The Invitation to Transformation
Vertigo
At other times I tried to just live with my condition through resignation — just count my blessings and use distraction to push the problem from my mind. At still others I desperately tried to hedge and live the fabulous “balanced life:” be a caterpillar Monday through Saturday and dream of butterflies on Sunday.
But the shocks that had perforated my repressive mechanism ultimately doomed these alternate approaches. All of my attempts to “get back to the way things were” and “get with it” were ultimately futile. I probed the hole in my defenses trying to heal or at least understand and only made it bigger. I had no more choice than a tongue with a sore tooth, and what made Rose such a remarkable teacher is that he stuck his fist and eventually his head into my soul-hole tearing it wider.
Before I knew what was happening I was irretrievably committed. I had naively started toying with a girl named Sophia only to wake up one day in love, and as is usually the case in affairs of the heart, I was the last to know and it was too late to do anything about it.
The rest of my spiritual journey was little more than an intense struggle against ongoing vacillation — the continual temptation to turn back and rejoin the “herd.” Sometimes I gave in and turned back cursing my vanity and pretensions to godhood. Then I’d return to spirituality cursing my weakness and the wasted time. Eventually I repeated this exercise — often in a single day or even a single moment — so many times that it felt like I’d been doing nothing for years but wandering aimlessly in circles in the desert, like a modern Israelite.
I no longer knew forward from back, and every time I looked in the mirror there was a little less water in the canteen. Then one day the water ran out. God was non-existent, indifferent, or beyond me, and I’d forgotten the way back to men. I was hopelessly lost, in over my head, and beyond my strength, and I sank to the ground in despair only to find I’d been standing in the Oasis the whole time. Such is surrender and the rest is gratitude, boundless gratitude.
The spiritual path is not a collection of diets, meditation techniques, and weekend workshops that we dabble in during our spare time to smooth out the rough spots. It is a commitment to real life decisions that produces a counter-intuitive journey into estrangement, alienation, and increasing disorientation. A process I call “spiritual vertigo.” Vertigo is the necessary ingredient and its disorienting qualities create the space between our defense mechanisms that lets in the sun. Spirituality is a journey into confusion powered by an abhorrence for confusion where we play “over our heads” most of the time.
But before I recount the actual shocks that I think perforated my repressive membrane I must make a final point. Everything I’ve written so far is about negative motivation. But there was an incredible sense of possibility that the hole in my defense mechanism revealed as well. There was something wonderful, something magical all around and just out of reach. Something that goaded me and maddened me as it filled my nostrils and collected on the tip of my tongue without ever revealing itself. This magnetic attraction had the pull of a million suns and to this day it beggars my ability to describe it and this aphasia is the heart break of my life. Because I’m convinced that if I could describe it, if I could convey it, I could take my place among the Magi bearing my priceless gift to a helpless God-child mistaken by so many for merely a godless and godforsaken world.
