leap

Ever since I was young, I’ve always had this impulse to strip naked and just walk into the forest.

I have no idea what to make of this, and it’s not exactly something that you’re likely to share with people outside of the Dhamma. I have no solid idea where that impulse comes from, but it visits me often. What I do know is that that impulse is tied to a deeper, almost archetypal need to renounce.

Many of us who encounter this path and choose to walk it in this way have felt this kind of soft, rumbling presence, almost like a continual confirmation that we’ve heard all this before and are simply continuing on. It seems quite common amongst people that choose to walk the monastic path.

In some ways this is reassuring, and it gives me renewed hope. Hope in the sense that even though through death I may have been ripped away from the Dhamma before, I’ve been able to find my way back though the confusing haze of this world. Encountering the Dhamma before in a previous incarnation is the only way I know how to make sense of that feeling, as it really doesn’t make sense any other way.

That soft rumble is an impossible feeling to convey to people that haven’t felt it, and in my early life I was probably misdiagnosed as being unwell when I was most probably just experiencing the malaise of unconfirmed saṁvega, for which there seemed to be no equivalent concept in my culture.

Things would have been a lot easier if I were born in a Buddhist culture which had some grasp of this emotion, this kind of dual feeling of being all at once disenchanted with life as it is lived around oneself - the values and interests and pursuits of people scurrying about seeming so cyclically pointless and strained - and yet also feeling all at once euphoric and uplifted, as if I could see a crack of light appearing in the interstitial space between each moment, a quiet confirmation of some tremendous power, felt, it seemed, only by myself. Until I met others like me, of course, who also felt the same.

How many lives have we been circling each other at a distance? The rolling liminality a kind of fugue state until we snap out of it once more and rekindle the path inside us that we always knew was there. You know your brothers and sisters when you finally meet them. There is a recognition and a depth of pause, and you know this life is simply a continuing and a shifting of shape, and that you have been moored amongst strangers until now. These new found friends don’t need names, they are better for not having them, as we’ve already had so many.

The deeper communion, though, is always with one’s mind. This is the calling I know to be true, and yet the very thing I keep running from. Terrence McKenna once said, ‘At some point you have to stop searching for the truth, and you have to start facing it.’ How so very true that is, Mr. McKenna. The search was over a long time ago, and I feel myself circling in on myself, I feel the possibility of surrender and the prospect of escape beckoning me ever stronger.

I sometimes get asked, ‘Isn’t what you are doing just escapism?’ You’re damn right it is. This world is a fail, and there is nothing in it worth holding on to. That would be totally crushing if it weren’t for a way out, and that, for a long time now, has been the only game in town, the only thing worth pursuing in this life. Everything else is worthless. I think even the people asking that question would say the same, if they had the nerve to admit it.

It’s fine.

At least I’ve got a lay of the land. Choosing to renounce this world is only depressing to those that think there’s joy to be found in it. The joys of this world are tainted, they’re nothing special, when you really look at them. The alternative of letting is all go to seek something else, a sanctuary from this mess, seems much more worthwhile.

When I was younger I felt the need to justify that, even proselytise it, but now I just accept it. I don’t need to convince anyone anymore. Even though I’m not awake yet, I can feel the power of the Buddha calling to me to take his hand and come with him on a journey; a journey that will take everything I’ve got, but a journey I must take, if I don’t want to get swallowed up and spat out by this earth once more.

If, as a monastic, you don’t wake up in a cold sweat every now and then, breathing heavy and lurching out into the cold of night in quiet desperation - you’re not doing it right. This is a wild life, and this project of quietly fading out, is big. It’s a path that only the truly brave can tread, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I have faith to keep me company.

• Peace