Emails 1

From: Rory
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2005 5:37 AM
To: Shawn
Subject: Hello there Shawn (long time no talkie)
Hey Shawn, guess what I'm doing? Sitting down and trying to write about my
adventures in ages past!

But you've heard that one before, eh?

Well, anyway, I'm back at university now, not far from the end of my degree - if I make it! - studying a mixture of English Literature and Creative Writing. The former is a complete drag - all over-analysis and blah-blah - and I am incredibly slack in that class, just doing the bare minimum. The latter, I love - that's why I'm here - and I seem to be learning a lot about the art of writing, and I feel that I've definitely grown. It's funny - threee years ago, when I lived in Dublin and I was trying to get down to writing a book, I did a tarot card reading that said to "become like a student". Silly me thought maybe just for a day or two - never very good at looking long-term, or in more practical ways! But here I is, and looking back, it all seems to have made perfect sense, one way or another. Now I feel more ready to do the job properly - though, I must confess, a tad detached from the whole thing, and finding myself a far more accomplished procrastinator than writer!

Also, I feel so different to how I did then; I read my old journal entries and I just seem so insane! Everything's wonderful and love and magic and God and - I know so much of that was true, but...so mental at the same time! It's hard to recapture that frame of mind. It feels like somebody else.

Do you ever feel like it was totally crazy? I know it wasn't totally crazy - but at the same time, I do wonder where it went, if it was so real. I often think about what your Kind Angel would have to say about my present of being. But I don't imagine you're doing those readings any more anyway. It's funny, though, looking back at the ones you used to send me, they still make lots of sense, and sometimes I see things that I never realised at the time - but probably would have helped me if I had! Oh well.

Life seems a little like missed opportunities. I know there's magic out there somewhere - but not much going on at the University of Kent! Still, at least I can function in the everyday world now...

So how are you? How's the little one? Write me long and hard, if you can, because I would love to hear what's been going on for you, and how life has been treating you since you had your baby. It has been a long time.

I still go to see Amma. Sophie and I went in Toronto, London and Paris this year. It was Sophie's first time, and it was quite beautiful to see. She cried, and smiled, and stayed up all night, right to the end at 10.30am! I smiled and cried too, and felt one or two things. One was, hearing all about Amma's efforts for the tsunami, I just thought I had to do more than I was, or to do something. It was really strong in me, a feeling which only subsided with the writing of a check, seeing as that was what I had to offer at the time. Now, back in England, I do some volunteer work with a local charity shop, pricing records and CDs, etc, and that seems to satisfy that urge. The other main thing I got from seeing her, though, was that I didn't really need to see her. I felt like one day a year was probably enough, and even getting a hug didn't seem necessary (wonderful though it was!) I think I used that in the past as a way to get high - a blast of bliss - but this time I just realised that, even though nothing profound exploded in me, there was a general feeling of wel-being for a few weeks afterwards, and I felt quietly content with that. On the whole, though, I felt pretty detached from the idea of spending all day there, wandering around, sitting on cushions, and waiting 'til the early hours to get hugged by her, almost a sense of "been there, done that". And maybe that's the point - maybe it's better to go out into the world more, and try and do something useful.

Having said that though, as I mentioned earlier, I'm a horrible slacker! I've even gone back to playing ridiculous computer games for hours on end. This whole writing malarkey is more difficult than it looks!

Anyway, that's enough waffling from me. I do hope you and yours are well, and I keep you in the fondest of memories.

Lots of love,
Rory

PS Did I tell you I got about 70% of my journal back, after deleting it a few years ago? That was good news. Also, I had a story published in a book here in England. You can even buy it on Amazon! Quite nice to see my name in print...


Subject RE: Hello there Shawn (no time no talkie)
From Kristen Fellner
Date Wednesday, November 30, 2005 6:51 pm
To rjm6@kent.ac.uk


Rory my old friend!!!!

It’s funny, just last week I went searching around online seeing if I could find you. I tried therubsley and down the rubadub and so forth, everything came to a dead end though. I’m so glad to hear from you! I am glad you are writing. You really could be the next Kerouac of your age if you wanted, I’m not shitting you, I have always thought so. So many people are stuck and your wanderings and mad ramblings would inspire people I am sure. And were you crazy? Hell yes you were but if you were crazy then I was totally fucking insane, wasn’t it grand!? I think fondly of that time in my life as well as our adventures together. We were nuts, nuts in the greatest of ways.

