The Art of Being Alone (Pt 3): Spiritual Tinder
What do dating, spirituality, and shopping for those perfect pair of jeans that snug your ass like velvet have in common?
They all are a search — that can leave you feeling like a freak that just can fit into anything. Whether dating, dharma or denim — with angst you will wonder: What the fuck is wrong with me?
As a 36 year old bachelor, the process of finding your teacher, tradition or tribe is all too familiar to the world of dating and romance.
Like romance, you long for something to spiritually snuggle with and call your own happily ever after. As a meditator, Vipassana and Maha Mudra have been world changing.
But deep within the being burns an Eros that longs not only for truth and transcendence, but also for love and connection — community and deeper meaning.
Just as that inner child from long ago that was once one with mother on her breast, your spiritual and romantic hearts long to feel cosmicly whole again. For both insight AND a community to call home.
And so riding the tail winds of Eros, the heart and mind begin a spiritual romance that will show we are all living in fantasies. A journey that will lead us to probably the most important thing I have learned: Shamanic Periscopes.
I finally have a shipmate at sea, a 2,500 year old Greek god. Don’t be jealous meaning mermaids. Onwards, upwards, and inwards we go — let’s go Eros!
WANNA DHARMA AND CHILL?
Like romance, some people find their great loves early. Others have to wait and wait.
Some blindly project teachers as Mr Perfect. Some, thinking something is better than nothing, settle and cave to the nagging aches of loneliness. Others, are aversively picky (who… me?).
Some of my dharma friends have found their rafts of a guru or teacher. Others have found their ideological islands of one spiritual practice and tradition to call home. (Things such as Theravada Buddhism, Yoga, “New Age”, Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, or secular Western Buddhism etc.)
Although their practice is not over, their search is over — they have found a lap to relax and rest their heads in. They have found their Sangha or tribe. Like romance or a 5 day constipated load, a great burden is relieved.
*Nerd Note: Interesting anecdote that many masters speak of attaining awakenings while pooping. It’s a cool meditation looking at effort & who is the pooper? or is there just pooping?
This brings me an appreciative joy (no, not just the pooping) for my dharma friends, but if I am fully transparent, part of me is also envious as fuck.
I don’t want to crap on their good fortune to simply jerk off my ego in projection. Nor would I want to trade places with them 100%: their life, their body, their thoughts.
Envy is futile, yes yes we know. But the primal human machinery still grinds away comparing and projecting. Transcending social emotions of fear, anger and guilt to swim in blame and narcisistic shame of “growing”. And yes in all your spiritual awesomeness — subconsciously you can be a mindfully envious prick. Sure, you can suppress it or better yet — see through it.
When you’re a lone yogi, this is the gauntlet you face. You're like that single, alienated, and pitied friend when everyone else is getting married and cranking out babies (wait that’s me right now!).
Evaporating envy, the voice of doubt still arises: Good for them, but is there something wrong with me?
This play of envy and doubt is another manifestation of the sea monsters of uncertainty. They will be a companion one dumps over and over and over again.
Feeling lonely and alienated, the meaning mermaids start to get hotter. And maybe I have just been in a drought at sea too long — they start to talk dirty.
Welcome to Dharma Dating.
Like the insecurities and frustrations of dating (or no dates with prudish eros), the spiritual path is a maze of:
Searching and exploring.
Comparing and judging.
Experimenting and learning,
Aversion and vulnerability.
Projection and love.
But maybe, just maybe, “the one” is out there? Ohh Eros hold me tight, I will be little spoon.
Mystical Misfit at SEA
Ohh how I dream of dry land — of islands to call home... The spiritual path is a misty mystical way anyway — with ups and downs and twists and turns. Buddha the Deadbeat Dad called it the “contemplative burden”. The price for leaving the comforting mainland.
But if you don’t have a home base of ideas and teachers — it can be extra lonely. You’re climbing Everest, but with no base camp. For a stubborn contrarian like myself, this can lead to even more alienation and loneliness.
Many communities provide connection, conviviality, and ritual that sings to the heart. But along for the ride, often is a axial age world views, superstition, and lack of cognitive complexity for the modern world challenges. Or modern spiritual groups have amazing community, but a lot of New Age ’synchronicities’ and hippie dippie horse shit.
But with a tribeless tribe, the contemplative’s burden is heavier. Lonelier. I find myself as an outcast — amongst the spiritual outcasts. A grey sheep amongst the black sheep. It sounds a bit rebelliously cool and all, but it will give you grey pubes for sure.
So here I am, just a mystical misfit with my pity party cargo, some semi-rotting Zombies in the deck below, and a few Shamanic Periscopes for role play (see below).
The path can bring truth to your heart-mind, but not necessarily a home for your heart.
This is the squeeze of any spiritual seeker’s journey. You may not be in the lonely hell of the Dark Night anymore, and may have world changing insights and liberating peacefulness of heart. But in leaving the mainland behind, you likely will be lonely for a while until you find your spiritual tribe or teacher.
That is, if you ever do.
But tribes are overrated (says the pirate-less pirate snuggling with eros in the lower cabin).
Of course they are important, providing support, connection, health and the Hallmark Card juice of life. But you can connect snorting lines with your buddies in the bathroom. Or sacredly slaughtering 108 goats in the temple for health and fortune.
Instead of simply belonging to something, doesn’t the something matter too? Doesn’t that something matter more than simply belonging? Eros and I long for an orgy of heart and mind for modern times.
Like romance or fuck buddies, your Dharma partner should have aligned values and priorities in life, otherwise it’s likely a house of cards… We said just friends.
I highly considered ordaining as a Theravadan monk, and maybe I am a half-ass cop out, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. Aversion? Of course. However, like those dates where she’s “nice and all”, intuitively something always felt off.
I couldn’t renounce the world, yet rely on that world to live, all while watching it burn. Call it pride or being a stubborn Bodhisattva, but I couldn’t settle.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was something more fundamental eating at me. Something that has allowed me to take a fragmented and conflicting landscape of various religions, meditation practices (and science), and like puzzle pieces magically click them together.
It’s something I call Shamanic Periscopes — it’s so important it had to be italicized — and you use it every day.
What does a lonely and single man at sea do with a Periscope?
Something tells me it will be messy…