Embracing the Lotus: A Long Journey to a Reluctant Enlightenment

By Gregory

This is a first-person poetic narrative by a successful middle-aged man, concerning a long spiritual journey. It began when he was twenty-seven, just getting traction with his engineering career, and was awakened from his ego-unconsciousness by mystical experiences that inspired him to scribble out reams of poetryand meet his Muse. Subsequent career demands induced him to deny the mystical experiences, quit writing poetry, and fall back asleep.
For two decades he was comfortable in that sleep, but during the third, the emptiness of his successful, ego-life and bouts of depression induced him to wake up enough for him to realize there was something fundamentally wrong with it. After many hours of depression and deep thinking about his life, he realized that he had to regain the sense of meaningful wholeness he had felt when in those mystical states and writing poetry.
This allegorical poem is his attempt to describe that struggle to wake up out of his long ego-sleep, regain his mystical wholeness, and through the act of writing this poem, make peace with his betrayed Muse and explicate what he learned during the process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Mar 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781504391047

Gregory

The author, firstly, is a shaman, and only secondarily, a poet. Embracing the Lotus is the culmination of a four decades shamanic journey deep into the Mystery, a journey that Joseph Campbell elucidated in his masterwork, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The act of writing it represents the stage of the journey Campbell labeled, the Return. Like all shamans, the author lives in two worlds: the mundane world of our material, ego-reality, and the world of the Mystery. The details of his journey in the ego-world are too mundane to record, while its counterparts in the Mystery are too extraordinary for belief. What he learned on his journeythe ideas, insights, revelations, and understandingsare contained in this poetic work and represent what Campbell labeled the Boon, the raison dtre for the whole, life-consuming process. Importantly, the authorin the words of Carlos Castanedas shaman/teacher, Don Juanhas lost his shields, has lost his normal human defenses against psychic and telepathic noise, and like many shamans, chooses to remain anonymous.

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Copyright © 2017 Gregory.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-9103-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-9104-7 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 03/23/2018

Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Prologue

Petal One

Petal Two

Petal Three

Petal Four

Petal Five

Petal Six

Petal Seven

Petal Eight

Petal Nine

First Bolgia

Second Bolgia

Third Bolgia

Fourth Bolgia

Fifth Bolgia

Sixth Bolgia

Seventh Bolgia

Eighth Bolgia

Ninth Bolgia

Petal Ten

Petal Eleven

Petal Twelve

Petal Thirteen

Epilogue

Afterword

Call it by any name,

God,

Self,

the Heart,

or the

Seat of Consciousness,

it is all the same.

The point

to be grasped

is this,

that Heart

means the very core

of one’s being,

the Center,

without which

there is nothing whatever.

Ramana Maharshi

Dedication

For—

Geoffrey Aaron and Michael Brendan,

whose bright

Heartshine

lit my way during

the first years of my long journey

to a bigger understanding

of Spirit.

For—

Jade Alyssa and Taylor Paige,

whose bright

Heartshine

lit my way during

the latter years of my long journey

to a bigger understanding

of Spirit.

For—

Charlotte Frances,

whose bright

Heartshine

induced her to most generously

alleviate some of the poet-poverty

endemic to my long journey

to a bigger understanding

of Spirit.

Foreword

"All the proofe of a pudding,

is in the eating."

William Camden, 1605

Preface

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched

With a woeful agony,

Which forced me to begin my tale;

And then it left me free… .

Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coming into this particular body, and being born of these particular parents, and in such a place, and in general what we call external circumstance. That all happenings form a unity and are spun together is signified by the Fates [Moirai].

Plotinus

When all the souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of his life and the fulfiller of his choice, the daimon that he had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of his lot and choice, and after contact with her, the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make the web of its destiny irreversible, and then without a backward look it passed beneath the throne of Necessity.

Plato,

Republic

There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli.

According to the capabilities of the reader, books have their destiny.

Terentianus Maurus

Prologue

The Flower Sermon

One morning the Buddha led his disciples to a pond for a teaching session. They sat on the ground, awaiting his wise words. Instead of speaking he walked into the pond and after pressing the palms of his hands together in front of his heart and bowing to a lotus flower in the ritual of Namaste, he gently pulled it out. Its roots dripping water and mud, he held it up. They all silently gazed at the beautiful blossom while awaiting their master’s profound words about it. However, none were forthcoming, and they all stared at him expectantly—except Mahakashyapa, who smiled. After nodding to Mahakashyapa, the Buddha carefully replanted the lotus, bowed to it in Namaste, stepped out of the pond, bowed in Namaste to his disciples, and walked away.

