What happens following "happily ever after"?
The discussion I had with Carl Stimson was really unlike any other podcast we’ve released so far. We discussed three books: by Eric Lerner, Bhikkhu Yogavacara Rahula, and John Coleman. But more than this, we used this as a jumping off point to discuss Carl’s own spiritual journey and what happens after the point where you think you’ve found the true path. The questions I asked him didn’t pull any punches either. Here are three successive questions I put to Carl in thinking through his current spiritual state. Listen to the interview to hear the answers.
“Don’t be lazy, just keep sitting, and power through this. It will eventually pass away.”
“You kind of push back at this ‘happily ever after’ ending that occurs once the meditator finds the Dhamma, and wonder what happens next to the authors of these three books. As you yourself say, you found that contrary to your former teacher’s insistence, you weren’t on the straight German Autobahn as you had once assumed. You then use this as a jumping off point to reflect on your own spiritual journey. So my question is, after your ‘This is It’ moment of finding the Dhamma, and then realizing that maybe it was not ‘it’, what happened next?
You mention that the main advice you received from Dhamma friends and teachers at the time your own crisis of faith developed, could basically be boiled down to something like this: ‘Don’t be lazy, just keep sitting, and power through this. It will eventually pass away.’ I’m sure there are listeners now thinking the same thing, that with more steadfast determination, whatever defilement was there would have eventually been let go of with more prolonged observation. Yet you push back at this, and do so by using a ‘food’ analogy as to whether it was better to starve yourself, or apply greater critical thought. Can you share more about this?
Although you do feel some regret and nostalgia for the time when you had a stronger practice, you also see yourself passing through the stage of Dhamma child to Dhamma adolescent. What do you mean by this?”