I think that we were so bent on finding the magic and love and God and all that, so intent was our focus that we brought it into being. The question is, is that a healthy and beneficial way of being all the time? Too much of even a good thing is still too much is it not? I have known too many people who have those awakenings and when they cycle out of those states (which we always do) they have a tendency to hold on too hard to something that was and are not truthfully living what is. So they become those haughty taughty “spiritual” types who approve of this and frown on that and feel they have to do something or be a certain way and to me its all a bunch of bullshit! I know that the magic is still present, what we experienced back then though, was just our interpretation of it, what it actually is, is much simpler and even more amazing because of its simplicity.

It feels good to write to you just as I am. You know, while Momma was alive I had become some kind of spiritual guy or healer or channel or whatever I was. I found it to be a lot of pressure to always feel like I had to maintain this status or reputation in the eyes of others. The things that were happening to me I feel were genuine but on some deep and only semi conscious level I was just the same old me who likes to look at boobs and smoke pot sometimes and like that. I had fallen into a trap of being something, and by being something I had willed myself into a state which required maintenance. I suppose we all put on a certain mask for others, to project to them what we want them to think we are, so that was mine, but the feeling deep inside that something was false slowly surfaced and I am fortunate that I was able to grab it and wrestle it down and really break out of the falsehood. I feel now a small bit of uneasiness in going further in this conversation because I am aware of what a know- it- all waffling holier –than- thou I was. Not that I felt holier than thou, my intent was always to serve in what I considered to be divine service, but having done years of intense self inquiry I am now aware of my past projections. On the other hand you said to write deep and hard so fuck it, I will try.

I don’t say much of anything to anyone about spiritual matters anymore. I absolutely cannot read or listen to any kind of spiritual discourse. I don’t believe in God. I think everything spiritual that I or anyone else has ever said or thought is wrong, and yet I have never been more spiritual and I have never been so consistently close to the Truth. Is that hard to understand? It is clear to me and yet I have a hard time coming up with an explanation of my experiences and my state, so I don’t talk about it and also no one looks to me to be “something”… I can just be. I can’t listen to anything spiritual or read anything because I have seen and experienced a sliver of the Truth, the absolute Truth which makes everything relative into merely a relative Truth. I do recognize the relevance of the relative though. Remember when I was all, “life is just a dream” and all that, well that has some truth but only half of the Truth. I am much more well balanced I think. And as you said, it was all very mental. I am not interested in expanding the mental; I just want to be the Truth. Remember when we would argue about which one of us would turn into Jesus! Ha! I don’t believe in God, is that surprising to hear? I suppose I am baiting you a bit. Every old concept of God I ever had is destroyed, but I am no atheist. Are you seeing the old waffler come back yet? It feels like it a bit, as I said I am out of practice in communicating my inner stuff. Funny how we both seem to always complain about ourselves being wafflers to each other. Is it some level of insecurity or do we worry that the other one really isn’t so interested in what we are saying, funny. Anyway in Truth brother, I could tell you some shit, some crazy crazy shit. Maybe I should get normal for a bit first, then I’ll dig a bit deeper.

Life is great really, we own a great house overlooking a vineyard and are within walking distance to the river. Our boy Shamus is a true joy (and a challenge have no doubt) at work my job is so intense and complicated that all the bosses are intimidated by it and leave me alone. We have gotten busier but things have become easier for me, although I would never admit it to them. They gave me a gas card so I never pay for gas. Oh, Kristen is pregnant! Due date is early July! After that no more kids. Our giant dog Koob is good and Shamus really likes him. Kristen bought me an I pod and I have been having fun listening to science fiction and horror pod casts. I subscribed to a couple spiritual ones and could not even force myself to listen to them. That’s the gist, really it’s a good life I am living, quite normal seeming, I don’t think anyone has a clue as to what is really going on with me. Sometimes I don’t have a clue myself. I do know that I live vastly within myself and just sort of float on the surface of my life, but no longer do I deny or run from the reality of the relative, I feel now I am collaborating with a great & still awareness in my middle, who is riding around in this complicated human system, just experiencing. But that’s not really right, nothing I say will be right, but let’s say stuff anyway, for you my friend Rory.