A Buddhist Legend,

paraphrased by Gregory

Satori

"…. looking into one’s nature … .This acquiring of a new point of view in our dealings with life and the world is popularly called …’satori’. It is really another name for Enlightenment.

D.T. Suzuki

Petal One

Young, so young

had I been, all those so many years ago,

in that season of my life,

when—

all yet lay before me, like an exciting

mystery novel awaiting to unfold and enthrall

my ego as I lived the writing of it;

when—

my youthful delusions of omnipotence enwrapped

me in their thick cloak of invincibility;

when—

my delusions of pope-like infallibility allowed me

to believe I could make no mistakes;

when—

no obstacles were too tall or too broad to hinder

or thwart my cherished dreams of success,

status and wealth, nor all my best laid plans

for the achieving of them;

that early

one soft, high summer eve, during the

the twenty seventh year of my carefully planned

and predictably unfolding life,

during that

pivotal year for all of us, when we believe

we are rounding the bases after hitting

a walk-off home run, but in truth are fleeing

the Cerberus of our true selves while treading

a crumbling ledge on the precipice of

ego-delusion that towers over the black and grasping

Abyss of Fate,

that is our true adult life;

that pivotal year, when, as too-often happens

to those of us, who with even the most careful of

soft-treading feet on that crumbling precipice, weighed

down as we are by our back-straining packs

filled with—

the massive tomes of all our personal, familial,

and cultural demands and limitations;

filled with—

the lead ingots of all our tendencies to

thoughtless and youthful excesses;

filled with—

the fool’s gold of all our youthful delusions

of omnipotence and immortality,

all of which can but pull us off balance, can but

cause our feet to slip and slide on that trickster-cliff

of ego-folly, while the Cerberus of our true self

drives us on along that ledge, and the

Abyss of Fate

is constantly reaching up with its black, brawny arms

and scrabbling at our slip-sliding feet

with its long, sharp claws;

that crucial year

when just as I was so youthfully and delusionally

certain

that the Saturn V rocket of my perfectly planned

and carefully constructed life was ready to blast off

towards the moon of all my cherished dreams

of material success and social status,

I was overwhelmed

with a strange and potent inner need to go

for an out-of-character walk along

a quiet rural road outside of the small mining town

where over the last six years I had been

diligently working at building the foundation

of what I hoped would be the towering edifice

of my cherished and hard-studied-for career,

first,

as a mining engineer,

then,

as the eventual superintendant of one of the larger

mines of the many owned by the

huge mining company that employed me,

while at

the same time fulfilling my vows to

love and to cherish

my beautiful wife, Joy, as well as love and perform

my paternal duties to our two young children,

though of late,

and most unexpectedly,

all of that which I’d cherished so dearly, and for which

I’d planned so well and worked so hard,

had most strangely been

filling me—

with a soft-gnawing sense of dissatisfaction;

filling me—

with an ever-burgeoning feeling of emptiness;

filling me—

with undeniable and disturbing intimations

that my precious job was no longer

a protective cocoon for the emerging butterfly

of my dreamed-for life,

but a tough and thickening eggshell containing the

late-hatching chick of a fierce bird of prey

that had been incubating in an unknown nest

in some hidden recess of my being.

And as my feet seemed to move,

all on their own, down that rural road,

I unexpectedly found myself enjoying that quiet and

bucolic stroll, becoming instantly enthralled with the

striking sight of the huge, red-westering sun slowly sinking

into the soft horizon-haze and casting long,

diffused shadows across the road;

but no less

striking and magical was the intoxicating scent

of the ditch-growing sweet clover blooms wavering in the

wandering breezes, of the soft flutterings and chirpings

of small birds foraging amongst them,

of the swaths and clumps of the many kinds of grasses

of varying heights, their heavy heads tugging

their slender stalks into graceful arcs;

and of

the myriads of other varied and colorful wildflowers

that decorate all ditches at this fecund time of year,

till finally,

I came to a large farm with a bright blue

mailbox at the entrance to the drive, the words

I. MESTESSA

carefully and fancily painted on it in bright yellow letters,

informing all who looked at it just who the important

person was who owned the big, many-gabled

farmhouse, its new white paint glowing a soft rose

in the reddening light of that slow-settling sun,

a magical light

that was also setting aglow the two,

huge weeping willows in the yard of flawless,

close-cropped grass, their ground-trailing branches

arching gracefully and swaying seductively

in a soft breeze,

while to the right of that large and impressive house,

loomed a huge barn, newly painted the traditional burnt-red,

with its fascias and window trims painted a bright white,

a colorful array of blooming hollyhocks growing

along its sturdy foundation of mortared rocks, and with

its new, shining-metal roof glowing a soft red

in the enchanting light of that

slow-settling sun.

