Lead to Gold

(Free Article)

I’ve witnessed an interesting phenomenon occur every day over the past month.

As my financial circumstances remain uncertain and tenuous due to my inability to secure suitable work (for the past six months), I wake up each morning in a state of deep anxiety and panic. My pillow is usually damp and cold. The heart feels heavy with dread and a sense of foreboding fills the air.

Nevertheless, I get up and get my kids dressed and, after dropping them off at school, take the dog for a walk on the trails. As I watch the sun filter in through the woods, the crisp morning air fills my lungs and I find myself in a state of awe and gratitude. Each day I watch the same family of bald eagles set off from their nests and glide in circles against a backdrop of mountains that loom like mirages in the morning mist. A deep sense of well-being permeates my consciousness gradually slowly dispelling the gloom in which I awoke earlier in the morning.

Later in the day, I sit down to meditate for anywhere between an hour to two hours. I quickly enter into a state of powerfully aware presence. My awareness sinks into a deep oblivion within which my perceptions become incomprehensible to me. Shapes appear, colours morph, sounds fade in and out and there are energetic shifts that I feel in my body - some so subtle they are almost imperceptible and others so massive my body jerks or arches in response. I witness these phenomena without paying them much attention - I know there is some deep purge that is occurring beyond the fringes of my conscious mind.

When my meditation is done, I find my day transformed. I am filled with a sense that all-is-deeply-well. I am overwhelmed by gratitude (often to the point of tears) for the time I am able to spend with my wife, my children, my dog, with nature. I am filled with reverence for life. Every moment feels utterly sacred. I go to bed filled with a deep peace and existential security.

And then the next morning I wake up in a cold sweat and panic again and the entire process repeats itself.

I’ve hypothesized to my wife that this may be some kind of profound alchemical process unfurling within me. For, when I awake, I have almost no memory of dreaming so I know I have slept very deeply. In deep sleep there are things in the recesses of my unconscious which get stirred, dredged up and become revealed. And when I wake up, I am confronted by the dark energetic morass of all that unresolved matter that has been brought to the surface. My task then becomes to convert all that lead into gold. To take that dense cloud of fear and doom and shine the light of awareness and perspective upon it. And I do this gradually through the day, during my walks in nature and my meditation.

But what I find fascinating is the paradoxical way in which two very different paradigms can coexist within my mind. I can simultaneously feel deep insecurity about the future yet also an immense sense of perfection and all-is-as-it-should-be in the present. I can feel both a sense of wanting to have control over my financial future and a deep sense of relaxation and willingness to surrender control.

It all depends where my attention goes. The moment it shifts to a thought about the future, my entire being gets hijacked by a neurotic state of craving and control. And yet, in the very next moment, as I become deeply present to my immediate surroundings, that fear vanishes as if it had never been present to begin with.

There are not one but two selves within me. One is the self whose survival I am worried about. And the second is the self that survives just fine without my excessive involvement.

The first self lives exclusively in the future. The second self only exists in the present.

When I am the first self, I become highly self conscious: I become contracted and fearful or I become excited and hopeful. There is no middle ground between those two extremes. When I am the second self, I am relaxed and unselfconscious.

When I am the first self, I live in a sensational reality in which sensational things happen, whether terrible or wonderful. I am either a millionaire or homeless, either a famous person or a loser, either a man who has left a deep mark on society or one who has faded into the oblivion of mediocrity like the rest of the sheeple. Yet, when I am the second self, I live in an ordinary reality. One in which terrible and wonderful things are rare occurrences and when they do happen are somehow taken in stride. And I find myself neither a winner nor a loser, neither a grander version of myself nor a wretcheder one. Rather I am wholly myself just as I am.

This past month has been one of pure alchemy. Where I wake up each morning as the first self and then gradually transform into the second. Lead to gold. Over and over again.

I do not understand how or why. I do not even know for certain what it is that is occurring. Yet, each step brings me intimately closer to that profound sense of mystery - it pervades my every hour. As the known and the desire to know fall away, the utter ineffability of life-as-it-is arises with a resounding presence.

And I am stilled.