Grayson Scheiner

The pain and sorrow we experience as humans are expressed commonly as 'having the blues.' For me, feeling all alone in the world was always my biggest agony. When I was a small child, my mom was a private caterer. She commonly had late night parties that she had to cater for and often their was only 30 minutes between when she picked me up from school to the time she had to leave for the party for me to see her. She would tell me commonly "I'll be home at 10:00pm" or "I'll be home to tuck you in." So I would sit and wait for her like a dog or a cat by the window waiting to see the lights from her car pull up into the driveway. So many nights I sat alone waiting for her to come home for hours upon endless hours. She was commonly be several hours late and as the night would progress, so would my anxiety. I would call her cell phone repeatedly out of worry and anguish only to have it go straight to voicemail. I would commonly get so worked up that I would have panic attacks and not be able to handle myself.

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With this codependant programming instilled within my mind from an early age, I often built relationships that would cover up the hole of lonliness and isolation I would feel when I was all by myself. I built inseperable friendships. It was beautiful for me to be with people - I truly loved my friends more than I loved myself, often spending all the money I earned from my jobs to help pay for my friends movie tickets, dinners, gas, and even guitars. I would agree with what they said to avoid arguments and conflicts so that they would feel comfortable around me. I had no voice. 

 

When I was in college, it was really difficult for me to find people I related to, all the people around me were so driven to get jobs and build their own careers and I didn't care about any of it...I just wanted a friend(or girlfriend) that I loved and understood that I could spend all my time with.

 

I became a chameleon - if I found people that would spend time with me, I would take on their passions and interests as my own so that I could do more things with them. I would take the classes they wanted to take, go to the gym with them, eat their special diets, play their styles of music, go to their parties. I became so lost within these worlds that I forgot what I even liked. The biggest problem came when I started to hang out with someone who was so narcissistic that it even became my own programming. I became really vein, really stubborn, and really obsessed with myself. When he decided one day to stop spending time with me because he found a girlfriend, I became so lonely. I no longer had the ability to become a chameleon because I put my ego on a pedestal. My shallow love for myself turned into self hate. I only liked the parts of myself that fit certain vein conceptions I had been programmed to like by the media and my social group. It was impossible to fit within those conceptions all the time, and when I saw my percieved 'flaws,' I would become self harming. 

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At this point I needed help, but I was too self absorbed to admit it. 

 

After being closetly depressed like this for about a year(I put on a good face), finally someone who had gone through the same things as I was going through saw through my facade. He saw how unhappy I was with my perfectly sculpted body(my one and only true love at the time) and he gave me a book called, The Power of Now, by Eckhardt Tolle. This book made me question who I thought I was and eventually lead to my complete psychological healing and enlightened realization.  At the time, I thought of myself as being a college student, and fitness/nutrition guru. I felt guilty and ashamed if I acted in ways that weren't acceptable for a fitness guru/nutrition expert. I was in constant stress too because at the time I was living with my mother and she is a southern chef and was trying to pamper me with my favorite childhood foods. I felt like an asshole if I turned down her cooking, but I also felt equally terrible if I ate the gluten and dairy filled treats she was making for me. This perpetual cycle of guilt and shame led to me develping a binge eating disorder and a terrible relationship with someone I loved and cared about when I was 21. At this point, I frequently thought of suicide and hated the fact that I was so self centered that nobody wanted to be around me.

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The philosophical guidance in the Power of Now, gave me the key to introspect into my own mind without getting lost in my own thoughts. When I looked at my mind, the entity the content and context of space and time that had always been there was the percieving essence. My knowingness became aware of itself in a moment of singularity. I realized my essence as being the primordeal existance of the universe. Without my mind, nothing could possibly be percieved exist. I realized that everything existed within me and that my mind was an expression of the totality of the Universe. The entity I had previously called myself felt like a hologram. I realized that I was at one with the universe and that my existance transcended space and time. This realization came in a flash of enlightenment. In Zen, this experience is called Kensho, which translates to initial awakening. This transcendental state was so blissful and fulfilling that it completely changed my life. As blissful and fulfilling as it was, it was also at the time like Narnia. I could not just walk through the door of my perception and attain this state at will, it was elusive and the silent egoless mind would only occur when I was not trying to attain it. I became obsessed with this elusive transendental state and within 2 months I moved into a meditation center. Then for the next 3 years, I spent 6-10 hours meditating every day, cultivating this inner awareness and cleansing my mind of my ego. In that time I probably spent 6,000 hours sitting in meditation. I did this while I was still in school studying neuroscience. I became addicted to living with my eyes closed. This state of pure thoughtless existence became my escape from the pains of living in external reality(the real world). If I felt my emotions or negative thoughts come up, I would sit down, close my eyes, and escape into bliss. 

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Three years later, I had graduated college, published work at national neurscience conferences on the effects of meditation on brain activity and had not come any closer to eliminating my emotional dependance. I was no longer dependant on social interactions, but was now dependant on meditation to keep my spirits high. Unfortunately, the meditaiton center I belonged to at the time turned out to be a cult where its students were very slowly programmed into subservience and leader worship(I didn't buy into it don't worry). The meditation center had a very powerful meditation method that worked to get the mind into the state of egolessness, but after they earned your trust through getting you to this state, they tried to instill in the students that the founders of the meditation practice were the owners of the Universe. It sounds absurd, but for those who were looking for easy linear logic, it was an easy way to live without questioning what the 'guru' had said.

 

Anyways, after realizing that I was in this silly cult, I packed all my things and left the meditation center. This time I knew that I could not allow myself to fall into the trappings of what self determined people told me to be truth and correct. I awakened to the realization that all of my consciousness eminated from the essence of mind and that it is all part of the Absolute existence of the universe. I was done fighting myself, I had cleansed my mind and realized that even the conception of the ego being false was a human conception. I realized through my inquiry into neuroscience that it is simply a product of brain activity and that it serves a purpose for human psychological wellbeing. After this long journey of self realization, I have actually gone nowhere, but I have gained a lot of spiritual wisdom on how to deal with myself. I realized that I was done being a chameleon to other self determined people. I realized that I needed to find my own voice as an indivitual and that I wanted to be as integrated to truth as possible. 

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While it has been a struggle, and I haven't been perfect at living as an integrated enlightened being, I also haven't been punishing or judging myself and for the first time in my life I am truly happy without being codependant on anything. I have found my voice to express myself through music and have created my own sound and style which I call the turquoise sound which to me translates to the unification of blue and gold. Blue - the outward human side of my existence & Gold - the psychedelic and spiritually transcended essence of my soul. These songs and sounds are my soul in music. I hope you find the music to be as beautiful as I do. The music the creation of the universe through my mind and body. It is pure soul music, no formulas and no intention involved other than me expressing myself