The Burning

Reading minds and being read — the mysterious role of the Teacher

See, the things is, he could read minds.

And I don’t care if you believe it or not, because that’s not for me to say. It’s not for me to tell you what to think or what to believe. And why would I even want to persuade you? I used to want to tell people what to do but that era didn’t last long because I quickly realized that it’s really a bit pointless.

The thing is, what really counts is what you think, what you believe, what you uncover and what you find out for yourself.

I think most of us, when we stop and really thing about it, will agree there’s way too much propaganda going on in the world. It’s really very difficult to keep it all straight. In that context, you certainly don’t need people from my side of the street adding to your load.

But mind reading? Well, yes. That’s a thing.

There’s the reading, and there’s the being read

When someone can read your mind, there is no refuge in going dark, no sense in deciding to not engage in conversation with them. Because if they’re good, it’s all pretty transparent and visible to them. I know. I tried every angle, I used every avoidance behavior, I exhausted every possibility. I thought I was successfully ducking every swing, so to speak.

When someone can read your mind, there is no refuge in going dark.

And by the way, I actually know something about you. I’m fairly certain that if you were to find out that someone you knew could truly read minds, the first thing you’d think about would not be about going dark. No.

Instead, you’d probably be all intrigued, all caught up in the novelty of the actual discovery. You’d likely use words like ‘fascinating’, or find yourself saying out loud how all of this is “really compelling” or “intriguing” or “captivating.” You’d repeat things like, “Wow, this just blows my mind.” Or, “Unbelievable” or “Man, this is so fucking unreal.” Then again, you might just kind of sneer and blow it off as dumb or not real.

Anyway, once you get past all that — which if you were to stick around long enough, you would eventually get past it — there’d be some pretty practical issues staring you in the face. That’s because while most people are all swept away with the initial, mysterious and romantic notion of being able to read minds, being around it is no picnic. The reality, so to speak, creeps in and has its way with you.

So, the part of what it’s like to experience the ‘being read’ end of the equation? What I can tell you is that it’s not really all that fun.

For starters, I have a little bit of the ability myself. Maybe it runs in families. It’s hard to say. But if you look at him and look at me, well, I can see how someone might call it hereditary.

But the thing is, hereditary or not, I don’t think anyone ever looks at me. Because I’ve always tried not to do anything that anyone would notice. I’ve worked really hard at that, ever since I was a kid. Giving away my secret here, but truth is this essay may never even be read.

But back to my ‘cloak of invisibility’. Of course there’s always my writing, but it is fairly obscure. And anyway, I’m not really worried about writing about it, in part because hardly anyone reads anything I write. And in part because I’ve become so good at not drawing attention, that you’d be completely put off the scent, even if we were to meet face-to-face… even if you had read this before we met. Kind of a Jedi mind trick.

I’ll take the risk, in part because there are so few people who really put it out there, who really write what it’s like going into and through this kind of study and training. And that’s kind of my tipping point, see? Because this kind of first-hand accounting is really needed.

Back to the point. To do what I do requires a lot of skill, because you have to understand invisibility, okay? And I don’t think most people get that. They might understand being unseen, like being anonymous in a crowd. Even in something as potentially revealing as a crowd of two.

But there’s more to it. Because you basically have to go so deep into not drawing attention to yourself, that you’re able to find and then hit the mute button itself. With precision. Every time. No leaks.

You have to just be normal. Appear normal because you are normal. For real. Because if you start leaking it, they will notice.

Don’t even think of being a superpower

Mystics of the world, listen to me: if you think you have some kind of power, some secret power, well, you kind of have to turn off from the whole idea that you’re special. This is another one of my secret agent motifs.

You have to keep things genuinely real. It’s not really an achievement to overcome our current views of reality if we think we have some kind of secret superpower we can pull out of the hat. It doesn’t count if you game the system. Because the realizations I write about on this site can’t be gamed.

There are very few people who should use actual superpower. (Right now, there’s only one nation on earth that’s a superpower. And even they screw it up a lot. That should be a big hint, right in front of us.) The truth is, the odds are extremely high that you’re not one of those few people. Even though I know that you think that you know that you are.

