I haven’t posted anything here in a while. A lot has happened between my last post and now, and I’ll do my best to describe what I experienced. It may not look like it has much to do with recovery, but I believe it has everything to do with recovery. At least for me, I don’t pretend to know what’s best for anybody else.
Because of a health issue that has become impossible to ignore any longer, I’m going to be speaking and writing freely from this point on. The health problem is that my memory and thinking aren’t what they were, and I can feel it and my wife and sons have noticed it. Some pretty rapid cognitive decline. I’ll leave it at that. Until now, I’ve held back what’s in my heart out of worry that if I said what’s really in my heart, it would upset a few family members’ religious beliefs and that they wouldn’t understand, or wouldn’t even try to understand. I’ve come to realize that holding back my own heart has been backfiring and causing me grief. So, definitely no more of that.
If you’ve read much of this blog, you’ll know I practiced Buddhism for somewhere around twenty years. Not always actively, especially not during active addiction. But when I started on my recovery journey I leaned heavily into Buddhism, and it got me through the worst of it.
There’s something I’ve touched on only vaguely and infrequently in my writing. Something that had been eating at me for a long time. I won’t go into all the “technical” details here, that would take more space than a single blog post allows. But I want to finally say it plainly.
During one of the most intense, painful, and frightening phases of withdrawal/detox, I really thought I was going to die. Not like “oh, this is terrible, what if I die”. No, I really thought I was going to die. I had two seizures and that terrified me.
What I’ve never mentioned in my writing is that until recently I carried a very intense fear of death. More accurately, a fear of what I had been taught from a very early age happens after death.
The teachings I grew up hearing were, at least to my young ears, nothing to take comfort in to say the least. My young mind heard all that talk of “hell” and “the wrath of God” and understood it to mean there’s a monster waiting on the other side, so death is something to be avoided at all costs. That fear stayed with me for decades.
It made my life miserable and it flared more intensely whenever I got sick. Because sickness can lead to death and death was the doorway through which one fell into the hands of that angry, wrathful, vengeful god literally just waiting to throw you into an eternal burning lake of fire.
The verse that lived in my head from a very young age was Revelation 14:11: “And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night…” That is an absolutely terrifying image for a kid to absorb.
So when I thought I was dying during detox, I tried my best to believe in Christian doctrine and started going to church. Not because I actually was a Christian, I wasn’t and I knew it, but because I was so afraid of that “monster on the other side” that I was doing it solely to avoid hell. That was the only reason. I didn’t believe the rest of it. I still don’t.
Fast forward to recently, from around the time of my last post here. I came to realize more and more that I wasn’t being completely honest with myself in my spiritual beliefs and practices. Buddhism answered the vast majority of my questions, and there’s absolutely no doubt its teachings on the mind were a big part of what got me through detox.
But there was something I kept getting stuck on and it’s where my dishonesty with myself finally became undeniable and unbearable. The firm, unwavering Buddhist teaching on Atman and anatman/anatta. Self (capital S) and non-Self. In plain English, soul and no soul. Nothing permanent whatsoever within a person. This is a foundational concept in Buddhism and there is absolutely no budging on it. When I finally became honest with myself, that’s what I fundamentally disagree with. That, and the teaching that there is no God.
I will say this though, I agree with Buddhism’s absolute refusal to entertain the question of who created the heavens and the earth. I completely agree that question is utterly irrelevant to the problem of suffering and liberation from suffering here and now.
That left me in a particularly confusing and painful spot. The faith I’d practiced for a large part of my life didn’t answer my deepest questions, not after it had gotten me through detox. And I don’t believe in the teachings and doctrines of the Abrahamic faiths either. So what was I to do now? Where could I possibly turn?? Pretending doesn’t work for me, especially at sixty years old.
What I did was start reading the mystics and contemplatives from several traditions. Merton, Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, Rumi, Suzuki, Thich Nhat Hanh, Meister Eckhart, and modern contemplative voices like Richard Rohr. Almost every page I found myself yelling “Yes!” in my head. These people were talking about things I utterly do believe. Finally! Here were people speaking of God in ways that actually makes sense to me. Reading them had a profound effect on me. It would be accurate to call it life changing because it was/is. So began my search.
I longed for, ached for, connection with the Godhead they wrote of. I went in search of it, knowing that at last there were words for what I had only briefly touched before and what I had been so desperately seeking. I found it in the Bhagavad Gita. The Gita uses language very familiar to me from my decades of Buddhist study and practice. Words like “dharma” and “Atman.” But it goes beyond those words to describe the very essence of what I’ve been searching for. Finally, answers to the questions that have been gnawing at me for so long.
I suppose I’m a bit late to the game at 60. But that’s OK because being late is better than not arriving at all. I still have deep respect and love for the Buddha and his teachings. But I’ve finally admitted that I disagree with the anatman/anatta doctrine so fundamental to Buddhist thought, and I’ve finally found where my heart actually lives. I feel settled. I feel at peace, even with this new/worsening cognitive decline, this battle I must fight. I feel… like I’ve arrived home.
~Buck
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