Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
THE PROCESS OF SPIRITUAL AUTOLYSIS has three basic parts: Seeing what needs to be killed, killing it, and cleaning up the mess. Seeing is really the first stage of killing, but the third part is just as important as the first two; you have to clean up after yourself. You must process the loss. That’s not a rule like no sweets before bed, that’s a rule like gravity. That’s how it works.
Every step in the process of awakening has all three components. A step begins with seeing and understanding. That seeing and understanding becomes the very thing that destroys the thing seen and understood. But it doesn’t end there. Just because you killed something doesn’t mean you killed your attachment to it. Seeing the thing is the beginning of killing the thing, and killing the thing is the beginning of detaching from it. The third step isn’t therapeutic; it’s the point.
Great! My fucking attic is haunted! My mind is haunted, my thoughts are haunted. I am haunted; possessed, plagued with demons! My mother is here! My unborn children are here. My future is here, my dreams. Everyone who means anything to me, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, is here. How do they all fit? How could I have not seen them right away? Of course they’re here. This is where they are. My attic is me, there is no place else. Whether or not they have physical counterparts out in the real world is meaningless to me, just as the fact that I might be a real person in the real world is meaningless to them. Perception is reality. I am possessed by my own perceptions; not by things and people, future and past, but by my perceptions of them. These are my connections, my attachments. Maybe all I really am is the sum of all these connections, these fearful longings and graspings. What is an attachment anyway? It’s a belief, that’s all. A strong one maybe, but just a belief. And yes, Jed, I know: No belief is true.
The pen is mightier than the sword, isn’t it Jed? You wrote about a sword, but that was just a metaphor. It’s the pen. Spiritual Autolysis is the power of the pen, which is the power of the mind, the power to see, to see clearly. Yes, I will kill these people inhabiting my mind. I will kill them by clearly seeing the attachments that keep them here. I can see those attachments now. I can see the emotions at work and I am starting to see them for what they are. I am starting to understand of what stuff this prison of self is really made.
You said it in the first chapter. I never paid enough attention to that chapter. Now it seems like the foundation upon which the rest of your book sits. Fear. Of course! There is only fear. Fear disguised as love. Fear disguised as morality. Fear disguised as compassion. Fear making the unreal seem real. We’re animals, right? Designed to survive, to protect our young and to keep our species going. Fear drives the whole process. People are like prisms hit by that single beam, which then splits into all the emotions of the rainbow. We are fear refractors.
You asked, “Who really wants to go where this road really leads?” I know that the answer is no one. No one could ever choose this, not knowingly. It’s a certain impossibility. You’re right, it’s like getting hit by a bus. Physical suicide would be a bad hair day next to this. There is no amount of courage that would permit someone who understood this to choose it. But no one knowingly chooses it. This isn’t spirituality. This is emotional carnage. There’s nothing spiritual about this.
I was in the city a few days ago and I stopped in at the bookstore to pick up a book by Bernadette Roberts. I went to the New Age and Eastern Religion aisles where I’ve spent so much time and money over the years, but this time I was overcome by sadness and disgust. Now that I’m here, now that I know what I know, I am seething with an inexpressible contempt for the whole of what passes itself off as spirituality. Close your eyes and repeat a mantra? What sort of pathetic joke is that? Be present in the moment? What the hell for? Don’t entertain negativity? Are they kidding? I have turned into a fire-breathing dragon of negativity. I can’t seem to entertain enough negativity! I am reborn as the child of negativity. I eat, breathe and sleep it. I exude it from my pores. I radiate malice and ill will. I am a wrathful destroyer, and what they call negativity, I call the purifying flames. Negation is the process. The various forms of spirituality and religion are not the path to truth, but the antidote to it.
I’m not done with this journey and I may never be, but I can damn well see who’s never taken it, who doesn’t even know it’s there to be taken. My altitude increases daily and I seldom take the time to look back, but visiting the bookstore caused me to do so; gave me some perspective on how far I’ve come and what I’ve left behind. So many books, so many teachers, so many paths. Hasn’t anyone noticed it’s not working? I guess I’m just naive. Who cares what’s true as long as it sells, I guess.
