On Top of the World

The month following I sorted out my worldly affairs. I announced that our concert in Sweden would be the last. I tied up loose ends with jobs and told the few friends I had left about my decision to practice A Course in Miracles with full commitment. It took me almost no time or effort to do so. I was geared towards the discipline of my awakening and therefore kept my mind focused and ready. I stayed clear from temptations and would not be lured back in the same old scenarios.
Our last formal gig was at the biggest blues festival in Amal, Sweden. My therapist who had become a good and healthy friend came to the festival with me. She helped me stay in a clean space. We stayed away from the blues networking and happy hours. My career had come to an end and I just waited on our last performance.

It was real hard for me to give up my duo, since it had become my whole life. My blues career was taking off, mainly because of my full dedication to it, as I was no longer distracted by my studies, and I had put in long hours in running the duo as a small business and in booking gigs and tours. For my partner in crime it was difficult to understand or accept. We had both invested a lot of energy and time in getting our show on the road. We had produced our first album barely half a year ago and we just started to catch on, on a wider circuit. He couldn’t grasp this whole Course thing that I was going on about and he felt left behind, maybe even betrayed by me. During our time as a duo we had been in many fights as an ongoing power struggle about leader and showman ship but in this performance he gave me the spotlight. He was either generous or trying to keep me from walking out on the act.

I just couldn’t do it anymore; the heavy exchange with the audience, the idolization, the drinking and smoking and the crazy long hours. I performed with my duo on the second day of the festival. The festival was in a huge open tent with a big stage for the bands and a smaller stage for solo, duo and trio acts. For each subsequent act the audience simply turned around to face the opposite stage. This last performance was strangely bizarre to me. The audience was unfocused and disconnected, they weren’t really seeing us. They were standing there expecting yet another sensation without a sincere need to listen to music or connect with us as real persons.

This is what I would dream of as the ultimate accomplishment for a music act; to play for a crowd of thousands of people. But when the moment came I preferred the more intimate setting of the direct interaction between musician and listener in a small café or informal setting. I didn’t feel we could really be ourselves on that stage and we were trying to tailor ourselves to this crowd. It was strange to be awake to the possibility of true light communication, yet sitting here on stage at a music event, for me always one of the highest forms of communication, realizing there was no true communication at all. I was slurping long notes from my bluesy soul to my harmonica, from my bullet microphone to the amplifier, from the amplifier to the mixer and out through the public address, from people’s strained ears to their confused and drunken brains, in the end to convert one percent of all that sound energy into a Swedish ja or jo. When we finished our set two beautiful ladies came up kissing us and handing us flowers. That was new.

After our performance I was drained, not the least happy.  I ordered a round of large beers for my mother and her boyfriend, who had come to see me and vacation at the same time, and my friends. I didn’t drink all weekend and I had intended not to drink anymore. The beer I drank from this large plastic cup made me feel terrible. It was to be my last beer as well as my last alcoholic drink.

I came home with money to spare and I put it away for a Course intensive in Switzerland.
My three new Course friends picked me up from the train station in the town where I grew up, and together we drove off to Switzerland. I was so light, so free, so excited and open to the adventure of a new life. The world no longer weighed me down and the anxiety of being stuck between two worlds had left me.  Listening to Michael Jackson and other inspirational pop music, we drove through Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland.  Then we drove through the high energy of the Alps and stopped to refill our water bottles with fresh water seeping out from the massive rock walls.

The event was hosted in a house high up in the Alps. It was a beautiful location and we were surrounded by a concentric group of mountains. The house was full and as the new guy I camped in a tent outside.  The main teacher for the weekend was a big guy from Boston, he was quietly spoken of as the second in line after Master teacher and he was the Master Teacher at the Australian center. His teachings were abstract but I could tune in to him and a lot of inspiration and light transmitted into my awareness. The Saturday morning he put his chair on the lawn outside and we held session in this beautiful summer weather with a godly view of the Alps. We had a great vegetarian lunch and after I took my 20 minute book (review of the first 50 lessons from the workbook of A Course in Miracles) and sat down on a flat rock by one of those large waterfalls you only see on TV.  Doing the review lessons in all their directness and simplicity I had a strong and deep meditative experience. Water always gives me a feeling of being connected to something bigger than myself and now with this powerful river coursing by I was the awakened Buddha sitting still as I saw my human past and future pass me by.

Later that same afternoon we had another teaching session and after I kept standing in the light with that same guy who had asked me to sit down with him that decisive Sunday afternoon in Soeria’s tea room. The teacher looked at us and lovingly called us a couple of space aliens. When something is new you suck it all in, and this was my Course in Miracles honeymoon.  I was sitting on top of the world, all the way.

 But I would not sleep that night. All my newfound light, joy and freedom had pushed me deep down in my fear and darkness. I was dislodged and extremely uncomfortable. As I had never felt so free before; I had never been this terrified.

I laid awake in my tent for hours, then I got out and stumbled in the dark. I couldn’t see a thing, only the stars. I looked for a familiar face or thought to comfort me but there was nothing. Everyone was asleep and I had nothing to hold onto or deflect my fear upon. I felt an immense pain in my body, and I thought I was dying. I had no past reference for this experience. I had felt pain and I had been afraid before, but I couldn’t associate this anguish with anything physical or outside of me.

Some interesting ideas had been taught me at previous sessions and in master teacher audio tapes and transcripts but it didn’t mean much until now. I was being turned inside out, I was reborn; I was pushed in my black hole and came out on the other side; I had a dark night of the soul. But the only comfort this gave was the knowledge that whatever was happening to me was somehow a part of my awakening and I wasn’t in fact physically dying. It sure felt like it though.

I had made an unequivocal decision, I had burnt my bridges, and now I was pushed over the cliff’s edge with not a straw or branch to clutch. I was cut off at the root, my shallow existence ended, and new roots were planted in firm soil. Nothing from my old self or world accompanied me in this makeover. I was initiated to a spiritual life.

Still in shock the next morning, I sat real still, didn’t say a word, and felt like a cleaned and emptied trash can. My face must have been pale, my expression astounded but when the teachers from Wisconsin looked at me, they smiled. They knew.