Reporting from the Great Doubt n 14 by Avikal
Since a few years I am transitioning from I Am (the witnessing consciousness of pure subjectivity) to Just This (pure not knowing).
In the five rungs of Tozan this seems to correspond with what Tozan describes as Standing on the Hundred-foot Pole. One is looking down into the abyss of complete dissolution.
I know that place of disappearance well, as it keeps unfolding many times as I facilitate my courses and retreats (especially Satori) and nobody is here to speak or listen or act. All happens naturally and organically without a subject operating: just awareness as action. And in meditation and love and many other moments of submission.
And yet I find myself coming back and standing on the pole.
How do I get here? I ask myself. What is the force that propels me back?
Finally, a few days ago, thanks to a particularly intense and revealing sharing with my partner, I saw it and felt it deeply in my bones, in my muscles, in my blood, in my skin, in my core: FURY! And my tens of years of identification and attachment to it…
Fury has been since I was a kid the other side of my melancholy. Melancholy is the shadows of the pain of being reborn and feeling a stranger on this planet.
I remember well when I finally landed here: it was one afternoon in the therapist room in Osho Uta in Cologne, possibly 1993 or 94. For the first time I heard Life telling me, “Welcome to Planet Earth.” And I felt that warm embrace, as something fundamental relaxed inside and I started moving towards the end of the search.
However, as melancholy disappeared, Fury stayed. It continued to burn in my passion, in the intensity of my love for the truth, in my spiritual willfulness… I loved it and nurtured it, unconsciously, at times misjudged it as anger, let it become reactivity, and justification for my love of freedom. And yes, it has been also at the center of my longing for being real, undivided, unique, completely belonging to Just This.
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- Follow the whole series: Reporting from the Great Doubt
Featured image: photo by the author
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