Are we focused on the right things, here?

There is seemingly no dispute anymore. Nearly everyone I speak with lately feels overwhelmed. Not just clients, but also coworkers, friends, acquaintances. Hell, even the random lady in the grocery checkout line seems to be emotionally flooded.

Now mind you, up here in the northern midwestern plains, the land of 10,000 lakes, the good ‘ol hotdish capital of the universe, Minnesota — people tend to not talk openly about their feelings. When painful or distressful events come up, the conversation is likely to be diverted rather quickly to how the Vikings, Wild, Timberwolves, or Twins are doing.

As a psychotherapist and drug counselor, though, my ears get to hear an unvarnished version of how people are processing their current so-called reality. Some of the topics that come up include…

• “Things are so expensive.”
• “I’m running out of food.”
• “My <family member> is drinking more than ever.”
• “I feel like I don’t fit in this world.”
• “<Politician> sent troops into Chicago and Portland, Minneapolis is next.”
• “My rent is past due.”
• “I got laid off after <number> years.”
• “On TikTok I saw <expert> say 3i/Atlas is an alien spacecraft not a comet.”
• “<Nation state> is committing genocide in <nation state>.”
• “I feel backed into a corner.”
• “The <social group> are trying to make us all <life condition>.”

The list goes on and on.

Driven by 24/7 exposure to news and social media, limited in-person social interactions, overtly maladaptive and transactional social behaviors, greater isolation, social and economic pressure, individuals state that they feel the “pressure cooker is getting hotter.” Again, this isn’t just people we see in therapeutic situations. No, it is everywhere. People are literally losing hope, feeling disconnected, and lamenting a world that they sense is becoming dark and foreboding.

“It’s like everyone is on fucking drugs,” a friend stated recently. “There is no more caring, there is no more common sense, people are meaner, situations are crazier than ever,” they exclaimed.

Sitting with this information over the past several months and weeks led to an epiphany. The current event stream is comprised of an all-out assault on humanity’s consciousness. For quite some time, before 2020, people in woo-world were talking about a coming crumbling of structures of the current reality. At the time it started, admittedly I was unclear what that exactly meant. Slowly over time, during meditations, writing, periods of introspection, dreams, and in conscious discernment of the current event stream the evidence began to assemble itself. The war on consciousness had begun, and with it a “flooding the zone” series of events around planet earth that now presents clear evidence representing what that is. There are too many events occurring in the past decade’s event stream to pull any single event out as a smoking gun.

But I’m not one to sit around and just bitch about a situation. I’ve always prided myself on being an action person. In my youth it was fighting back against my childhood bullies. As 20-year-old it was being a frontline political activist and wide-eyed idealist. In my 30s it was becoming an out-and-proud gay man living with HIV, dabbling in writing, hosting progressive talk radio, and becoming a voice for my community. In my 40s the path morphed to using that voice to fight right wing extremism in all its forms.

Then, in 2016 I was canceled.

Publicly.

Embarrassingly.

Cruelly.

Absolutely.

Cooked.

Seemingly aligned with this so-called cancellation was an inherent internal battle to rediscover and remember myself. First, I went into hiding. Then I was forced to get clean and rebuild from the ashes. Now, in my 50s, it is clear that the so-called cancellation was actually a challenge from Universal Source to reinvent, to answer a higher calling. In the midst of this greater challenge, slogging through life transformation, intentionally tuning into higher consciousness awareness daily, a new pattern emerged. That of returning to old tools to solve new problems.

In 2019 a dear friend in the rooms of recovery gifted me a treasure. This friend had somehow acquired a unit of Pema Chödrön’s “The Compassion Box.” These tools, ensconced in a gold paper box, is a meditation training program in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Lojong or “mind-training” teachings. This friend, having heard in 2019 about some of my recent statements exploring deeper spirituality amidst my recovery from co-occurring substance use and mental health challenges, walked up to me after a meeting, and humbly gifted me the box. “It wasn’t for me, really, but maybe you’ll find something useful in it,” he stated with a smile. I graciously accepted the gift, not knowing quite what I would do with it.

The famous “Training the Mind in Seven Points” is an instruction brought to Tibet by Lord Atisha and written down by Geshe Chekawa (Chekawa Yeshe Dorje) (1102-1176) was a Kadampa Buddhist meditation master who taught this training, called Lojong in Tibetan. According to scholars, Geshe Chekawa was trained not only in his native Nyingma Tibetan Tradition, but also in Kadampa Tradition. He studied for 12 years under one of Geshe Langri Tangpa’s main disciples, Geshe Sharawa, to learn the teachings of Geshe Langri Tangpa’s own “Eight Versus of Training the Mind,” and then wrote his root text “Training the Mind in Seven Points” before his death. The teaching is is the basis for Je Tsonkhapa’s text “Sunrays of Training the Mind,” regarded as “one of the most authoritative commentaries on training the mind.”

