The Case For Awareness

As I've started going to 12 step meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics (or otherwise dysfunctional parents) I have, once again, been confronted with the question of God. The third of the twelve steps is to, essentially, give your life over to God as you understand it, heavy on the second part because I don't think it would be helpful for an addiction program to be exclusionary.

I have a demonic jester spirit in my mind that behaves as a wave that crashes over my neural links, spreading the fear as far and wide as it can across the vast wasteland that is my brain. It's my dad. It's his voice, usually. It's always something he would say. And I'm grateful that he's trying to protect me from everything, including being happy, because at least he's protected me from something.

Anyway, back to God. I've believed in God before, genuinely. I, looking back, have questioned if it was religious mania or if it was genuine, but regardless, I believed in God for a few months. It was around the time that I was meditating for an hour a day, and I was the happiest and calmest I've ever been. Proof that human beings don't have free will is that I stopped doing it because it wasn't stimulating enough.

The pinnacle, moon and star of Buddhism is presence. To be ever-present, to be ever-aware, to be constantly seeking understanding of whatever it is you're mind is focused on in that moment, is what Buddhism really comes down to. The Buddha himself had hundreds of rules for his pure, unbiased, non judgmental belief system, with hundreds more for his female followers that he said could meditate for a hundred years and not be ranked higher than a novice monk. For this reason I do disrespect the Holy teacher, and Buddhism itself. The Buddha said that if someone points at the moon, don't get so distracted by the finger that you forget to look at the moon, but the Buddha, in my opinion, has done this more than anyone. It's for this reason that I prefer Zen Buddhism, a straightforward approach to what the Buddha seemed to muddle. It's to meditate, and that's it.

I read a book by a monk where he gave me what years of CBT could give me in one chapter. He essentially advocated for being anti-intellectual. The idea that the mind can 'figure things out' is flawed, because the mind is too limited. Instead, to truly understand a situation, having the least thought possible is ideal, because the less thought there is, the less of a barrier there is between reality and the mind. Watching is watching, thinking about what you have watched is not watching. Before reading this book, I had obsessively not looked at the sky, turned light switches off up to 50 times before leaving rooms, spat out the saliva in my mouth every time I could, sometimes not into sinks, obsessively washed my hands, thought that I or someone around me was capable of murder and that it was my responsibility to stop it, thought that i was capable of casting spells with my mind and worried that if i had bad intentions, people around me would die, had awful intrusive thoughts of incest, rape and pedophilia, been obsessively nice to people because I thought that if I said something mean they would kill themselves, and many more irrational worries. These worries were on and off, coming on usually in month long spirals, before trailing off. They started when I was ten, and continued until I read this book when I was seventeen.

I've tried to set my conception of God as mother nature, science, love for humanity, a commitment to a cause, and even just blind faith in the traditional idea of God. This hasn't worked, I just didn't resonate with any of these things. What I do resonate with, however, is awareness.

Awareness is watching the world without judging, projecting, or thinking. You hear sounds, you watch the room around you, you feel what is touching you are what your emotional state is. Any sense experience, you be there instead of arguing, pulling or pushing.

This is difficult. I have attention issues where if there's a paragraph in front of me it's tiring to read them. If I want to read a book I have to listen on speechify, and will sometimes listen whilst looking at Instagram. So believe me, I understand how difficult it is. For me personally, I resonate strongly with awareness as a higher power. Whether it can be described as a higher power, I don't know. Instead of it being bigger than me, it feels like the process of paying attention to the reality of what IS bigger than me. Looking up at the sky, looking at a pot of flowers and recognizing the life in it, recognizing that every object and person I see has had just as complex a life as I have.

How I would apply this as part of my 12 step program is to completely drop my worries, thoughts and desires in favor of watching the world around me at all times. Once I started this I felt a feeling in my body that I haven't felt since I was a child. It was like something dropping in my stomach. True dread. The idea of being aware of everything I did made me afraid. I hadn't realized how dissociated I was until I realized not dissociating scared me.

It's a good fear, though. I look forward to applying it in my life, and although I talked s**t about the Buddha earlier, what I'm doing is exactly what his monks and nuns do day to day, I'm just doing it away from the monastery.