Saturday, October 17, 2015

The Story of the Sad Song (Revised)

Where is the moment we needed the most?
You kick up the leaves and the magic is lost.
You tell me your blue skies fade to grey.
You tell me your passion's gone away,
and I don't need no carrying on.
(Daniel Powter, Bad Day)

In the olden days when the AOL and MSN communities were still thriving, I enjoyed visiting their chat rooms to exchange steamy fantasies with other folks who just like me wanted to have a little fun. Ironically, this was also the time when my spiritual path started opening up to me. Well, as you can imagine, mind sex and spirituality don't really go together (see the note I wrote with my co-author Su Zhen on this 
A long self-discovery journey started to leave that all stuff behind and commit myself whole-heartedly to the Way instead. Needless to say, the Way steadily took over my life whereas my dark passions faded in the background until they disappeared altogether. Part of the reason was that these communities all closed down anyway and pornography simply couldn't fill the void of talking to real people. But the much more important reason was that you simply can't run away from your Self.

Most spiritual travelers have encountered synchronicity on their journey, like number sequences such as 11:11 that magically pop up everywhere. I experienced a serendipity during that time in the form of a song. It was a sad song that somehow always popped up on the radio when as I experienced one of these "dark night of the soul" episodes. I was flabbergasted. How can there be a "System" that knows me so well that It can even anticipate what I will do. I started running little experiments with it. Surely, I wouldn't succumb to my dark night of the soul episodes knowing that this was about to happen. Well, I did anyway! The System always knew me perfectly.

More than that, whenever this sad song was playing, pain was coming my way. Professional or personal pain; misfortunes involving my friends and family. It worked like karmic clock-work. First I thought that I was going through some shadow experience the way Jacob did when he thought that he had wrestled with God and dislocated his hip in the process. But then, I don't believe in a God that punishes us for our sins. I only believe that we are powerful enough to manifest whatever it is we believe in. But having said this, I was impressed by the regularity of the sequences of events: the dark passions followed the song, and the pain followed the passions without missing a beat. And I was similarly impressed with the predictability of the recovery path in the aftermath. The first two weeks hurt a lot, the third week was better, and by the fourth week all of that stuff was a distant memory. It was like climbing out of a dark hole, but eventually you got to the realization that no matter how much the hurt, the sun would always shine again a few weeks down the road. 

Perhaps you wonder now what happened to the sad song after I put my dark night experiences safely behind me? Well, it is still with me. It still pops up from time to time, but its meaning has completely changed; instead of announcing anything, it simply reminds me that a somewhat deflated pain body is still with me; a little irritation, a minor inconvenience, a lingering sadness. Some things still go wrong, a broken window, the wifi doesn't work, a little cold, some set-back here or there. But you see that the impact is waning. 

I have no idea what I will associate with this song in a few years from now. Maybe it will fade from my life completely; maybe it will always remain a Cassandra song of sorts. What I do know the pain body inside of me is deflating, and that should be an uplifting message for everyone. When I recently saw the video of the song I realized that it actually has a very loving, creative and uplifting finish. Yup, this made perfect sense to me. There is so much creative power in the dark side, but you have to make it to the other side to experience it.

No comments: