a rambling five-part exploration of how spiritual healing must complement lifestyle changes that will facilitate spiritual healing – the Introduction is here

Fits and Starts

There is a new comb. It can be used without reference to the ‘i’. There was a festival, and there is an OSHO commune on Lesvos, Greece. Here, there and now, there is an alternative way of living. It is the way of light, of love, of uncontrollable and inexplicable laughter: laughter that bubbles up from the well-spring of a healthy spirit.

I have been experimenting with writing without reference to the ‘i’, to the ego, but it is proving difficult – it feels detached from reality, disembodied. Maybe it’s too much for now, because the thing is i’m still attached to my sense of ‘i’, to a sense that things happen to me, or that i do things.

It’s complicated. I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle again, A New Earth. He has a lot to say about how we invest a sense of self in objects, things, people, whatever – things that ultimately exist outside ourselves, and are not us. And i have obviously been reading and listening to Osho, who has a lot to say about witnessing, about that part of our consciousness that can observe our ego, thereby separating us from what Eckhart would call the mind-made self – a way to start moving toward liberation.

I want to write about what’s been happening over the last month or so, and i wanted to try doing so without making reference to myself because i feel very much as though i’ve been guided lately, hardly responsible for the influences i have met that carried me here.

I am starting to wonder more and more, If my mind is not me, then who brought me here?

This may seem esoteric, but it’s not – it’s simple, and the point is: i found a new comb. Remember flux combing? Flux combing is anything that helps you accommodate, facilitate and embrace change: change being a near-constant source of suffering, flux combing is a way of moving away from suffering and toward joy.

So when i say i’ve found a new comb i mean i’ve found a new (internal) resource, a sense of my inner resources for allowing change to flow through me, instead of resisting it by hanging onto the old. I’ll try to get literal about it, instead of skirting around the esoteric edges.

I’m living at Osho Afroz on the island of Lesvos, Greece. It’s a kind of commune dedicated to practising a range of meditations that Osho designed, and also there are regular ‘groups’, a week or so long, where people come together to learn a new modality of self-healing.

I joined a group training in BioDynamic Breath and Trauma Release, facilitated by Giten Tonkov, and the experience has shifted something in me, moved something out of the way of my light, and i now see that i have (always had) the means to guide myself into a new way of being.

So i’m changing my flight again, to embark on a new kind of experiment here, an experiment in physical, mental, emotional and spiritual cleansing, with something i’m calling ‘downtoxing’ because detoxing is too extreme for me right now. Also, it’s impossible to be entirely free of toxins, so i’m trying to be realistic – toxin paranoia could leave a person housebound wearing a gas mask and a tin-foil hat.

I want to experience physical, mental, emotional and spiritual purity and clarity, because one of the most resounding experiences of taking the course was a new awareness of my tendency to stuff myself full of shit (food, tobacco smoke, alcohol, drugs) to avoid feeling.

I have known for sometime now, that i have been trying to fill myself up from without: cigarettes, drugs, food, sex, porn, romantic love, entertainment, literature … anything that takes me away from myself.

But i’m tired of it. I have seen that it leaves me feeling isolated and lonely, and not only because it causes separation from others, but because it causes me to feel separate from myself. I have been avoiding myself, the way a person might avoid their lover when the relationship isn’t going so well.

I have not been a good lover to myself. I have been escaping into (false) external resources to avoid the pain of sober reality, of undisguised reality. I have been seeking meaning in the external mundane world because i had not known how to seek inside for the rich meaning of our internal divine world …

… i’m getting esoteric again, maybe because i can’t get at this with my mind …

I’ll try to get at this from a start – not the start, because there is no such thing outside of time: there is only flux, where time is a type of comb, and a limited one because when everything is constantly changing, there is no external or mind-made resource (no comb)  that will sufficiently contain the flux or keep it under ‘control’.

But something started in me some time ago, when i got back from my first trip to Southeast Asia.