I had a radar detector. I bought it in Maryland. The only state in America where they are illegal is next door in Virginia. I got caught with it one dark night by a Virginia State Trooper. I wasn’t speeding. He tagged me as I was driving up through the mountains in the Lexington/Buena Vista area.

“How’d you get me?” I asked. Because I had the unit well hidden. He told me he had a radar detector Detector. Imagine that.

So the thing is, unless you truly turn it off, it’s going to be visible. And somebody’s going to spot that you’re trying to cheat. And in the stuff I’m writing about here, it’s really easy to spot a cheater. And what’s the cheat? To cheat yourself? Or someone else? Or to somehow try to get over? To be a fake hero? Cheating quickly disqualifies you, man. Cheaters only get but so far in confronting the truth and in showing up in heaven. It’s not that they try to keep you out, it’s more like you can't squeeze through the pinhole.

But enough of this vague rambling. Let’s look at Irina.

Irina Tweetie and Fire

When certain doors get opened, the wise old sayings tell us that they can never be shut again. I’ve found that to be true. It’s also true that when certain doors get opened, you are going to encounter some unimaginable things. And sometimes they are devastating and deeply consequential. They might even kill you.

Irina Tweedie studied Sufism. In her studies she focused on kundalini, or ‘the fire’. I studied in martial arts. In my studies we focused on movement and flow, or on ‘ki’ energy. One person studies fire, another water.

[Tweedie’s] teacher’s first request of her was to keep a complete diary of her spiritual training — everything, all the difficult parts, even all the doubts. He predicted that one day it would become a book and would benefit people around the world. Indeed, it became the book, Daughter of Fire: A Diary of a Spiritual Training with a Sufi Master.
This diary spans five years. It is an account of a spiritual training with a Sufi Master and is the most detailed account of the relationship between disciple and teacher that exists in Western Literature. The book is written in diary form. From a psychological viewpoint, the diary maps the process of ego dissolution, gradually unveiling the openness and love that reside beneath the surface of the personality.

While the catalyst for someone’s studies may differ from one path to another, the aims are the same. They meet. And the teachers must be strict, because they are trying to guide their students through pinholes.

Here’s the thing about teachers: when you’re put in the position of having no choice but to teach someone how to go through a pinhole, those deeply devoted students are going to end up hating you at some point. I’ll show you what I mean a little later.

I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. — Matthew 19:24

I speak of the aims being the same. They are. It doesn’t take an extensive study of mythology or comparative religions to prove it. Even on terms as seemingly unrelated as ‘nothingness,’ a term after which I originally named the monastery, we find that Tweetie clearly relates:

We have this state of oneness with the Beloved and it is really a condition of love. But with what are you united, in the night? With nothing — with a black hole. God is nothingness. And the word Allah means exactly that. “Al” — is the article “the”, but “lah” means nothing, and if you write the word Allah and look there is “Aaa-ooo” — and where is the last “lah”? It is hidden on top as a little squirk. Even the name!
Arabic language is wonderful, how they write Allah shows that it is “The Great Nothing”. And here comes this tremendous difficulty to explain to people we are mystics of course we Sufis. We say the lover and the Beloved they are unbelievable. But when you have the union with the Beloved alone in meditation you are united with nothingness. But this nothingness responds, it’s a feedback, it loves you absolutely and utterly, so completely everything of you because he created you like that, he can’t help loving you, and if he doesn’t love you, you will cry and you will cry and will keep crying, till the milk of his kindness boils up — I quote now Rumi — he can’t help it he has to love us, he made us. He is part of us actually, and Teilhard de Chardin said God experiences and fulfills himself in man — I quote from memory, probably not quite correct quotation — and he nearly was excommunicated for that.
So it’s not only us that say that. But nothingness, again, it is for the mind, because in this moment of union there is no mind. For the mind, God is a concept which does not exist, because it cannot prove anything, it’s not there. Because the mind by its very substance knows the things from outside itself. There is me and the knowledge, the knowledge which I have acquired, there is you and me, that is the I and the not I. The God is you — you cannot see your own eyes. How can there be no God? Never! But in the moments of oneness where I said there is a complete fulfillment, God is everything but nothingness, it is a complete fullness, like in the Isa Upanishad. Fullness, take away fullness from fullness, fullness alone remains.

