Last weekend I felt like singing out with my pain. A fierce longing unexpectedly knocked me over like a hurricane-grade wave. Having gotten slightly better about neither resisting nor clinging to emotional upheaval, I let this fierce hunger rattle my foundations and then ebb.

I may have overcome some of my lesser addictions, but there really is something almost gorgeous about the suffering of feeling every fibre of your restrained being strain toward what it craves. Even when left totally unsatisfied.

Last time around, I mentioned that I might write a future post about what I meant by the “Karamazov” types for whom I fall so hard. Now seems like the perfect time. Because I’m no stranger to the same drives. I was born and bred to thirst after ecstasy and joy and transcendence and all the things my kinfolk called God. I also possess acute senses, which can isolate and identify the flavor of cardamom, the aroma of lemon verbena, or the chemicals of arousal with equal precision. I love the phenomena of the world at least as much as whatever unifying spirit underlies them. Maybe too much. I’m a junky for beauty and an apologist for inordinate passion. In other words, I’m a Karamazov too.

**

The year before I became obsessed with Damien Moreau, I read the short story “Lifeguard” by John Updike. Its literate blasphemies awakened recognition in me and went a long way toward liberating my imagination; I had spent a great deal of my pious adolescence trying to quash my impious desires. The story’s contemplative narrator/protagonist is a divinity student who spends his summers as a lifeguard, watching women on the beach and entertaining his own prodigious lusts:

There is a great truth in those motion pictures which are slandered as true neither to the Bible nor to life. They are—written though they are by demons and drunks—true to both. We are all Solomons lusting for Sheba’s salvation. The God-filled man is filled with a wilderness that cries to be populated. The stony chambers need jewels, furs, tints of cloth and flesh, even though, as in Samson’s case, the temple comes tumbling. Women are an alien race of pagans set down among us. Every seduction is a conversion.

The God-filled man is a wilderness that cries to be populated. At the time, I found the author’s words a little scary, even though I was no longer a “believer.” The boundaries of a prim and tidy envelope I’d always inhabited were pressing slowly and inexorably outward. The stony chambers need jewels, furs, tints of cloth and flesh…Updike was exhibiting what seemed to me to be a lot of nerve in marrying spiritual depth with sensuality and excess. And yet I felt intuitively that what he was saying was true.

Scandalous as this seemed at the time to a graduate of Vacation Bible School, I would discover a few years later that a professed (if somewhat grouchy and disreputable) Christian had done exactly the same thing a century earlier. One of my favorite passages in all of literature is Dmitri Karamazov’s fevered monologue in The Brothers Karamazov, delivered to his brother Alyosha, after he falls hopelessly in love with the “bad woman” Grushenka and plans to break his engagement to honorable Katerina Ivanovna. Dmitri starts spouting poetry incoherently, singing hosannas to creation that describe angels experiencing “visions of God’s throne” and insects who experience only “sensual lust.” Here is the rest of that incredible passage:

I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest worse than a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are! Too many riddles weigh men down on earth. We must solve them as we can, and try to keep a dry skin in the water. Beauty! I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What’s still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna, and his heart may be on fire with that ideal, genuinely on fire, just as in his days of youth and innocence. Yes, man is broad, too broad, indeed. I’d have him narrower. The devil only knows what to make of it! What to the mind is shameful is beauty and nothing else to the heart. Is there beauty in Sodom? Believe me, that for the immense mass of mankind beauty is found in Sodom. Did you know that secret? The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

By the time I encountered this masterpiece of a novel, late in my college career, I had had a bit more direct experience with the tempests in my blood, the torments and contradictions and mysteries of beauty and desire, and had done some hard time in the darker places within my own psyche. Dostoevsky’s non-condemning (indeed, bordering on celebratory) understanding made me shed tears publicly in a coffee shop. He knew! He knew how ferocious and voracious human wanting could be, how complementary the lusts for transcendent wholeness and the quiver of a well-formed thigh. Clearly he would have appreciated that wanly singing monotonous hymns in a narrow pew was no real answer for those whom Jack Kerouac called “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time.” He dared to recognize that the greater a person’s breadth of spirit, the greater was his or her capacity for extremes of both exaltedness and “depravity.” He grasped that the passionate drive toward beauty — toward its experience or its possession — could lead a person to either the sacred (the Madonna) or the profane (Sodom). Possibly both.

I believe this paradox accounts for what seems like a disorienting (for many, distressing) contradiction in the lives of some of our more “enlightened” sages. Those who idealize and reify the late, great Kundalini master Yogi Bhajan would rather ignore his many extramarital liasions with starstruck students. Most of us don’t like to dwell upon our nonviolent civil rights hero Dr. King’s purported indiscretions. Others discount Osho/Rajneesh’s legitimacy as a spiritual teacher because of his flashy fleet of Rolls-Royces and the orgiastic conditions at his insular Oregon compound. And then there’s Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

It’s a funny thing about Trungpa…you won’t hear his most devout followers go anywhere near a public discussion of the severe alcohol addiction that eventually killed him, his serial seductions of students, or his other episodes of out-of-control licentiousness. Like the textbook family of an alcoholic, the Shambhala crowd glosses over or rationalizes his problematic behaviors (e.g. as intentional “crazy wisdom”). Papa was perfect, he can’t have been a drunk! On the other hand, detractors dismiss him too easily by debunking his profound insights with inevitable horror stories. We humans like our heroes and villains clear-cut and unambiguous.