“The Compassion Box,” created by Pema Chödrön, Tibetan Karma Kagyu Tradiiton Buddhist Nun, student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, under His Holiness Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, the sixteenth Gyalwa Karampa; is a modernized version of the “Training the Mind in Seven Points” Lojong teachings. Presented as a set of fifty-nine Lojong slogan cards with commentaries on the reverse side, a copy of Chödrön’s book “Start Where You Are,” and an audio CD of her “Opening the Heart” lojong instructions; “The Compassion Box” met me where I was as a novice student of meditation.

Truthfully, the gift was a novelty for the first few years I owned it. I would pick it up and put it down, preferring a different tradition of spiritual teachings as my primary practice. After all, I was knee-deep in four intense years of graduate study and supervised clinical practicum for my Masters of Professional Studies in Integrated Behavioral Health at University of Minnesota. Three years ago, inspired by Dr. Wayne Dyer’s transformation journey from psychologist to spiritual teacher-student, in the midst of my clinical studies I engaged in a deep dive into studying the “Dao de Jing,” and continue to today. Something about studying the Dao led me to begin to process the event stream in a different way. I was rapidly shifting from a “grit” orientation towards an “ontology” orientation of understanding so-called reality. Like Dr. Dyer, these spiritual studies reinforced my academic and clinical studies, providing me with a compass to process the event stream.

In parallel with these events, the noise of the world accelerated, tragedies increased, global pain escalated, and not coincidentally I completed my graduate school degree, worked first as a co-occurring SU/MH counselor, and then as a psychotherapist under supervision, serving clients in need daily. With these occurrences and my own continual recovery journey, an internal need for a simple, straightforward, direct, accessible deeper spiritual training became even more apparent. All the while, The Compassion Box’s Lojong training program was right there on my bookshelf, waiting for me, the student, to be ready for the teacher.

To deal with this greater intensity in the event stream I have recently returned to Lojong as a way of mind training as a foundation for my beingness. Each morning I pick up one of the 59 Lojong cards and study the face, meditating on it for a brief period. Then, in presence of the morning silence I flip the card over to review the commentary on the reverse side.

The very first card in the deck is the statement: “First, train in the preliminaries.”

The Commentary is as follows:

“The preliminaries are also known as the four reminders. In your daily life, try to: (1) Maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life. (2) Be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone. (3) Recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what goes around comes around. (4) Contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer. Obsessing about getting what you want and avoiding what you don’t want does not result in happiness.”

Meditate on the face of the card for a few minutes, meditate on the lesson from the Commentary for a few more. Set an intention to integrate these throughout the day, then check-in again with oneself at night. That’s it. That’s the whole thing each day. Do it again every day, continuously.

Many psycho-spiritualism oriented colleagues on Substack and elsewhere recently shifted from giving warnings to suggesting solutions regarding the greater upheaval in our current so-called realty. Humbly stated, I mostly agree with assertions that there is no political solution, no religious solution, no social media solution, no law and order solution, no social justice solution, no “good guys vs. bad guys” solution, no technology or technocratic solution, no left/right/center/anarchist ideological solution; to solve the current ‘war on consciousness’ in which our entire planet is currently engaged.

Gritologists, Technocrats, Authoritarians, and Oligarchs will tell you that their way is the best way to solve all of your problems. Their way is mass control disguised as security theater, justified warfare over natural resources, digital money associated with a digital ID, engineered food that keeps you fat and sedated, illicit drugs and prescribed pharmaceuticals to keep you disassociated and confused, media psy-ops to manipulate your mind, acceptance of human collateral damage — innocent lives lost to traumatic mental and physical anguish, and ultimately an untimely early death. Their way is more grit, ultimately in service of your freedom, your needs.

They are lying to you, lying to all of us.

The truth is that the only way these problems will be solved is through a huge movement towards spiritual discernment, alignment with resonance from the universal source energy, and doing the work within ourselves as individual parts of the broader consciousness – by aligning with the highest versions of ourselves and with each other. We must reset, transform, and rise out of the grit and embrace ontology as a way to understand and transcend our current experience. The upheaval will continue far beyond when all of us have transitioned to the next state of existence, but the process of ascension to higher conscious beingness starts now.

Turning to ancient tools to train for modern problems seems like a pretty solid way to engage in the process, doesn’t it?

Namaste.

-SF