In her book, Irina Tweedie wrote about the experience of being a student. While she wrote extensively of her personal transformation, she was also transparent regarding her agonies, doubts and fears, including her times of rage toward her teacher.

To be able to lucidly write about experiences in the Nothingness is momentous. It’s hard for me to imagine someone having that ability without having paid deep psychological prices to get there. Tweedie even contemplated suicide. From an interview with Tweedie:

The dark night of the soul is really the inner moments of utter dejection. Because what happens on the mystical path — the meditation is easy; all is wonderful. We call God or That, the Beloved. The Beloved is near; meditation is easy. It’s all wonderful.
The next day I am alone. I can’t find the Beloved. God doesn’t exist. It is awful. We call it the yo-yo syndrome — up and down, and up and down, and up and down, endlessly. And that provokes a kind of loneliness, and a kind of frustration, which St. John of the Cross calls the dark night of the soul. And as you can compare spiritual life to a spiral, the experiences repeat themselves in a higher and higher spiral, or rather higher and higher frequencies. The dark night of the soul gets deeper and deeper and deeper.
I remember at the end I was practically suicidal. I wanted to commit suicide twice. I didn’t, of course, because I wouldn’t be here. He saved me from it, with very simple words. First he told me, “You are absolutely hopeless. You are nowhere. You will never reach spiritual life.” He treated me so badly that I really thought I was wasting my time. And I knew I couldn’t go back to London without having achieved at least a little bit. I wouldn’t respect myself. So I said, “Well, I’ll just go out of this world.”
I was in a terrible desperation, because the heat was 120 degrees in the shade, and he treated me in a terrible way. I had very little to eat, because I couldn’t eat in this heat. I got thinner and thinner. I reached, I think it was less than eight stones, and this is very, very little — I don’t know how much it is in pounds. You know, the physical body at a certain time just reaches a kind of “ring pass not” — I can’t go further.
I decided to throw myself from the bridge, at Kampur, the city where my teacher lived. He died in the meantime. It was on the Ganges; there was a big long bridge on the Ganges, and the Ganges is deep. So I thought, “Well, it won’t hurt very much.”

Like Tweedie, I raged. Even now, there are times I rage. I don’t think there are many students who will admit to this stuff. It’s more convenient to pontificate and to look like a hero. We generally prefer being admired to being dismissed, marginalized, dismantled, or viewed with scorn or the dreaded pity.

But, at some point you’ll rage. I’ll share a little of my rage.

The phone call

The phone rang. It was 1997. I was in New York. He was in Virginia.

“You still haven’t called me,” came the voice. It was him. I was tense as he continued. “I know you’re telling me that you’re writing. But why aren’t you plugging in?”

I was silent. Sometimes a great deal of our phone time would pass in silence.

Mine old school wall phone had the super long cord… I could pace.

“Why wouldn’t you want to plug in?” There was another long period of dead phone time. Very long. “Didn’t you get what you asked for?” he asked slowly.

Again, a long pause. Finally, I said, “Yes.”

“And what did you ask for?” he continued. His prodding was gentle, but from my point of view it felt manipulative, like I was being baited in.

That’s what would happen with him. I’d often feel like I was damned if I do, and damned if I don’t with how I responded. That no matter what I said, some kind of noose would get tighter. There were times when these kinds of training experiences would feel overwhelmingly oppressive, suffocating. For me, it was often better to just clam up. I had no other way to defend myself. I’d just convince myself that the cobra wrapped tighter and tighter around my psychology was normal.

