Getting Lost on the Spiritual Path

Thus far, I've tried to keep this blog  impersonal. It has mostly been a practice of taking what I have read, and heard, experienced and contemplated and then trying to distill some core truth out of  all of that. I don't know if anyone has gotten anything out of reading this, but it has been a good way for me to clarify my thoughts to myself.

This entry will be a bit more personal. It may also be the last entry. I'm putting this blog on indefinite hiatus.

I've always been interested in the big questions about life: who am I? what am I doing here? Is there a God? An afterlife? A spirit? I've never been a card carrying member of any religion, but I became interested in Buddhism and contemporary Western spirituality in my teens. I was very unhappy, and I was looking for answers. When I was 18 I had an incredibly powerful experience on psychedelic mushrooms which made the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment an obsession. This obsession had latent periods, of years at a time, but it has always resurfaced.

I am 30 years old now, and the enlightenment that I was sure would attain had not appeared. For a time, I would have periods of what I thought was satori. I mapped them and they were getting longer and closer together. And then finally...nothing happened. Well, something happened, it just wasn't what I expected. I became extremely depressed. For the last four months or so I've been battling suicidal depression.

But good news: I think I have come to some sort of equilibrium. Not because I've come to some big insight, but because I haven't. None of the spiritual diatribe makes sense anymore. I hear the words, but they just slide off my mind. I haven't had an awakening. I haven't realized anything.

There is no more spiritual path for me. There is no more philosophy. It's piss in the wind, a snake swallowing its own tail.