A wooden, white-painted windmill

towered above a collection of red-painted, white-trimmed

outbuildings nestled between the house and the barn,

the evening breezes too soft and desultory

to set its grey metal blades moving.

A huge-crowned elm

that looked like monstrous green fountain, its dark

leaves erupting skyward before cascading

in ground-touching cataracts that gentle swayed to the

soft breezes, towered almost to the height of the peak

of that barn, its living existence surprising me, for most of its kin

in the area had already succumbed to the ravages

of the Dutch elm epidemic, which had turned

them into stark, leafless skeletons.

And stretching from that

huge barn now glowing an even deeper crimson

in the horizontal light of that red-glowing sun, and down

to the road where I was standing and breathing in

that pungent, organic odor endemic to every barnyard,

—and not minding it a bit!—

was a large, green-grassed, and delightfully

buttercup-sprinkled paddock in which half a dozen horses

of various colors, heads down, ears flicking, and tails

swishing, munched their evening meal,

while three others,

—one a stunning, white-maned, white-tailed Palomino,

his muscles rippling under his sleek, golden coat—

stood at the new, white-painted wooden fence running

along the road, their broad white blazes glowing in the

ever-reddening light of that slow-settling solstice-sun,

as they intelligently, inquisitively, ears flicking,

and tails swishing, watched me.

And just as I was turning away

from this very soothing and entrancing scene,

intent on continuing my walk down the road before me,

I heard, just off to my left, and above me,

the familiar and mournful

cooowhaah, coooo, cooo, cooooo …

cooowhaah, coooo, cooo, cooooo …

of mourning doves,

and looking towards that sorrowful sound, I saw a pair

of them perched close together on a sagging telephone wire,

and after gazing at them for several minutes while

listening to their soft, sad cooing,

I noticed,

almost directly beneath the long sag in that wire, a

mostly-overgrown road branching off from the main,

while beside it was a small and weathered sign on a leaning,

weathered post enwrapped in flowering vines, stating

that it was the older version of the road

I’d been walking down.

And no great powers of deduction

did it take to figure out that it had been abandoned

on the building of the new road

that I was walking along, which, as it stretched out

before me, ran down a gentle slope before shooting arrow-straight

to a tree-lined river, which it crossed

over a massive cement bridge.

And no less

than had some strange and potent

inner urging

sent me out walking along that main road,

a now stronger

inner urging

induced me to turn my strolling steps down that old road

that had been abandoned on the building of the new,

with my initial steps taking me underneath that sagging wire,

sending those two doves flying off,

their wings making that familiar whistling noise,

which sounded loud and startling in the

red-glowing, evening stillness.

And instantly glad I was

that those two doves had drawn my attention

to that old road, and that I’d given-in to that

inner urging,

for with my first step along its over-grown way,

and with the cessation of the wing-whistling

of those two doves, a most

strange, profound, and timeless

S    I   L   E   N   C   E,

the likes of which I’d had no memory

of ever experiencing before, swaddled me like

a newborn in a blanket of cotton batting,

and so startlingly loud was that

strange, profound, and timeless

S    I    L   E   N   C   E,

that I could but stop, and in utter amazement,

listen to it,

though as I listened, I heard a soft,

soothing, and indefinable

buzzing

filling, not only my head, but my whole psyche,

followed by the sense

of …

of …

of …

what Alice must have felt on following the

White Rabbit down his hole, for when that strange

buzzing

stopped, there again was that

strange, profound, and timeless

S   I   L   E   N   C   E,

though it lasted but a swaddling short span of seconds

before a delightful panoply

of natural sounds supplanted it, and as

my footsteps, quite of their own entranced volition,

carried me forward, I noticed, with utter amazement, the

wonderfully delicious absence of all

the mechanical noises I’d theretofore unconsciously

accepted as an integral aspect of my daily reality,

and as well,

just as keenly noticed a profound and uncanny

alteration to my perception of time—

no longer

were the seconds of my existence hitched together,

nose-to-tail, like railway coaches full of the passengers

of the experiences of each of those seconds,

but had become like shadows that landed,

one-atop-the-other,

never accumulating in a pile,

never connecting the experiences of the former to the latter,

never weighing down the latter with the

memory-baggage of the former,

but always

being a single, weightless, and utterly timeless

N    O    W,

that much as it could be sliced into the seconds of remembered

experiences, when not being thus sliced, remained that

delicious, comforting, soothing, and utterly timeless

N    O    W.

