Meditation Overload

I am in the midst of an identity crisis that cuts to the core of who and what I want to be.

Do I want an end to suffering?

Do I want to awaken?

Or do I want to transcend the limits of human perception and trip the light fantastic?

The first wonderful experience I had in meditation came about two years ago, thanks to Grant Morrison and his wonderful little book called The Invisibles.  Morrison sold me on the idea that there was a hidden world just outside of the reach of the every day that humans had and could access, if they'd just dive far enough into the weird and wild, where all the good stuff resides.  The fan website Barbelith led me to Condensed Chaos, which is as good an introduction into the principals of magic as I can imagine.

One of the first things an aspiring magician needs to learn is how to achieve the gnostic state.  Basically, you close your eyes or look into a mirror or a bowl of water and just...let you mind go, wander, play.  Don't forbid yourself from seeing anything, and you might see everything.  When I stopped worrying about whether what I was seeing was real, I could see a lot more cool stuff, a lot more meaningful stuff.  I saw myself as Gandalf retreating to my castle of ice.  I met my spirit animal, the grey wolf.  I journeyed deep into the heart of death and found complete peace there.  I learned so much about myself, and I felt I was moving forward.

Books got me on the gnostic path, so it's fitting that a book should have knocked me from it.  Magic had shown me glimpses of the whole world, but I didn't want a piece of the world.  I wanted the whole thing, and Buddhism Plain & Simple seemed to offer that.  All one had to do was let go of everything superfluous and just...wake up.  Awaken to ultimate reality.  Right now, because there is only now.  The key wasn't to let your mind wander but to stay present in the moment.  If one could understand right now completely, without hope or fear of anything else, one might actually wake up, and then one really could see everything.  As I learned just a little bit about Tibetan Buddhism, I saw a lot of stuff floating around like bodhisattavas that matched some of what I saw in gnosis, which only furthered my belief that Buddhism was big enough to encompass magic and a lot of other stuff.  I felt I was moving forward.

With the beginning of yoga teacher training, I've encountered a third organizing principle for meditation.  Yogic meditation seems to want to calm the fluctuations of the mind, not for the sake of awakening, but just because.  Because it will make you better, fuller, more content.  I confess I've thought the least about this type of meditation and that it appeals to me the least.

Frankly, all that the yogic ideas behind meditation have done is bring to a head a situation that had been developing for quite some time, which is that I've officially hit meditation overload.  Too many chefs have spoiled the broth.  I'm confused.  I don't know whether to seek calm or enlightenment or visions from another dimension of reality.  Too many ideas are competing for the time I spend in lotus.  I don't feel like I'm moving forward.

In the long run, I'm not too concerned about where I am.  I'm not going to stop meditating, and I recognize that even the best journeys have times spent at pit stops, lost, or stuck in a ditch.  I believe Steve Hagen when he says that all we need to do is show up and meditate each day, and the practice will teach us everything we need to know.  Ultimately, I think all of these paths have one final destination, anyway.  The Buddha and the great magicians and yogis of history are all chilling at the top of the same mountain together, calmly sipping mushroom tea and tripping off the world in all its glory.

I get all that.

But that doesn't mean I'm not frustrated now.