I wish I could stick a finger down my throat and just puke out all that sugary spiritual sickness that I spent so many years ingesting. That’s what I’m doing now, I guess. That’s why I have to write this; to purge myself of this poisonous contempt. Teachers? Teaching what? What is there to teach? There is no teaching, there is only doing. You’re either doing this or you’re not. All teachings exist for the sole purpose of not doing. I see that quite clearly. The whole thing seems grotesque to me now. There is only one book, Jed, and you wrote it. I was also shopping for a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita, but I know that the whole of it is contained in your epilogue; The unreal has no being, the real never ceases to be. What else is there to say?
Something strange is happening. (The understatement of the century!) It’s hard to describe, it’s still very unclear. In fact, being unclear is what it is. Dissolving clarity. It’s like the lines I’ve always seen distinguishing one thing from another, or separating types of things from other types, are fading. It’s like looking at earth from space and seeing one world; no artificial boundaries. It’s as if I’ve been seeing divisions that didn’t exist all my life, but now I’m not seeing them, and I’m noticing the difference. Is that weird? It seems weird. Hard to tell what’s weird anymore.
For example, people. I can no longer really distinguish types or traits. Rather, I see characteristics common to all in slightly differing proportions. I don’t understand it yet, but it definitely marks a new way of seeing and understanding the world around me. It’s like there are many songs, but they’re all variations on the same few notes. People, though, seem like variations on only one note. When I was in the city, it wasn’t like I saw many different people, as usual, but the same person many different times, in many different guises. The outer layers of personality, clothing, appearance and gender hardly register with me anymore. A person is a person. To know one is to know them all, like leaves on a tree.
Waste and conservation is an example of parts of my old self just sort of disappearing. When I arrived at the cabin I began considering arrangements for recycling, about which I have always been conscientious. But now, the very idea of waste – the idea that anything can be wasted – seems absurd, non-sensical. That’s how it dawned on me.
Unlike much of this process I’m engaged in, some things seems to be changing without my volitional input or conscious awareness. Things are changing and I’m not even aware that they’ve changed until I look and see that something’s missing, something’s not what it used to be. And then comes another little surprise; no reaction. No sense of loss, no emotional response. This happens repeatedly; once or twice a day I notice that what I once considered an important part of myself is simply gone and forgotten. Beliefs, preferences, opinions; popping silently like soap bubbles, leaving no sign of having ever existed. It’s not that I’m reevaluating or seeing things in a new light, but that I’m disappearing one small piece at a time. It’s not shocking or upsetting. It seems like it should be a big deal every time it happens, but it’s really a non-event. It’s actually kind of funny. It’s as if all my life I considered it my primary duty to fit in, to belong, to get along and be part of everything, but now that’s not my job anymore and that change alone has completely reconstituted what I think of as me.
What I’m writing now is more like journaling than autolysis, it seems. I’m exploring the changes that are occurring rather than using the writing process to make them occur. I’m all over the road with this. Still, I think it’s worth paying attention to and examining the part of the process that seems to be taking place behind the scenes. I’m so focused on the things I’m working to change that I could fail to notice that the person I am is changing, or maybe just falling away, fading away, burning away, I guess, and in some cases, simply vanishing.
I spend hours and hours writing letters to people I know; my mom and dad, sisters and friends, former bosses and teachers. Usually to people who have some power over me which I did not consciously grant, and which I must now consciously revoke; people who influence my thinking, who inhabit my mind. What is it but a form of possession if I’m in almost constant internal dialog with people not present? How many times a day does this happen, and on how many levels? How deep does this go? What is a demon but an inhabiting influence? These non-me presences in my mental space are malignancies and I’m using the pen like a scalpel to remove them. I write these long messy tirades, page after page, longhand, and it works. It gets this crap out of my system. Rumi said the elixir was hidden in the poison and it’s true! I write these letters and I just keep at it, twenty pages, thirty pages, until I have managed to purge out whatever poisons were infecting me. I’d never send the letters, of course. They’d lock me up for sure!
I look back now on those early days when I was still with you in the house and I can’t believe I survived. Funny that the First Step is in a way the final step. The whole thing, the very thought of it, was so insanely massive that I was crushed under the weight of it. I couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t see any possible hope of resolution. I couldn’t eat, could barely sit up. I was simply devastated by what felt like the most unbearable grief. I knew there was no possibility of turning back, of undoing what had been done, of going back to the state of blindness that had been my life up until that point. I couldn’t see any way of going forward, either. No way out.
