The Savior Somewhere Else

On ashrams, fresh experiences, and the loop that follows you wherever you go.

I am still looking for my savior somewhere else.

Lately it takes the shape of an ashram. I imagine going there and learning the meditation Shiva is said to have taught — gaining existential awareness, the kind experienced directly rather than through the mind’s thinking and imagining. It’s a beautiful picture. And almost as soon as I finish painting it, I notice the brush in my hand.

Because here is the quiet problem. The whole appeal of the ashram is that it offers direct experience. But the ashram itself is not a direct experience. It’s an idea about one. It’s a concept of the place where the real thing finally happens. And a concept of direct experience has exactly the same status, right now, as this ordinary moment I’m sitting in — no closer to the truth, no further. There is no destination that improves the odds. Postponement doesn’t ripen anything.

So I wonder if I’m caught in a loop of fascinations again. The belief runs: the current moment, I cannot experience it; I need an ashram to teach me how. But that’s a belief. There’s no guarantee I’ll see my true consciousness, or the divine in me, by booking a flight.

Everything is a lie until you experience it.

That sentence, once I actually hold it, dissolves the ashram. The ashram is also a lie until experienced. So is the Shiva-meditation. So is “existential awareness.” They wait in the same line as everything else.

The dullness isn’t the moment’s fault

My mind has gone dull. Not from lack of input — from the opposite. From thinking the same things, retrieving the same memories, circling the same experiences. I would like life to feel fresh again.

But notice where that wish leads. The hunger for the new, the fresh experience — that’s precisely what drives people to ashrams, to spirituality, to the next teacher and the next technique. The pursuit of freshness is the oldest loop there is. So that’s a trap too.

Which leaves me with four questions. I want to write them down before the mind smooths them over:

What is wrong with the present moment?
Why is the present moment not enough?
How can I be peaceful in the present moment?
Who is this experience, these thoughts, happening to?

Sitting with them, I see that the first three are not really questions. They’re assumptions wearing question marks. They take it as already settled that the present moment is deficient, and the only task left is to repair my relationship with it.

Only the fourth question is different in kind. It doesn’t assume a broken present. It asks about the one who keeps finding it broken.

And I suspect the first three can’t be answered until the fourth is looked at — because the “wrongness” of the present moment was never a property of the moment. There is nothing wrong with now. There is a me laid over it, and the me, by its very nature, is never satisfied. A satisfied seeker has no work to do, and so it ceases. The dullness isn’t the moment going stale. It’s the seeker recycling itself and calling the staleness life.

The poison in the throat

I tell myself a comforting story about meditation. Buddha, it’s said, used it to remove anger, hate, frustration, negativity — all the dark filters of the mind. He lost them. And Shiva destroys the ego, burns away the negative emotions, so there’s room for new things to enter. Fresh, positive things.

But look at the shape of that story. It’s still acquisition. Clear out the bad inventory, stock the good inventory — and the one running the warehouse stays in business the entire time. It’s the ashram fantasy again, wearing the robes of “inner work.”

There is, I think, a truer image, and it’s also Shiva’s. The poison. When the ocean was churned and the poison rose, Shiva did not remove it. He held it in his throat. It stayed there — neither swallowed nor spat out — and it did not become him.

That is much closer to what I’ve actually observed in myself than the destruction story is. I see all my negativity. And honestly, I feel I live with it more than I ever truly remove it. For a long time I read that as failure. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe seeing the negativity fully, holding it, refusing to either drown it or be ruled by it — maybe that is not a lesser version of freedom. Maybe that is the thing itself. The wish to truly remove it might just be one more search for the savior somewhere else.

Recognize that it is present. Never succumb to it. That’s the whole instruction.

Mind and heart

The mind is always groping. Wanting, desiring, reaching for something. Perhaps that’s simply its nature; I won’t blame it for being what it is.

But the heart seems more in sync with life. It wants to live this life, to dance in its joy. And I notice I am far more mind-oriented than heart-oriented. Somewhere along the way I closed my heart to existence — and to people. I would like to start trusting again. Though trusting others, I think, asks first for trust in oneself: you can only risk the trust you place in others if you can hold whatever comes back.

I’ve even tried to handle the question of God the way the mind handles everything — by building. I caught myself assembling a composite name, every tradition’s divine stitched into one long word, as if the perfect object could be constructed if I just gathered enough syllables. But that’s the mind doing what the mind does: collecting, categorizing, grasping. And religiousness, if it’s anything, is something deeper than the mind can grasp. The name is the mind reaching for it. Which is the same gesture as the ashram — just aimed at a word instead of a place.

So the real question isn’t what to believe in. It’s whether the heart can open at all. And the mind cannot pry it open. That’s why all four of my what / why / how / who questions come back a little hollow when I point them at the heart. The heart doesn’t open by being understood.

Heart, oh heart

It opens, I think, by being spoken to. Gently. So I’ll end not with an answer but with that — the only register the heart actually listens in:

Heart oh heart

open up now.

You are loved.

You are in my tender care.

Sorry it hurt before — but it doesn’t have to again. Can you trust one more time?

Ready to get hurt, and become better and better at trusting yourself?

Heart oh heart,

open up now.

I don’t open the heart in order to reach the big, fat, beautiful name at the end of the devotion. My own fourth question already gave that away: who is the devotion ultimately for? There may be no one waiting at the end to receive it. The opening is not a means to something else. The opening is the thing.

And the present moment was never the problem. Only the seeker who needed it to be.

Boredom Matters is a space for contemplative inquiry — slow questions, no destinations.