Are you ready to hear the crazy shit? I am going to nutshell it as best I can. You can decide if I have lost my mind or if I am delusional or not. I am fine with whatever you think. For a period of about 5 months starting in early May 2005 I began having experiences. In the past I have had encounters with energies and beings and other phenomenon but none of it compares to these experiences that would spontaneously take me over on every level of my being.

You know I was initiated by a Satguru from India named Bhagavan Sri Atmananda. At the time of my initiation (December 2002) I was still very blissy blah blah and very much detached from the world and basically how I was when you knew me best, thinking I had attained something and thinking that I knew stuff. I thought that after my initiation I would ascend higher and just explode with bliss, but quite the contrary I was plunged into normal reality,. I stopped seeing the colored sparks around almost everyone I looked at, people stopped asking for readings and healings (which in truth was a bit of a relief). I was just a normal guy suddenly and it really sucked ass to feel like I had fallen from grace if you will. I now see the necessity of it, I was stuck in a joyful netherworld of my own creation and could have been stuck there my entire life, and it took outside intervention to “reboot” me so to say.

I had the occasional brief breakthrough or experience but mostly I was just normal again. During the end of April 2005 I was meditating with a small group of fellow initiates and devotees of Bhagavan once a week. I began to experience a vast emptiness behind everything. It was not pleasant, this perpetual void, it was quite horrifying in fact. I discussed it with Scott, the guy who was leading the meditations and he suggested that I was starting to awaken to the Truth but because my life was more worldly energies than spiritual vibrations I was perceiving this Truth as horrific, the individual is horrified by the Truth of unity. He suggested that instead of one night a week I do 2 nights. This was a problem because Kristen and I get very little time together and she was already upset that I was doing 1 night. Nevertheless I decided to make a stand and chose to do 2 nights a week. It may seem a small thing but Kristen was very upset, and I let her be and I took it, her upset. Making this small stand for spirit and sacrificing a peaceful home for a shitstorm for a while shifted something in me. I cannot describe the shift in consciousness only the symptoms. I was in control, all my impulses were intact but I was no longer compelled to act upon them. I felt illuminated somehow, a great and drastic shift had occurred but I cannot describe it further. The meditation sessions changed into sessions in which we would see into one another and point out certain things that were unconscious. It was a brutal no holds barred psychic therapy session. I learned so much and found so many things in me I was not conscious of. I learned to dig into myself and find these things all the time, I began to use every situation to find the buried blackness within me, I ripped my own guts out and chased every embarrassment, every shame and every lie and pulled it up to consciousness. I was relentless. I was finally being honest with myself and by pulling everything unconscious to consciousness I was destroying the triggers that previously would cause reaction, I now could discern how I wanted to respond. The void went away and I settled into a state of peace. Instead of a void, it seemed that everything was light and I actually perceived vast amounts of light which seemed to pour into my eyes all the time.

In mid May I was at work one day and I felt like I needed to take a shit, you know that sort of tingling pressure one feels down there. I went to the toilet to do so and found that I did not need to poop, but the feeling remained. The feeling increased in fact and I began to feel very spaced out, not unpleasantly so. Then a strange thing happened, this ”I have to take a shit” feeling jumped up into my abdomen. It remained a bit the sunk back down. This happened many times up and down, then the take a shit feeling began jumping into my chest. This kept happening until the feeling stabilized in my gut and became a much different feeling. Suddenly I was having an orgasm x 10 in my belly. I was experiencing a tangible and overwhelming bliss in my belly. It was so intense; the orgasmic feeling was more me than I am. In other words the normal feeling of being Shawn was dwarfed by this bliss and I basically became mostly bliss. This remained for days, For DAYS! It stayed but constantly changed just so subtly so as to be ever new but always so intense and delicious. It began to change on the 3rd or 4th day and would come and go, sometimes subtle and constant and at other times brief and intense. In total it lasted a week before it mostly faded.

Then on my way to work one morning I had my first merger experience or Samadhi state or whatever you want to call it, I still have a hard time labeling it. It was early in the morning driving through San Francisco and suddenly that blissful orgasmic feeling came full force into my chest, it nearly took my breath away. Everyone I saw on the street was Me. Not Shawn me, but a vast and indescribable me, and yet Shawn remained experiencing this. I was everyone I saw. Also, towards everyone I saw I felt this bliss pour from my chest towards them yet never diminishing. I loved myself everywhere, Shawn tried to find someone he/I did not love and found it impossible. The fat tourists totting luggage, the bums pushing shopping carts, the drug dealers with their gold chains and baggy pants, they were all Me, and I loved them with a love so strong it bordered on painful.