It’s hard to describe, but the experience of being probed so singularly is similar to having a boil. You’re in a lot of pain. So, off you go to the doctor, who, without asking permission decides the best approach is to bore right in and lance it with a hot needle, without any anesthetic. Who in their right mind would enjoy that?

My teacher was often baffled by the way I reacted. He claimed he wasn’t that way at all himself. If, for example, someone was boring in on him, he implied that he lapped it up. I wasn’t so sure about that, because the roles were never really reversed. Well maybe once or twice. But either way, it wasn’t in any way the least bit comfortable to be on the receiving end of what he would dish out.

The silence on the phone went on and on. Finally I guess something moved just enough in my mind that I decided to relax a little.

“I asked for a value system.” I had finally managed to allow something to leak out. As puny as it makes me sound today, it was truly an act of steely willpower.

Ten years earlier I had been floundering in some personal aspects of my life. At the time I had wailed out to him that I wanted a value system. It wasn’t so much about not having any personal values of right and wrong, decency, politeness or social behaviors. It was more about not having a clear sense of charting a course in life. What do you build a life on? What values do you seize upon to build a life?

I had been raised to fulfill the American Dream: to get married, buy a house, own a car and have two kids. With that mission accomplished, I suppose that somewhere deep down inside of me a slowly percolating dread had begun to bubble up. It was somewhat wrapped up in the whole idea of wondering if there was more to it than some U.S. of A. American Dream that I’d been programmed to chase as my destiny.

“Don’t you have that now, and a whole lot more?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” I replied.

Without going into the details here, he’d taken my value request and developed a comprehensive set of universal principles to coincide with our Jiu Jitsu training. They had changed my life, and those of many others. They continue to deeply impact me to this day.

“So, what is your question?” he asked.

And just like that, I was locked up again. I went silent, I submerged like a stealth submarine, diving even deeper to avoid detection. Silent running.

He started laughing. “See? They travel to India to seek out the great master. They find the guru. And when they get there, they have nothing to ask. Amazing, isn’t it?”

I was biting my lip and shaking my head on the other end of the phone. But still I said nothing.

In retrospect, there seems to be nothing inappropriate in what he had asked and said. But I was cognizant at the time that any response I gave would somehow expose me, that he could leap like a panther straight into my weaknesses or vulnerabilities. Eat me alive. Regardless of my answer I’d be torn to shreds. So yeah, I’d just go dark.

“Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, coaxingly.

I have to ask something, I thought to myself. He never stops. Anything. Just let me start moving. Let me think. Let me think. Let me think…

These null-sets that I exhibited would happen fairly frequently. That’s what I called them: null sets, the null mind. All zeros. They’d occur in spurts.

Completely unknown to me at the time, however, a very peculiar phenomenon was emerging, something more peculiar than the act of clamming up. But that particular insight — that positive something that was slowly developing out of my null-mind behavior — that realization wouldn’t emerge until many years later.

When I first began going into the null set, it was clearly subconscious, some kind of knee-jerk reaction to someone poking into my ‘operating system’. But it didn’t take me long to start going there on my own, deliberately. As I’ve pointed out, it was my reaction to a perceived threat.

He would sometimes comment about it, saying things like, “It’s weird. You go into the strangest state. It’s like you’re catatonic. It’s the weirdest thing. I really don’t know how to describe it.”

I didn’t either. But I can now. Fluently.

Looking back, I can see what it was. I had subconsciously, inadvertently perhaps, found the elusive ‘no mind’ or ‘empty mind’ state. It was only in that state that he couldn’t read my thoughts. I was in a ‘shields up’ defensive posture. But the state of empty mind has various rooms or levels. The one I was in at the time had thick walls. In other words, if there was something greater or vaster ‘out there’ my castle walls were still too thick to be penetrated.

Ironically, while I definitely did not make the connection at the time, the truth was that a big part of my training was all about learning how to go into that state! Yet, like I said, that connect-the-dots realization didn’t occur until many years later.

The mind can be completely impenetrable.