Dostoevsky knew otherwise. Ironically, Trungpa himself urged us to be honest about these very things:

We have a fear of facing ourselves. That is the obstacle. Experiencing the innermost core of our existence is very embarrassing to a lot of people. A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. That is impossible. We can’t do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our excrement, our most undesirable parts. We have to see them. That is the foundation of warriorship, basically speaking. Whatever is there, we have to face it, we have to look at it, study it, work with it and practice meditation with it.

A lot of people turn to something that they hope will liberate them without their having to face themselves. This is the ostensible dynamic of addiction, something he doubtless knew intimately. We Karamazovs are prone to addictions. But the external “liberations” can feel so sublime!!! Perhaps the problem comes when — as Rilke wrote about sex — we “apply (them) as a stimulant on the tired places of (our) lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering (ourselves) for (our) highest moments.” Eckhart Tolle recommended that we cease partaking of any pleasure (his examples were wine and chocolate) once the true enjoyment of it has passed. This is sound advice, I think. It highlights the difference between mindfulness and mindlessness. In mindlessness, we don’t even really see what (or whom) we’re using.

**

Which brings me back to my own brothers Karamazov. My potent karmic attraction to these spiritual brethren of mine has forced me to look in the mirror that they are, and to be more honest with myself. It sure as hell ain’t exactly been a walk in the park.

I’d like to think that if, for example, you and I were committed to each other in some way, and at the same time ridiculously tasty men were throwing themselves at me on a daily basis, that I’d do nothing that wasn’t okay with you. I’d like to think that I don’t mask my intermittent bouts of self-loathing with mind-altering substances for some other reason than that everything I’ve tried makes me wake up miserably sick. But I also know that my personal tendencies are to want to eat all the proverbial chocolates in the box. If I fault my “brothers” for never being satisfied, well, neither am I. If I fault them for being distractable, well, so am I. Secretive? I’ll tell you whatever doesn’t make me look bad. Kinky? Stay out of my sexual fantasies, please. Looking for an extraordinary high? Why do you think I insist on getting so attached to other Karamazovs? Would I like us to be narrower, to borrow from Dmitri?

That’s the kind of question that brings you to the difference between what mystics and spiritual teachers call love, and what may be just another high: when you’re challenged to accept (or reject) the whole enchilada of someone, disorienting contradictions and all — yourself included. It’s an exercise in being mindful rather than mindless, in honoring rather than objectifying a person according to your own requirements. (And it’s not the norm! Somehow taking care of yourself always gets confused with making the other the bad guy. You can still opt out, without pointing fingers.) I wonder if Lady Diana Mukpo (Mrs. Trungpa) used to look at her husband and think –as Mamie Eisenhower once said of Ike — that he “belonged to the world,” and not to her; that she could fault no one for being enamored of his powerful radiance, insight, and charisma; that his demons were not hers to manage or control.

If I had stayed in the fold and quashed my own Karamazovian tendencies, I might never have gone anywhere near such exercises in nonduality, and I’d be another of those offended people clucking my tongue about what a hypocrite and a charlatan old Chogyam must have been. No, I can’t just dismiss a man who could say

The essence of warriorship, or the essence of human bravery, is refusing to give up on anyone or anything. We can never say that we are simply falling to pieces or that anyone else is, and we can never say that about the world, either.

Word, bro. He should know.

**

(UPDATE) My Gen-X contemporary and onetime literary crush, the scruffy genius David Foster Wallace, committed suicide yesterday evening at his home in Claremont, California. He actually touched upon the themes of spirituality and addiction in this 1996 interview with Salon.

There went a broad soul. I’m sorry he felt it necessary to give up on himself, but I understand it, too.

Good night, sweet prince.

I had been reading a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron — When Things Fall Apart, or was it The Wisdom of No Escape? — and some subatomic particle of wisdom must have penetrated my hard head. I remember walking down the street on a sunny day, lost in my usual obsessive and negative thoughts — why me, why me? — when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I looked up at the blue sky and thought, I am not that important.

All at once my anxiety dispersed, as if by magic. For several hours thereafter I remained in a state of calm and (dare I say it?) peace.

This was wholly counter-intuitive. I grew up in America, dammit, land of Davy Crockett and Horatio Alger and libertarianism. Isn’t the individual the measure of all things? Isn’t the whole point of life to distinguish ourselves from the herd, and to get our piece of the apple pie? Or to make it onto the cover of People magazine?

