doesn’t work for me.  Yes, my mind can be a howling, poo-flinging beastie, but most of the time it’s much more vulnerable than that.  I don’t have monkey mind: I have puppy mind.

My mind is a flop-eared puppy with big, sad eyes.  She’s earnest, eager to do the right thing, always wants to be involved – but she trips over her own feet, and she’s easily frightened by loud noises and big crowds.  She howls when she’s left alone, and is often desperate for attention.  Stern looks and harsh words make her cower and, when dragged toward discipline by the collar she’s a lot more likely to pee herself and hide than to snap into shape.  She takes a lot of positive reinforcement and gentle persuasion.  She gets bored easily, and when bored, causes mischief and tends to chew on everything in sight.  She has to be gently corrected when she wanders off course; force and anger will do no good, only make her too afraid to try again.

She was a pound puppy, so she’s afraid of being abandoned, and that makes it hard for her to let go and just enjoy life.  Her puppy exuberance is tempered with a fear of being kicked.

She responds well to treats and cuddling – and to activity.  If I want her to stay out of trouble while I’m trying to meditate, it’s best to give her a mantra to play with, some beads to nibble on, or music to sway to.  She doesn’t understand simply sitting still; that’s not her job.  Her job is to do things, to run and play and chase squirrels, to figure out puzzles.  But because she’s young, she doesn’t grasp the fact that she’s not the center of the universe, and that other parts of me have jobs of their own and need her to be still sometimes so they don’t trip over her.

She’s a creature of habit, nervous in strange circumstances.  If she gets used to a negative way of thinking or behaving, it does no good to rub her nose in it.  She has to be given an alternative, a nudge in the right direction, so that she can sniff her way over on her own time.  That way she thinks it was her idea, so she doesn’t fight the change.  Otherwise, well, she can dig her little feet in and refuse to budge.

She also whines a lot.

I find this analogy a lot more fitting for my own personality than a monkey, but also, it’s an image that I can work with.  It’s easier to treat myself with more kindness if I visualize the restless, jumpy part of myself as a young creature that needs care and love rather than an annoying, screeching primate up on a branch.  Yes, puppies can be very aggravating, but you keep working with them because you love them and want them to grow up into good companions, not because you want them to shut up and go away.

I am already too much at odds with myself to set up a battleground in my head.  I’d rather think of my conscious mind as something to befriend than something to overcome.  Every aspect of the self has its place and its mission; sometimes the first step toward balance is just finding a cute fuzzy metaphor.

There is a place within you that has never been broken. No matter what fractures and cracks, no matter what seismic blows have battered your heart year after year after wearying year, within you there is something that grows strong, that stands.  It has never been laid low by storm, never drowned in flood, never frozen and cracked.  It has never burned to the ground, never faded away.  It is that still point in your turning world, it is that deepest part of the heart that makes you the whole and complete child of God, Her perfect beloved daughter or son, and in that place, that place within you that is whole and sound…when you touch that place, you know what God has brought you here, born of this great Mama Earth to do for Her, and for all of us.  Somewhere in that beating, swirling, DNA-dancing core of your being, your ground, your center, your great big silver belt buckle of shining badassery, if you can touch that place, for even a moment, you will remember for just a second, maybe even a minute, maybe someday even forever, what it is like to be whole, and completed, even as you embrace those cracks and call them your ground of being, for you will have touched that within you that is immortal, and powerful, and beautiful, and in that moment, God Himself will lead a standing ovation that here, right here and right now, this person, this soul touching soul, GETS IT.

For a minute, anyway.

But it’s a start, right?

Forget the broken places. Forget dragging those bags of dust around with you.  The broken places had their shot. Do you want them in charge forever? Aren’t you bored with those “not good enough” messages? Aren’t you done being the broken girl?

Go to the source.  Find that still place unbroken in your being and let it speak.

It’s time for your wholeness to speak.

So shut
up
and
listen.

Not all who wander are total flakes.

