Dead Set on Living

by Chris Grosso

  Her words struck a chord with me. My practice of self-forgiveness since my relapse has certainly deepened. The self-negating thoughts still arise, and perhaps that will never change (or perhaps it will, who knows?), but no matter how often my mind tries to convince me I’m not worthy of forgiveness, that’s complete and utter bullshit. Fuck it if this sounds cliché, but I am worthy of forgiveness and love and good things in life as much as anyone else, even when every cell in my brain is trying to convince me otherwise. I do my best to remember my truth. It’s not always perfect, and sometimes, yes, I can still stay too long at the pity party, but it’s diminishing. Yet, I wondered, is forgiveness always appropriate? What did Mona think?

  “Always. Always. Always. To not forgive is to allow toxicity to dwell within us. Forgiveness doesn’t mean returning to the source of the hurt and allowing it to continue to abuse us or cause pain. Forgiveness is a personal inward journey we all deserve—it’s a love for our own sacredness, our own mystical spirits, that is always appropriate. Nothing should get in our way when it comes to this love.”

  I have to say that one more time: Forgiveness is a love for our own sacredness.

  Wow.

  And just a little more love . . . Mona ended our conversation by saying, “Reach out to your neighbors—whether you have Muslim neighbors or Hindu neighbors or anything neighbors. Reach out and give love and be love in the world, because there’s not enough of it and we all have an infinite amount. One of my dear friends said to me, ‘Mona, just work a little bit harder, just do a little bit more, and when you think you can’t do a little bit more, just do a tiny bit more.’ I think we can all do a tiny bit more to love more truly from our hearts. Maybe some of us can try a lot harder, but all of us can try at least a tiny bit harder to be more kind and friendly and smiley.

  “In Islam, a smile is considered charity. Not like ho-hum charity in the metaphorical sense. It’s considered charity as though you’ve given your money away. It’s like what Ram Dass says about Maharajji telling him at the beginning of his journey to give it all—that’s giving it all. A smile that’s from your heart. So connect with people. Look them in the eye and be present with them. I think that’s the only way out of our current state of affairs, and that’s the only way out of our disconnectedness—to be there for one another, to see each other, and give a little bit more love, and then give a tiny bit more after that.”

  PRACTICE

  You Could Be a Saint

  A wise elder once told Mona, “If you try a little bit harder, you could be a saint.” This led her to the most beautiful practice. It’s simple yet profound.

  Several times throughout your day, pause and ask yourself:

  • Am I doing this excellently? Am I doing this beautifully? Am I giving it my full presence?

  • Can I try a little harder?

  • Listen for your answer.

  That’s it.

  Mona told me, “I’ve seen what happens when I do try—my life becomes more full of love, more full of prayers and dreams manifesting themselves beautifully. It’s almost a selfish act, because while it can be difficult at times to try harder or to take the moral high ground, it ultimately results in my own increase in contentment. This contentment is everything to me—it’s gratitude wrapped up in a beautiful joy that makes me and mine shine—even if it’s only in my own eyes.”

  13

  THE INEVITABLE CATASTROPHE

  CONVERSATION WITH DUNCAN TRUSSELL

  I hit it off with Duncan during an event we did together in New York City hosted by Ram Dass’s Love Serve Remember Foundation. Duncan is a comedian who speaks about how psychedelic drugs can help people heal conditions like depression and anxiety, as well as facilitate spiritual awakening (among a wide variety of other things, but this book has only so many pages). I wanted to find out where he saw psychedelics on the spectrum of addictive behavior, but Duncan had other plans. Before I could start asking a lot of questions, he told me he had something he wanted me to read. It was a passage from that seminal Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita:

  Arjuna said: What is the destination of the man of faith who does not persevere, who in the beginning takes to the process of self-realization but who later desists due to worldly-mindedness and thus does not attain perfection in mysticism?

  “O mighty-armed Kṛṣṇa,” Arjuna continues, “does not such a man, being deviated from the path of Transcendence, perish like a riven cloud, with no position in any sphere?

  “This is my doubt, O Kṛṣṇa, and I ask You to dispel it completely. But for Yourself, no one is to be found who can destroy this doubt.”

  The Blessed Lord said: “Son of Pṛthā a transcendentalist engaged in auspicious activities does not meet with destruction either in this world or in the spiritual world; one who does good, my friend, is never overcome by evil.”1

  Duncan explained that “as somebody who is constantly falling away from the path,” this passage was one of his favorites. “In fact, I don’t even know if I’ve gotten to the path yet. I’m falling away from getting near the path.” I loved that, and I loved the next line he read:

  There is never any loss nor diminution on this path.