And besides that

uncanny sense of timelessness,

everything about that old and abandoned road

felt

different and strange,

felt

more alive, more serene, more meaningful,

while the colors of every object my startled eyes settled upon,

appeared

clearer, deeper, richer,

than anything I’d ever seen before, while each object

subtly glowed with a strange and entrancing light, a

Living Light

that melded with a subtle but omnipresent background

Living Light

that I somehow knew to be nothing less than the

Matrix of Meaning

that all sentient beings are capable of tapping into

and gaining sustenance from, which I was

so delightfully feeling, and which, in some strange way,

I knew I was seeing,

not with the mundane vision of my

outer eyes,

but with a magical form of seeing of a pair

inner eyes

that I was not aware I possessed until

that strange and enchanted moment.

But most startling of all,

was that all those objects felt like they were

alive,

felt like they were intensely

conscious,

and were looking back at me with the same

interest and wonder

with which I was looking at them,

while flitting and dancing amongst all those living

and conscious objects, appeared to be

a host of very incredibly conscious

Beings,

that I could, for but the most fleeting of moments,

just barely see with that magical seeing

of my inner eyes,

Beings

who seemed to be telling me that this enchanted

world I’d stepped into was their

Garden,

and that it was their job to tend it during the months

of warmth and growing, and that I was always welcome

to visit both It, and Them, but only if I did so

with respect and in a state of

openness and humble reverence.

But however alive

those Beings felt to me, they were so strange

and ephemeral that I could not long dwell

on their existence, nor totally believe they could

be as real as I sensed them to be,

so though I mentally acknowledged their existence and

their right to their dominion over that magical realm,

which I so powerfully sensed I had entered,

I focused my wonder-expanded attention on all

the very alive and inner-glowing

trees and bushes and ferns and wildflowers

growing in the small and gloaming-gloomy wood

that I was strolling through.

Though not just

the organic and living things of that stunningly alive

wood were filled with that startling sense of aliveness,

with that

Living Light,

that emanated from absolutely everything,

even the dead—though once alive—things, like the

giant, rotting stumps of the red pines that had erstwhile been

the towering masters of it,

to the inorganic things,

like the rusting hulk of an ancient truck sadly sinking

into the rising duff of that forest floor, which though it had

once swiftly and noisily roamed the roads of the area,

it long ago had been reduced to little more than

a silent planter,

for along with a the bushes, wildflowers, and grasses

growing around its rusting and tire-bereft rims,

a white-barked birch

grew out through a hole in its roof,

that old truck, and other supposedly inorganic things

appearing to my wonder-struck inner eyes, to be

scintillatingly alive with a sense

of …

of …

of …

what I could not then have even begun to articulate

with my literal and limited engineer’s mind,

but only much later learned, in my readings on the subject,

to be what that great, pantheistic poet,

William Wordsworth, called

Celestial Light;

[If you take the time to read his masterpiece, "Intimations of Immortality

from Recollections of Early Childhood," you can save yourself the trouble

of reading this poem—he’s an infinitely better poet who says what I am

trying to say in a lot less words!]

what the venerable and famous mystic,

Meister Eckhart,

called

Istigkeit,

which translates as

Is-ness,

and which he most dangerously, for his medieval,

Church-tyrannized, heretic-torturing-times,

tried to characterize with his brave and heretical words,

"Where there is Isness, there God is.

Creation is the giving of Isness from

God. And that is why God becomes

Where any creature expresses God."

and which,

in later readings on the subject, I discovered that the Buddha

had millennia-ago taught about,

Such-ness, or Tathata, or Buddha-nature,

or

Ultimate Reality,

but which back in those youthful days of my blissful

ignorance and unfounded arrogance,

immersed as I was,

both in my busy and practical engineers life, and in

that unexpected experience of

Celestial Light, of Istigkeit, of Is-ness

I had no words for it at all, not that my inarticulateness

on the subject concerned me,

for I was more than satisfied just to revel in the

powerful feelings of

wonder, peace, plenitude, and meaning,

that it filled me with, though accompanying those

rich and enthralling feelings,

was a faint and distracting disquietude, for it all hinted at

the existence of a vast, hidden, looming, and ego-annihilating

reality,

that was as far beyond the pale of anything my

rational, engineer’s mind could conceive,

as were the two tiny moons of Mars beyond the scope

of what my two, normal eyes could see.