To be clear, I wasn’t experiencing that state with any sense of real control, much less understanding. It was the difference between being a seasoned explorer of caves and being a guy who sometimes just falls in a dark hole and flails around. Yet paradoxically, I went there so often that eventually, years later, it became easy to find, achieve and sustain. It became familiar and navigable. So much so that fast forwarding to the present, I find myself more or less living in that place.

But anyway, there I was, on the other end of the phone line, thinking, delaying, thinking, stalling…

“Ask the first thing that pops into your mind,” he said. “The first thing that flashes into your mind when I say ‘Ask your question.’”

Instantly, I saw the flash and moved on it. “I want to know something about ego and respect,” I stated. It wasn’t really a question, but at least I’d started moving.

Without hesitation, he shifted into an extended conversation about ego and respect. Suddenly, things were feeling different. There was a different tone, and a different quality to the interaction between us. It felt better. He was telling me that respect counterbalances ego.

“What helps keep respect in control?” I asked.

“Appreciation and gratitude,” came the instant reply.

“Well, what is it then that keeps smugness in control?”

He started chuckling. “Yes, you are smug. You don’t understand genuine humility. You look at humility as something less than. I see being humble as something more than. Humble is where it’s at.”

He’d gone and done it. Remember? I told you that no matter which way I turned, the noose would tighten. I’d opened back up a little, began to relax just a little, and then pow, the cannon ball came flying in. A undisguised accusation of smugness. He didn’t soften the blow. Couple that with me thinking about how he had just demonstrated his superiority to me, his advanced understanding. He was smart, I was an idiot. He had his act together, I was a clumsy dunce. But somehow I hung in.

He told me not to worry, that everyone goes through these kinds of things. His soothing helped a bit, but I had a lot of rough waters ahead of me in the years to come.

Blip — so that’s the moment of thought

But back to mind reading. I’ve referred to these things before, like in the next excerpt below.

But look, there’s a lot to this. You’ve already seen me point out a completely unexpected byproduct that resulted from using the so-called ‘null-mind’ as some kind of refuge, only to later discover that it was completely setting me up to become facile in ‘mushin’ or empty-mind. Who would have known?

There’s also this whole notion of asking yourself questions, questions that might not normally ever come up had I not been exposed to mind training of this somewhat threatening nature. For example, how do you know where thoughts come from? The stock answer is to say they come from your brain. Are you really so certain of that? Or, how do you know that your own thoughts are really your own thoughts?

There’s mind control and then there’s Mind control

So, those kinds of questions, and the ensuing roads that lead to discovering answers, emerged out of personally miserable incidents such as the ones exemplified in this essay. It wasn’t always miserable, though. Here’s that excerpt:

We were on the road, heading from Virginia to Nashville. The smoothness of the highway created a lazy lull in the conversation. He was driving. After a time, the silence was broken with a single word.
“There,” he said.
With not a clue about what he meant, I just sat there. Whatever was going on seemed dumb. Stupid. Some kind of lesson. Always with the lessons. Dumb.
“There,” he said again, after a bit of a pause.
I glanced over at him quizzically, still mute. Inside my quiet places, I was shaking my head. A little more time went by in silence. He stared at the road, the miles still clipping by. And then…
“There.” Pause. “And there.”
“And there.”
A light went off in my head.
“There.” He did it again. As soon as the light had gone off.
Suddenly, I was startled. “Wait a minute,” I said.
“There it is again,” he stated.
“What? What are you doing? You’re sensing when I’m thinking about something!”
He said nothing, but just kept driving.
“No wait! You’re not sensing when I’m thinking. You’re sensing when I have the actual intention to think!”
“Yes,” he replied.
“The actual moment of intention!” I exploded. “The blip, the moment, the first indication of intention!”
“Yes.”

The essay this is drawn from goes on to reveal that I learned how to do this myself. Which was astonishing. But I only learned because I was willing — despite my kicking and screaming — to be deeply exposed, cut open all raw and bloody. And because my teacher was also willing to be deeply vulnerable. And play the part of the bad guy. That takes courage, love and commitment.