  Duncan pointed out that “this is super cool, because in everything else in the world, if you don’t keep it up, if you don’t keep your exercise program up, you lose muscle. If you don’t eat right, you’re going to get fat. But what the Bhagavad Gita is saying is that any kind of progression at all is an eternal progression, which is counterintuitive; it goes against everything we understand.” Duncan read some more:

  The unsuccessful yogi, after many, many years of enjoyment on the planets of the pious living entities, is born into a family of righteous people, or into a family of rich aristocracy. Or he takes his birth in a family of transcendentalists who are surely great in wisdom. Verily, such a birth is rare in this world.

  “The idea is, if you start this path and then you die, then in your next incarnation—if you didn’t finish or pick the path back up in this one—little bread crumbs get dropped in your life.” This creates opportunities for the things that feel predestined or meant to be. “That’s the ‘why do I feel this weird attraction to this book?’ Of all the books on the shelf, suddenly you’re pulling down whatever it may be, the Bhagavad Gita or some book on yoga or a Ram Dass book, and you feel more drawn to that, you feel a weird magnetic pull toward that rather than the hundreds or thousands of other books to choose from. This is a continuation of some momentum that you started days, weeks, months, years, or perhaps lifetimes ago, and it never stops.”

  That certainly resounded for me—especially what he was saying about the magnetic pull toward texts and teachers. Anyone who reads my books or listens to my podcasts knows I’ve had no shortage of those experiences. I also liked the idea of returning to the path across lifetimes, because we don’t have to feel neurotic about losing what progress is made.

  This made me think about my experiences of relapse. The first few times I felt like a complete failure—an utter fuckup and nothing more. As time went by and unfortunately more relapses happened, I began to see a pattern: They were growing shorter. While I would still bottom out, the bottoms were significantly less deep than in relapses gone by. What this taught me is that every day in recovery (not just sobriety, but actual recovery) has long-lasting ripple effects. With the continuing relapses, I also noticed a power greater than myself (however one chooses to label or define that) had not forsaken me; rather, I’d forsaken myself. That power was right there to help pick me (and the pieces) up when I was able and ready to surrender and begin again.

  Most people who’ve been on a spiritual path a little while—hell, even those who haven’t—have had glimpses of awakening, of truth, of nonduality, and sometimes coming out of that nondual experience can be terrifying to our ego selves because it shows us that there’s nothing to hold on to, no past, no future; there’s only now. Our ego hates this, because part of its function is grasping, rega
rdless of what it’s grasping for—just anything to keep it alive.

  Duncan got where I was coming from and connected it to a story about a memorable teacher—Percy, who taught him how to swim when he was a kid. “I was terrified of swimming. I don’t know if you remember, but when you’re a kid, man, going out into the deep end is a big fucking deal. That’s death for a kid. You will die in the deep end if you don’t know how to swim. Kids who can make it to the deep end, you look at them like ‘Holy shit! They’re swimming in the deep end of the pool with no floaties!’ Percy would take us out into the deep end of the pool, and the whole time he’d tell hilarious jokes. He knew we were terrified, so he’d have us laughing, and he would sing to us and do these ridiculous things, and before I knew it, I realized that he wasn’t holding me anymore, that I was floating on my back in the deep end of the pool.” This is what the best teachers do. “They come into the shallows where those of us are interested in going into that deep water hang out, and they start telling jokes. You don’t realize it because they’re so cool, but you start following them, and the next thing you know, you’ve become the thing they were talking about. And then, when you realize it, that’s when you start sinking, like, ‘Oh fuck, what?’ And then the pattern repeats.”

  What a great analogy! It reminded me of an experience my brother Jay had in the deep end of the pool, which wasn’t so enjoyable, and it’s a pretty good metaphor for my own spiritual life. We were taking swimming lessons at a local YMCA, and my brother was terrified to go into the deep end. These two fucked-up swim instructors grabbed my brother by the ankles and the wrists and swung him back and forth, saying, “One, two, three—heave ho!” and threw him into the deep end. I was already in there myself and was an okay swimmer at that point, so I went over to help him back to the side of the pool, but that shit traumatized him. To this day, he won’t swim. I think about that and how it was the hell of living in addiction that thrust me onto a spiritual path in a similar sink-or-swim sort of way. Fortunately, I’ve also had teachers like Duncan’s Percy (many of whom you’re meeting in this book) who eased my transition with humor and compassion. There are so many people who don’t learn to swim, who drown in the spiritual pool—which is to say, die in addiction.

  Duncan got where I was coming from. He recognized that there are different levels from which we can experience “the inevitable catastrophe, and drug addiction is certainly one of the more popular ways to die these days.” It reminded him of times in his life when he was addicted and suicidal, and likened addiction to a weird form of suicide.

  “Even there in that place, and everyone has a different version of it, if your mind comes to you at all, and there isn’t a wave of guilt or a wave of craving, then even down in that place you still experience this amazing sweetness, and that’s always a shocking moment, because you’re, like, ‘I’m lying on a mattress kicking dope with roaches crawling on me and I was thinking about jumping out the window to commit suicide.’ Even here, there’s beauty in the world. On one level, it’s catastrophe; on another level, it’s more teaching.

