Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
And so all of the energy I'd been spending, and it's a tightening, it's
like I want this to happen, and I want that to happen, and I think it
goes on in the background for us and we don't even notice it. It all
just stopped, and simultaneously to that I was beginning to read
spiritual texts, Buddhists texts mostly, and it just occurred to me,
wow, I'm experiencing what they're talking about. And I'm
experiencing what they're talking about not because I'm achieving
something or accomplishing something, but because I've
despaired of that, and yet nevertheless here I am. That's the
extraordinary thing, is like we're trained to think that we get what
we want by going out and getting it, but the opposite is true. We
get it by giving up the notion that it's absent.
WIZARD: Yes.
TRIP: Okay, let's keep going with some toughies here, he's doing
great.
WIZARD: It's grace that the affirmation of the Buddhist teachings
presented themselves at the very time to affirm your own right of
understanding.
BRIAN ADLER: I really think that's the value of crisis, because I
think for a lot of people these things become intellectual pursuits,
but for me it was like water in a desert. So prison was an incredibly
powerful actual experience of, wow, what's going on here has
nothing to do with any objective. I mean, it has everything to do
with what's going on in my head, and what's going on in my head
actually much more determines how everything seems than any
sort of objective reality, what's out there. And to get that in prison,
it's like after I left everything… it didn't sustain itself permanently,
but for a long time everything else was easy in comparison. It was
like life's great, don't you know?
TRIP: Well you were a clued in undergraduate in 1995, because
you wrote a paper about depression, you called it, Opportunity for
Deep Surrender Revealed in the Experience of Depression, and in
that paper… was it a thesis?
87