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Saniel Bonder "The Rot:
From Waking Down: Beyond Hypermasculine Dharma See more about Saniel Bonder in Modern Spiritual Giants: A User's Guide Talk about it: In the below passage, Bonder speaks of a phase called "The Rot" as a somewhat unpleasant but necessary phase of spiritual growth. "The Rot is the passage that individuals undergo when they conclusively begin to lose faith in - and enthusiasm for - the hopes, beliefs, enterprises, and all the personal, social, and cultural forms whereby they have engages in an endless search for happiness, peach, freedom, love, andlightenment, or other ultimate or even ordinary goals in life. The passage beyond hypermasculine dissociation and idealistic seeking really begins with the Rotting away of everything you have ever been able to do to better yourself, to succeed, to get what you want, to get free. More precisely, it begins with your fundamental loss of ultimate hope in all such things. You may continue with your meditation, your therapy; you most likely will maintain your responsibilities to family and friends; you most likely won't abandon your job, your career, and other activities. But at the center of the wole great symphony of your own life, you begin to notice and helplessly endure a stunned, stark silence, an emptineses, a despair. All of your life you have bene seeking, often quite aggressively, to overcome this silent desolation at the core. When the Rot really sets in, nothing works any more. It may feel to you as if you are losing everything you have ever gained. It may appear that you are becoming the opposite of a spiritual person, a responsible citizen, family member, whatever. In fact, most people are able to keep their lives more or less together. But right at the very core of everything, a disintegration of hope and confidence sets in and will not lift. Different people Rot in different ways. (I have to capitalize references to this process - it is so thoroughly sacred and divine. Yet we usually experience it as anything but that!) Some people go through dramatic and difficult ordeals that chasten them into readiness to permit the Rot to do its work. Others appear to be breezing through life as if no problem had ever occurred, as if nothing were wrong, out of place, incomplete or frustrating. Yet, regardless of the surface appearances, the Rot goes on in all those who can no longer avoid it. Because, as many of my friends have agreed, as long as you can avoid the Rot, you will. I have seen this to be so, again and agin. As long as you have a path, as long as you have anxious hope, as long as you have a trajectory that you're traveling, an arc of growth to cultivate and defend, you are not yet prepared to encounter and embrace existence as the core wound. Therefore, you will not permit yourself to endure the onset and the consequences of the Rot. A couple of years ago, I spent some time serving a man who is a meditation teacher. He was attracted to what I was saying, but only, I sensed, in a kind of romantic way. Sure enough, as soon as the natural phenomena of this process began to appear in him, he bolted. He described how everything was fine, except that when he woke up each morning, he felt himself falling into a dark dwamp of despair that he could not get out of, no matter how hard he tried. I attempted to help him accept the swamp and its despair, to give up and sink into it and just be there, even if he might feel as if he were drowning. But he was not ready for that passage. And shortly hereafter our work together ended, at least for an indefinite time. What makes the Rot an evolutionary crisis is not the mere fact that things no longer appear to be working for you. Rather, it is where you are Rotting from, and what you are Rotting into. In The White-Hot Yoga of the Heart I speak of these matters in terms of centers of identity-gravity. As long as you are still fundamentally activated in the hypermasculine mode, the center of identity to which you gravitate, and from which you chronically view the world, is more or less analogous to the head. Its seat is the mind or total psyche, and its active essence or core is the individuated soul-nature, the root feeling of "I" or "me" that persists through all the ordinary states of daily waking, dreaming, and sleeping. This is true even of individuals who appear to be based in the heart, the emotional being or body, or in the physical, material, elemental body. I am talking about a deeper dimension of chronic identity than where any person's characteristic concentration of life-force happens to manifest. The person who is authentically involved in the Rot is falling, steadily and most often helplessly, out of the idealistic, dissociative, anxious mode of superimposed and formulaic seeking, and into the realistic, naturally associative, and more and more peaceful mode of participation in what IS in his or her life. A shift is occurring, in other words, in his or her characteristic place and orientation or identity. What is happening? He or she is "sropping," as my friends like to say, out of head-mind-soul awareness and into Heart-body-consciousness. He or she is falling into existence as the core wound of confusion and sparateness. This drop cannot be willed, motivated, made to happen by any means whatsoever. It occurs only via the Rot. The most dangerous way to relate to it is to imagine that you have already done it just because you have done a lot of inner work of a deep, psychological and spiritual kind. Then you can fool yourself, and thus depreive yourself of a realistic reckoning with your nature. This is a big point, or better to say, a huge red flag. I have had so many experiences of people coming to me and, when I start talking about the Rot, nodding their heads with a smile that is at once rueful, humbled - and incredibly proud. "Yep - I sure know what that is. Been there. Done that. Don't need any more Rot, no sirree." In general, after that, one of two things has occurred. Either thay are never really touched by my transmission, so that the Being-force never activates in them in such a way that they drop into the stark actuality of their persisting, underlying distress. Or, if they finally do somehow permit themselves to be touched in that way, they find something wrong with me and the work itself, or the community of participants, and thus rationalize a righteous departure. I am not begrudging such individuals their need to make their own ways through life, which include holding whatever opinions of my work and of me that they will or must. I am simply saying that I have seen a small parade of great souls come through my door and go out again without ever having understood what I actually meant when I speak of the core wound, the hypermasculine patterns of dissociation and seeking, and, especially, the Rot. More from Saniel Bonder is available at www.sanielbonder.com In addition, see more about Saniel Bonder in Modern Spiritual Giants: A User's Guide Talk about it: |
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