I arrived at work and as it was a Saturday morning hardly anyone was around. I was dizzy with this physical bliss. I decided to close my eyes and that’s when I stopped breathing. I felt no panic and no compulsion to breath. I just sat in bliss not breathing for quite some time. The only reason I started breathing again was because the rational part of my mind convinced me that I probably should be breathing, so I did though I did not feel like I needed air. I tried it on my own and again found no need to breath. I cannot describe the wonders I felt the rest of that day. As the day wore on the feeling of being everyone faded but the bliss in my chest increased. When I got home I told Kristen about it. She said I was surrounded by a tight blue field of light, not something she would normally say to me. I felt remarkable.

Things get fuzzy in my memory for the next 4 months. There are many moments of lost time and some kind of blackouts in my memory. What I describe will be incomplete and maybe not in sequential order.

I was walking everyday I was off work through a redwood forest near my house which leads down to the river. Many things came to me on these walks. I began to turn inward. I am sure you have heard “look within” a gazillion times as had I. “The answers are all within” and all that. I never had really followed that advice before though. But for some reason I began to, not that it was so much of a conscious choice, it really just started to happen and I became constantly aware of the awareness in my middle, the awareness that I am behind my thoughts and feelings. I found that no matter what I was doing, whether at work or home, most of my attention was on this awareness. Like if you have an intense pain in your body, you can’t help but think about it, my attention was similarly attached to this awareness, it was not painful though. Then one day on a walk by the river I was standing still looking at the water and mountains and greenery, so forth and it came to me that I am awareness and also that everything else I perceived to be around me was awareness and the bit of illogical proof that came to me was that because I am aware of everything that is the proof that everything is awareness and something cascaded through me and suddenly I was perceiving only myself everywhere I looked. It was an amazing state, being pure awareness and perceiving only that. It was like the eye seeing itself, or the mouth eating itself, impossible to happen yet here it was happening. I was amazed (When I say I, I am not sure what I am referring to in that state but I have to explain it somehow don’t I?) I was amazed about how obvious the truth is. I laughed and was completely convinced that everyone knows this Truth because it is SO VERY OBVIOUS! Later in the day Kristen took me to the supermarket and here I am in this state, feeling the physical bliss again, in love with everything. In the store I remember forgetting where I was and it took about 30 seconds to remember I was in a store and then I found I could not recall what city we were in and I had to ask her. This state lasted in its most intense for a day. The next day I was equally amazed that the most obvious Truth had suddenly become so elusive, it was gone and no where to be found.

The 3rd merger state I experienced was at work. It actually started on the way to work, something seemed to be downloading into me, bliss came and knowledge, but this knowledge acted like some kind of a Pac man or something because I felt it eating all my other knowledge, I felt everything I know and believe get erased and I felt myself open wider to it, holding nothing back, allowing everything to go. In my other 2 merger states each time I felt something fundamental in me give way and disappear. Each merger felt like I was been swallowed and was being digested then spit out before the digestion was complete. This time the force coming into me was thorough and I was holding nothing back. I felt myself completely disappear. It’s hard to understand but although I was gone, everything else was intact. The body continued to drive and the mind continued to think and the memory continued to record the experience as best it could, but some things were too much and could not fully be recorded. The mind even went on a brief search and was confused; it was looking for “me” and gave up shortly thereafter, the situation being such a paradox and an impossibility. The human system was intact but the identification with it was gone and thus the “Me” was gone as well. What remained when the identification merged is unspeakable, I can only say that at that point this unspeakable being is not separate from the human system. Duality is no longer an applicable concept. From the outside you would have watched what you thought was Shawn going about his day, filling out his dispatch sheet, responding to phone calls, going to the toilet. When the phone wasn’t ringing you would have seen him not reading a book or wandering out on the dock like usual, he just sat there staring at the wall with a blank face. No one was home, and yet functioning went on. Coming out of this state a day later was very blissful. The thought came that perhaps someone had drugged me I felt so euphoric. I was at home with Shamus and when I was with him I became him and we sat in the dirt and played, when Kristen came home I was her, I seemed to be whoever I was around. Then things became very difficult to bear.