And then there was my upbringing in evangelical Christianity, which teaches us twice-born kids from birth that we’re so very special, our separate, unique little godfearing selves are so utterly important to our Heavenly Father, that He sent His Only Son just to die on our behalf so that our disembodied personalities wouldn’t fry eternally in the lake of fire with the godless heathens (who aren’t very special at all, apparently. Unless you’re a missionary or something).

Add to that some accelerated early learning — I was labeled as a “gifted” child, and did schoolwork two grades ahead for the first several of my elementary years — and, presto! you have a recipe for borderline megalomania. If Americans are superior to the rest of the world’s citizens, and Christians are superior to the legions of nonbelievers populating this evil planet, and “gifted” children are superior to their idiot classmates who do age-appropriate work, then I was la creme de la creme. I was Supergirl. I was way more important than you, you poor slob.

Thus I started off my life journey completely identified with things that made me “special.” Things that made me need to guard my turf, to oppose, to compete. Things that could be taken away from me at a moment’s notice.

And that’s exactly what happened. Other kids surpassed me in school. My ossified faith crumbled to ashes. I failed to make money or headlines, to pull myself up by my red-white-and-blue bootstraps. My self-esteem took a nosedive. The flip side of grandiosity, after all, is inferiority.

Eastern faith traditions like Buddhism (as well as modern mystics like Eckhart Tolle) recognize all of this as the activity of the ego, the constructed self that strives to maintain the illusion of separateness. It feeds on feelings of personal importance, and thrives on grievances and the need to be right. Anything that strengthens that sense of individual special-ness or better-ness is good, to the ego. Unfortunately, its constant internal monologues can create a monstrous tunnel vision, eliminating all perspective and sense of proportion. Ego concerns can dominate a person’s entire consciousness, to the exclusion of anything and everything else that might be going on.

Case in point: there I was, on a beautiful summer day, obsessing and ruminating miserably about my past and all its repetitive, seemingly insurmountable failures. For me, the sky may as well have been pitch black and raining down hailstones. Consumed by despair, I think I was actually contemplating suicide.

And then, the miraculous thought: I am not that important.

In that moment, my massive, dark, bloated, all-consuming ego deflated like a stuck balloon.

The pressure was off. Pressure to live up to expectations, whether they were my family’s or my peers’ or my own; pressure to do something, for god’s sake, and get it right; pressure to solve the never-ending and intractable problem of AlienBaby. Was the earth going to stop turning on its axis if I didn’t get my act together? Who the hell did I think I was?!

All those frenzied thoughts, all their well-worn circuits of self-blame and self-pity, just ceased. I had obliterated their underlying operating assumption. If my strictly individual concerns and desires and achievements really weren’t the be-all end-all in the grand scheme of things, then why expend so much energy? Why create so much distress?

It was radical, to me, coming from where I came from. It was a relief.

…

Many times since, personal importance, the labored machinations of my overactive ego, have more often that not been the prime culprit when I’ve fallen into the heavy quicksand of depression and the sticky sinkholes of despair.

If you’re like me, you may find that when you don’t get the job, the promotion, the coveted affection and attention of a certain person, your sense of specialness is mortally affronted. Why haven’t I “won?” And who, then, is the superior candidate? What often doesn’t help matters is that your friends, relatives, and colleagues, who care about you and have your best interests at heart, may collaborate with your ego and encourage you to think that you deserve X more than someone else because you are better. (Your fear, of course, is that you are worse!) How many times have we sat over coffee with friends, bemoaning the phony bastard who sucked up to the boss or the shallow bitch who got the guy? There would be no plot to most romantic comedies were it not for this need for somebody (e.g. the sweet underdog suitor) to be “better.” Professional sports franchises might likewise languish and go out of business without the fierce identification of fans with a team they believe is superior to all others. (I’m not saying people wouldn’t still enjoy the game, but the more fanatical manifestations of such identification would have no impetus.)

Let’s be frank: a rather nerve-wracking ego investment in being Number One is ingrained deeply into our collective American psyche (USA! USA!), and no one ever wants to be the “loser.”

But the game theme is perhaps a good one to stick with. Some of the more (to my mind) “enlightened” individuals on our planet, like Tolle, author Don Miguel Ruiz, and the wonderful Roz and Ben Zander, have suggested in one way or another that everything in life can and should be treated as a game, albeit not a high-stakes one. (I think my new friend Pablo would say the same.) Their focus is upon gentle experimentation and lighthearted play, upon the appreciation of the richness, texture, and variety of all that exists on the “game board” of life, rather than an attachment to getting some nifty prize in the end. Engagement, to these seemingly happier souls, is much more vital than outcome.

Within this alternate framework, we might start to loosen the clenched fists of ego, of our own personal importance and our need to win, thereby becoming more capable of holding gently and then releasing whatever cards the present moment deals us. We could perhaps enjoy the game of life, without taking it all so personally.

Playing this way would require of us greater patience, kindness, and awareness. Unlike our usual games, this one presupposes cooperation rather than competition.

But anyone and everyone could play, if they were willing to take off their platform shoes.