  “I get in trouble for this idea a lot. I might say, ‘This is heaven. No matter what’s going on. You’re in heaven. There’s no way out of it.’ ” Then someone will bring up something awful like a terminal illness or a hurricane or corrupt politicians and ask Duncan if that is heaven. Duncan says, “The answer is that we don’t know the victims of the crisis, we don’t know where they are. But people must ultimately decide which lens to look at the situation through. That lens can be ‘This is an absurd and cruel universe with no meaning.’ The best way I’ve heard it described is that there was a catastrophic accident that happened with matter—it became aware of itself. And it’s tragic. There are no mistakes, and there are no non-mistakes, but basically we’re the part of matter that became aware of itself. This was the very worst thing that could happen to matter, because if you’re not aware of yourself, you get to non-exist, and to non-exist is to be truly in heaven, so we’re fucked; that’s the idea.

  “That’s one lens you get to decide to look through. The other lens you can decide to look through is the lens that people like Ram Dass point us toward, which is that even now, even now, whatever it is, even now, it’s still perfect. Even amid the catastrophe that is inevitable, Krishna, God, realization is playing this game of hide-and-seek, and you can always find it in there.”

  I admire Duncan because he brings humor to dark situations and shakes up assumptions rooted in a dualistic experience of life. I’m not saying that any of us is better than any other, because (at least in regard to the ultimate reality, for which all the great wisdom traditions speak) there is no one else. However, the entire premise of this book—the relapses I’ve experienced and that we all endure in one form or another—arose because I was stuck in the belief of an isolated, lonely, fearful, separate self. From that place of dualism, it’s natural to be outraged, because from the separate, egoic lens, it is outrageous. Then you encounter Ram Dass and many other teachers who speak from the place of ultimate reality, where there is no more separation. The see-er, the seeing, and the seen are all one, and that’s why, even though horrible things happen, they can still be experienced as perfection, because they are unfolding as life unfolds. Yes, it’s sad, oftentimes tragic, and as humans, even when we do start to awaken and the egoic stronghold of “me” and “them” begins to fall away, it’s not as if our feelings vanish. We still experience pain. A loved one dies and we still grieve, but we can witness suffering from a place that sees the perfection in it. I know this sounds virtually impossible, borderline insanely absurd, but from my heart, I promise you I wouldn’t write it if I hadn’t experienced it myself, as well as heard many accounts of similar experiences from other people. It’s important for me to relay the truth of this potential because I know how much it can hurt sometimes—overwhelmingly, painfully hurt—but as absolutely fucked as it sounds (and trust me, I know it sounds fucked), there is a sincere perfection in it.

  An obvious example might be that of losing a parent or a pet, but seeing the perfection during times of sadness doesn’t have to only be about life’s big stuff. What comes to mind for me is the first day of November, the day after Halloween. I fucking love Halloween. Not only the holiday itself but the entire fall season. Hoodies, horror movies, pumpkin-flavored everything—yes, please! But sure enough, every year when November 1 hits, even though it’s still fall, melancholy hits me right in the gut, basically to the same extent as when I was a kid, and that’s saying a lot. As I awake to the first of November each year, I’ve begun to use it as a part of my practice, to see the perfection in each moment, to appreciate that, thanks to impermanence, not only will my feelings of sadness leave after some time but next year’s Halloween will return after some time as well. Or maybe Christmas is your favorite holiday, and you can relate more specifically to that. Or maybe you think all holidays are a waste of time and can’t relate at all, to which I’d say, “What happened to you as a child?” Jokingly, of course. (Well, half-jokingly, at least.)

  Duncan sees the problem as being one of getting spiritually “stuck” on time. “I love conspiracy theories, but there’s a great conspiracy theory that nobody wants to talk about. It’s that we’re all in a waiting room where we get called into oblivion at random times, generally unexpectedly. We’re all hanging out in a terminal at an interdimensional airport, and people’s flights are arriving all the time. Whenever a flight departs, we can either look at it as a tragedy, like the flight left early, or we can look at it like ‘he lived a great life and now he is at peace.’ The truth of the matter is that flights are always landing and taking off. Every person existing right now is for certain going to die.”

  Duncan turned me on to a great term he gleaned from C. S. Lewis: spiritual amphibians.

  Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to
an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks . . . a phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.2

  Duncan believes “we emerge from whatever happened before we were born. We come into time and then we go back out of time again. This version of reality transforms the permanent notion of life. It’s like when we’re on a boat and we see dolphins show up and start doing flips in front of the boat. That’s what a life is—a flip, a trick. It’s our spirit coming to time. We can showboat. We can be famous. We can discover some incredible thing. We can do some awful thing. Often we’re going to belly flop. We’re going to come into the world, dive into time, look around, be completely perplexed, completely fuck up in every single way, and fall back into the nothingness with a weird look of, like, ‘What the fuck happened?’ on our face. That’s the usual way to do it, and there’s nothing wrong with it.”