After each merger, as I have said, a part of me was absorbed or obliterated or something. When you knew me I lived in a great temple of belief I had built, this temple was on the beach and really had a great view, but the first merger was like a tidal wave and it crushed and destroyed this temple I lived in. After each merger the mind reeled and raced to understand and define the unexplainable and indefinable and I found it impossible to keep the mind from doing this, I could not influence its need to put things within a logical framework. So it built itself a house representing a belief about what had happened to me. The second merger was a hurricane and blew the house away, so the mind pitched a tent. The 3rd merger was a tsunami and a hurricane and a fucking earthquake and took everything from me. I felt naked on the beach with only a cup, and the mind was feebly making itself a sand castle just to have something to look at and relate to.

I was destroyed, I had no beliefs, I felt no drives or passions or compulsions or attractions or aversions. I had lost my resting place, lost my default position of being at the very least a spiritual man. All gone, I was empty and the mind and emotion even the body writhed in agony for days, as though it was going through death throes. I cannot adequately explain the anguish of losing everything that you thought yourself and your reality to be. I began to have another merger, this time I became pure suffering on every level. It hurt and burned because I resisted it, I had always been conditioned to run from suffering, thinking freedom was the ability to avoid suffering and be in bliss or happiness. I finally became so weary that I gave in and accepted this suffering fully and I immediately found out that true freedom is not hiding from and avoiding suffering, it is accepting both bliss and suffering equally and the true freedom is in being equally accepting and calm in either maxim.

Other stuff happened and I had one more major Merger, this time with Love. I became love and found it was an experience of pure agony and pure delight equally. I had learned from the 3rd merger that the individual in me is NOTHING more than identification. I found out that we do not have an individual soul, but that there is only one soul and its identification with a supposably individual form is who you think you are, who I thought I am as an individual. We can manage to give up the idea that we are the body but we trade it for the idea that we are an individual soul that travels from life to life or attains some heaven or hell. We hold so tight to the idea of being individual. That was another reason the pain came to me, I had experienced the truth and when the identification returned it knew it was dying on some level, the farce and illusion that it existed as an independent entity could no longer continue. So I had decided to ask for an experience of what Love is, and it came as a merger experience as a supremely intense energy. I was in agony and then I sunk my identification back into that unspeakable Truth and the agony became delight, I would then surface and it became agony. I did this over and over again as an experiment and learned that this force called love drives everything. It is how we identify with it that determines whether it is an experience of pleasure or pain. It does not care, it is the same always and ever-present, only through our human system do we alter how the experience of it.

Have I dug deeply enough for you? I have shared a snippet of this with a couple people but I really shot my load here. The mergers and bliss has stopped since around September or October. I have been recovering since then. I seem to be integrating this human life with what the human system has experienced of the actual Truth of things. I am again aware mostly of awareness, but it is integral now, in other words it’s not just behind the mind but also the mind and all of its projections of the world. From the outside I seem normal to others as far as I know, but on the interior I am becoming, no that is not the correct term, I am unbecoming. I am not gaining any realizations or states of being, I am unbecoming everything and what IS, is being revealed more and more. In the outer world I am just going about my business, doing normal things, making mischief not really doing any practices other than a bit of meditation and by doing so I sense collaboration between that which IS with the individual identification. Like something is riding around in me in order to experience everything it is not, in order to experience that which it is and ironically everything that it is not, is it as well, and this passenger of mine is ME! Is this some deep shit or what!!! I am in touch with the Truth and what a relief it is not to have to try anymore, or pretend or anything. I don’t know what else to say, its no big deal really, it just is. Nothing is as I thought it was. Everything is in the way of the Truth, especially our highest Truth. Aspiration gets that force flowing but in the end even the aspiration gets burned. That was why we had the experiences we had, aspiration. I am convinced. The only consistent thing I had in my life was this aspiration. It was hard to suddenly be without it, to have it forcibly absorbed into something else. Maybe it will come back, who knows, I DON’T EVEN CARE. All I know is that every state is only temporary; everything is temporary so I hold onto nothing. OK now I am done, I really am.

I would love to buy your book, send me the info will you? Any plans for after you graduate?? I’ve not known you to be a planner, neither am I. Will they let you back into the U.S. yet? Ok brother, that’s it for now, I am so glad to get in touch with you again. I am interested in your writing keep me up to date if you feel to do so. I love you my crazy waffling brother, and I too think of you with fond memories as a fellow seeker of truth and avoider of bullshit!

Love Shawn