And while still pondering that

strange, disturbing, and enthralling sense of

Is-ness,

that profound, bewildering, and entrancing sense of

Such-ness

that filled those things,

a force that hardly felt connected to my volition,

compelled my steps to carry me out of the deepening shadows

of that wood, and into the bright, open farmland beyond it,

where I had no choice but focus

my entranced attention on the swaths and clumps

of the many varied and very alive,

Istigkeit-glowing grasses,

ranging from calf-brushing short ones,

to crown-arching high,

with some still in their fecund efflorescence,

which not only filled the air around them with a

variety of sweet and subtle scents

that I could smell with an intensity and clarity

that I’d never before experienced, but also created

the effect of lovely green, or tan, or russet mists as they

stood tall in the soft, pollinating breezes;

while others,

having fulfilled their procreative imperatives,

arched gracefully and delightfully under the weight

of a startling variety of burgeoning seed-heads,

some like green or tan bottle-brushes,

some like flags, or feathers,

some like delicate pine trees, and

some like bushy foxtails,

the sheer variety of them startling and enthralling me

almost as much as the incredible sense of the

vitality, of the Is-ness,

they possessed.

Though mixed with these

entrancing clumps and swaths of breeze-swaying grasses,

were the countless varieties, colors, shapes and sizes

of the bright and inner-glowing wildflowers

that were too numerous to describe,

save for the startling Easter array created by

a swatch of deep purple vetch twining through a clump

of bright yellow buttercups,

though even more entrancing than the sight of those

lovely flowers, was the sense that I got from them,

that they were all

jumping up and down

with excitement over my willingness to pay attention

to them, each seeming to want to tell me

about themselves and their properties and powers,

quite unlike

those grasses, which, as they silently swayed in gentle,

living breezes, gave off the sense of possessing

an ancient wisdom too profound

for me to understand, and driving home to me why

the poet Whitman named his magnum opus,

Leaves of Grass,

and suddenly!—

as if to drive home that point, a playful Zephyr swirled

out of nowhere, shaking and swaying

all the grasses growing in tall clumps, while creating,

in the ones growing in thick, supple swaths,

the sense of waves undulating across an expanse of

green, or tan, or russet,

but always very alive, water.

And as fast as that playful Zephyr

arrived, it moved on, giving me the distinct sense that

I’d just been visited by the powerful spirit

of the great Poet himself,

who still being the inveterate wanderer he’d been

in his incarnate life, had places yet to go, things yet to do,

and didn’t have the time to linger,

leaving me even more convinced that there was

a level of

aliveness and consciousness,

a level of

intent and meaning,

inherent to this old and abandoned road than ever

I could have imagined prior to my walk along it.

And no less!

there came to me the sense that all of those things

we tend to thoughtlessly accept as nothing but

dead and inert matter,

things like—

rocks, rusting tin cans, toppled road signs;

things like—

the sagging, tangled lengths of rusting, vine-wrapped

wire stretching between rotting, weather-roughened

posts half-hidden by thick, arching geysers

of heavy-headed grasses;

things like—

an iron-wheeled and horse-drawn hay rake, long ago

abandoned and now slowly rusting to its inevitable oblivion

not far from that rusting, oblivion-destined fence with

its rotting, weathered, and oblivion-destined posts;

things that—

my rational mind kept telling me, as my ever-strolling

feet carried me along that old and abandoned road,

were dead and inert;

things like—

the row of skeletons of the anciently-planted Theves poplars,

several of which had been struck by lightning,

or just broken in half over the decades, but most of which,

barren of leaves as they now were, still towered in a

straight line behind a collapsing and grey-weathered

stretch of cedar-rail fence,

and behind that phalanx of erstwhile arboreal soldiers,

clustered the remnants of the ancient homestead that long ago

had been so laboriously constructed by the farsighted pioneer

who had planted those poplars to guard it

from blasting winds and drifting snow,

nothing now remaining of it but the pile of rotting logs

that had once been a homey cabin for that

intrepid soul and his family,

while to the right of it rested the rugged stone base

of what must have been the barn, its timbers and planks

long ago having rotted away, or been scavenged,

while leaning against that old stone base, half hidden

in a clump of sparse-blooming hollyhocks and

arching grasses, were several weathered, spoke-sparse

wagon wheels, the wagon, like its owners, long before having

gone to earth,

all of these either dead or never alive

things,

continuing to give off the very distracting sense,

to my inner eyes,

of being absolutely

alive,

continuing to give off the very distracting sense,

to my inner-eyes,