I don’t like the prefix “ex-” to describe my no-longer-Wiccan status.  Ex- carries with it a sense of severance, like a messy breakup or someone who’s been brainwashed into believing they can “pray the gay away.” When I hear the term “Ex-Wiccan” chances are it’s describing someone who either found Jesus and rejected Wicca, or had it done to them by some kind of overzealous deprogrammer. That’s not to say that connotation is definitive; it’s just how it feels to me.  “Ex-” sounds so terminal, as if I were an ex-parrot no longer pining for the fjords.

I prefer to describe myself as Post-Wiccan. I don’t feel like I chucked the entire religion or suddenly fell in hate with it.  I feel like I evolved beyond it.  I am what can happen after Wicca, not at the end of Wicca.  I am Post-Wiccan.

Of course, saying I “evolved beyond” it probably makes it sound like there’s a line from lesser to greater and that I believe Wicca is somehow inferior to whatever comes next in line, much the way a lot of people think of evolution as a progression upward with humans at the top rather than an ever-branching tree.

Not true at all.  Every person’s path is unique.  All the religions are like villages on a map; you can stop in as many as you want and learn the culture, eat the food, shop in the markets, pray in the temples. You can stay as long as you feel moved to.  You can stay there for life if you feel you’ve found home.  But not everyone will; some people start in the East and end up West, or stay in the same village for life, or become spiritual nomads and wander for decades, content to learn a little here, a little there, and annotate the map with their experiences.

A map is just a map.  Your destination and mine won’t be the same, and your journey and mine certainly won’t.  Even if we both spent a year in the Archipelago of the Buddha, if I picked up malaria and you picked up enlightenment, we’d have two very different years.  The Archipelago of the Buddha is not better than Fort Islam, nor is the cheerful chaos of Wiccaville (surrounded, unfortunately, by many tourist traps) necessarily better than the vast Christian Metropolitan Area, whose towers reach toward heaven despite its seedy underbelly.

And so, my backpack is full of guidebooks and souvenirs from a variety of places, and I have scrapbooks and tattoos and jewelry from brief getaways and long pilgrimages.  (I went to Taoism and all I got was this t-shirt…but that’s okay.)  I’ve got the map open in front of me as I sit in a cafe on the outskirts of Wiccaville, and as I sip my chai I’m considering where to visit next.

A lot of people believe you should settle down in one place and stay there, fully adopting the local traditions and not upsetting the status quo by dancing naked on the village common while everyone else is praying indoors.  If you bring foreign ideas into a village sometimes others will consider them and maybe even try them out, and the village might even change the way it does things…or they might throw rocks at you.  Either way, sometimes it’s best just to pack up and move on.

I think the life of a spiritual nomad is a perfectly lovely thing.  Perhaps it’s too uncertain for some.  Perhaps they worry about the validity of blending so many different ideas and rituals together–they worry that their village culture will be diluted and everyone will be forced to change even if they’ve lived in the same house since birth.  But I have no intention of forcing people to look at my slides of Hinduism; I’ll talk about it if they ask, but really, it’s better if they go themselves.  I was a tour guide for a while in Wiccaville, and I might try it again someday on a different route.

A long time ago I was against eclecticism, because I had seen it used so clumsily by people who didn’t care about exploiting threatened or oppressed traditions.  I wouldn’t advocate just throwing a bunch of practices together without learning more about their origins and treating them with utmost respect.  But I find that if something truly calls to you on that soul-deep level that’s more important than outer trappings, you find that the teachers are there for you, the wisdom is waiting for you.

There’s an old fable known as “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” originally told in India.  In the story six blind men were led to

Cutest. Metaphor. Ever.

an elephant and each described what the animal must be based on what they could sense.  One said the elephant was a wall because it was so broad.  Another felt the trunk and said it was like a snake.  Another felt its massive wrinkled legs and declared the elephant was a tree…and so forth. Not one of the men realized that the elephant was all these things and more.

God is like that.  No one person can see all of the the universe, or every aspect of Deity at once, except by seeking out mystical experience that affords our small human minds the opportunity to open a little wider and perceive a little more.  The goal of spirituality is to perceive the whole elephant, and you can do that starting in any village, using whatever tools that work for you.

So strap on your hiking boots and choose your adventure. Where you’re going, you can even drink the water.