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 changed: it now announces a dark cloud of melancholy that just lingers for a couple of days and I simply submit to it. So the pain body that was once responsible for my full moon escapades is still within me; yet, it has become a fountain of creativity for me, as I no longer attempt to escape from it. Someone also recently pointed out to me that the video of the sad song in fact has a creative, loving, and this happy ending. That finding fits the gist of my story quite well. I called this note "The Story of the Sad Song" just because I can still feel the pain of this pain body vividly in my bones, but who knows, in a few years hence I may just re-title this note as the story of the happy song instead.
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