As the cracks in my logic widened, my mind opened

One time I was driving my family back from a short weekend vacation. I pulled into a travel plaza off the interstate that I’d never used before or since. We were still a hundred miles or so from home. And there he was. With a group of students. One of his students was caravanning some horses, and I recall she had broken down. Pickup trucks and horse trailers. What force caused all of us to converge in the most unlikely of ways, places and times? — circa 1999. Call it coincidence if that suits you. I don’t really care because I’m not out to convince you or anyone. I had and continue to have far too many things like this happen to feel a need to persuade anyone of something they may not be open to experiencing.

As I let go, I experienced more deeply

One time he had gone camping. I had no idea where he’d gone other than it was ‘somewhere to the north’. It was the weekend and already dark. On a whim, I decided to see if I could find him. There were hundreds of square miles of beach, forest, parks and campgrounds. Dozens of choices. I had no sense of his camping destinations of choice or outdoor his habits. Yet, less than an hour later I was standing in pitch black woods, a mile or more from the nearest road, having slipped past locked gates and barbed wired fences, and somehow found myself behind dark trees, standing there looking at a campfire with several men huddled around it. There he was. I’d walked straight there. What guided me there? — circa 1988

THE TEACHER BECOMES A PUNCHING BAG

But it’s not always about the teacher. Far from it. I’m using my teacher here as an example, maybe even picking on him a little, because I am trying to convey what it is like to be around people who can do this. And what it can do to you, if you are ever involved in this kind of training and study. But I’m also saying that if you are around people who are like this, you may never know… because they can completely hide it.

In a sense my teacher is not really the subject of this essay. I am. Notice how I have painted myself as a victim, similar to how Irina painted herself. Our victimization stories are something you may relate to. Because at some point, whether through studying with a teacher or just living your life, you’ll probably end up thinking you’re being victimized, too.

Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee once said, “My teacher said you can’t cross an unknown land or a desert without a guide.”

I’ve found that many people disparage the notion of having a teacher. And that’s fine. It’s about making choices, isn’t it? What works for one person, doesn’t always work for another. People are fond of telling me that they have their truth, and I have mine. Fair enough.

Yet, having said that, I also know that there are certain things that we do in life in which we do not hesitate to turn to teachers. It has nothing to do with my truth or your truth. Our K-12 system of education is compulsory, and it is led by teachers. If a student wants to become a doctor, they’ll train with teachers. If an adventurer wants to climb Denali, they’ll hire guides. I had teachers all along the way as I first learned a trade and then a profession.

Do you want my candid opinion? You are only going to get so far into and be only so successful in navigating the unknown without some kind of guide. Silicon Valley’s trends of micro-dosing or brain hacking will only take you so far.

It’s really odd to me that we unhesitatingly accept the need for teachers of the known, but so often vehemently reject even the hint of needing a teacher for the unknown. Even though it’s unknown!

Tweedie sums it up ruthlessly

Tweedie documents her five years with her teacher in her book Daughter of Fire.

“I hoped to get instruction in Yoga, expected wonderful teachings, but what the teacher did was mainly to force me to face the darkness within myself and it almost killed me…. I was beaten down in every sense until I had to come to terms with that in me which I kept rejecting all my life.”

I’ve had far more time with my teacher than Tweedie had with hers. While I didn’t keep diaries like Tweedie, I maintained prodigious notes. I have no reluctance in saying I can deeply identify with many of Tweedie’s experiences. In that regard, I have written extensively on these subjects, going back at least 30 years. I intend to continue writing until I can no longer write.

NOTE: If you want to study and journey deeper and deeper into consciousness, in my opinion it’s important to just take things as they come. Not to judge. It comes with being a monastery. Even if the only monastery in sight is you.

To be clear, I’m not claiming in any of my accounts that some kind of ‘miracles’ took place. While I’ve witnessed inexplicable phenomenon, that’s just what it is: inexplicable. That’s why such things are called esoteric studies. Science will eventually catch up.

ESSAYS, REPORTSMark WalterJanuary 3, 2021mushin, mystics, mysticism, teacher, training, field reports, mark walter