Out of My Mind by Alan Arkin

Author:Alan Arkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Out of My Mind
ISBN: 9781632281302
Publisher: Viva Editions
Published: 2020-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

JOHN

My connection with John, our path, the community, and the ashram lasted for several decades. As time went on, my allegiance to him grew and my devotion to his teachings became virtually ironclad because I found that in following his instructions and going past my intellectual understanding of what was being asked of me—past my comfort level and personal proclivities—it often led to astounding results and began making me a bigger, less fearful, and more flexible person than I had ever thought myself capable of being.

Somewhere in the middle of the third decade of my connection with him I began feeling that things were not progressing in ways that were making any sense. The instructions we were asked to adhere to often became not just difficult but completely impossible to follow. In order to maintain my sanity I began backing away from intimate connection with John and the community and began to work more and more in privacy. A short time after making this decision, the entire community collapsed, taking down John and almost everyone else with it. The reasons for the demise of the community are too complex for me to go into, but they were dramatic enough so that most of the people involved severed any connection they had not only with John but also sadly with spiritual work altogether. It was the kind of collapse that we have seen over and over again in this culture, and I have given up trying to understand it. After looking for clarity for many years … for any kind of simple clarity … I have come to no conclusions of any kind, except to feel that it’s okay not to know the reason for things. Or the accepted reason for things. Or the comfortable reason for things. I’m alright for things to remain mysterious and devoid of simple, arbitrary answers. It’s enough for me to know what I can say yes to and what I can say no to; what I can be close to and what I must distance myself from … the rest is judgment and easy comfort, and if I have learned anything at all, I have learned that judgment is a quality to keep myself as far removed from as humanly possible. I have felt the results of that venomous attribute and know intimately how it impacts my mind and my body, and I am determined to keep well away.

What I have ended up with, and it has taken at least a decade of intense self-scrutiny for this to have taken hold, is a sense of gratitude toward John for the lessons I have learned from him, and there have been many; the rest I just simply try to distance myself from without looking for a defining phrase or quality, or indeed anything at all to comfortably and easily define who and what he was. I have had a couple of teachers since John and have continued to learn and grow from their guidance but have

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