What kind of madness was it, I wondered, that allowed me to contemplate a journey that had only one possible destination? A destination far beyond anything ever even contemplated by people I love and respect; my parents and grandparents, my teachers, my sisters and friends. But more! Beyond everybody! Beyond the greatest minds and hearts mankind has produced! Beyond presidents and philosophers and heroes and poets. Beyond Shakespeare and Einstein, Lincoln and Churchill, Bach and Beethoven! Simply by taking the First Step I had already left most of humanity behind forever. That, or I was plunging into the severest sort of insanity. I will be exploring far beyond anything imagined by the greatest explorers, beyond anything our astronauts could even contemplate. Forget death, this is the undiscover’d country. This is the final frontier. I was going beyond my own species! That’s not metaphor or hyperbole, that’s literal fact! How do you wrap your mind around that? The very idea was so utterly, perversely, egomaniacally absurd that I would have been able to simply dismiss it with a bitter laugh except for one thing: It was true! I knew it was true. I tried and I tried, everything I could think of, but that was the inescapable fact. It was true. No other way to say it. My time as a human being was over. Now it was time for something else. I was now on this road and somehow I would walk it until it killed me. I couldn’t get off if I wanted to. But what’s more, I knew where it went. Right from the very first seconds of this journey there was something in me that understood the whole of it.
You only spoke to me once during that week I spent at the house, Jed. I don’t think I came out of the bedroom much. I came down at one point, looking like hell I’m sure, and there you were, sitting in the library, reading. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t ask anything. But you answered. You spoke without looking up. “The way humans reckon age is incorrect,” you said. “Most people stop developing at a very early age. What looks like a seventy year-old is generally an eleven year-old with fifty-nine years of experience.” That’s all I remember you saying, but that’s all I needed. That was the key that opened that first door that threatened to crush the life out of me. You didn’t have to explain. You didn’t have to elaborate. If you had come and said that the day before, I wouldn’t have understood it, but by the time you spoke to me it was as if the whole thing had built up inside me and just needed that one little tweak and this aching mass of thought and conflict and loathing and heart-crushing fear resolved itself in a flash of clarity and a door opened where there wasn’t a door before and the thing that was about to break didn’t break.
That wasn’t the end of it, of course. Next, I found myself trying to expand that simple concept into a fully realized understanding of human development. Whether or not it’s a new idea that most people are developmentally in their pre-teens, it was new to me and I had the urge to understand it in fullness, so I wrote it out and explored it for myself. That’s when I got off my self-pitying ass and started taking positive action. I revised my opinion of everyone I knew, one person at a time, based on this new understanding, and saw them in the light of their developmental ages. What an amazing process! I saw that everyone had stopped believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but really hadn’t gone much further than that. I didn’t have your book back then, Jed, but I remember when you told me that people were just children on a playground to you. I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now.
Obviously, it doesn’t end there. That was just the first week. The larger process actually took many long months and continues still. The larger process had to do with cutting away. Detaching. You can say it like that and it looks like just a word – detaching – but what it really is is so brutal and so remorseless, so cold and surgical, that no word or words can approach it. I wrote literally hundreds of thousands of words during this period in my attempt to process myself through it, but it seems like something that can never really be fully accomplished. I use the word detaching, but it’s really about dying. No spiritual teaching that talks about non-attachment has any right to. None of them are talking about this. “Cultivate a sense of detachment,” they say. A sense of detachment? What planet are they from? They have no idea whatsoever what detachment means. They seem to be talking about detaching from your desire for a BMW or for Mr. Right. Try detaching from what you love! From what you are! From everything that characterizes your membership in the human race! And that’s just for starters.
The process of awakening looks like it’s about destroying ego, but that’s not really accurate. You never completely rid yourself of ego—the false self—as long as you’re alive, and it’s not important that you do. What matters is the emotional tethers that anchor us to the dreamstate; that hold us in place and make us feel that we’re a part of something real. We send out energetic tendrils from the nexus of ego like roots to attach ourselves to the dreamstate, and to detach from it we must sever them. The energy of an emotion is our lifeforce, and the amount of lifeforce determines the power of the emotion. Withdraw energy from an emotion and what’s left? A sterile thought. A husk. In this sense, freeing ourselves from attachment is indeed the process of awakening, but such attachments aren’t what we have, they’re what we are.
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