My Spiritual Evolution | Tao Lin | Granta

Rather than sampling alien practices and exploring beliefs entirely new to me, it was the quality of my own felt experience that became ever more fascinating, the carnal thickness underlying even my most ephemeral daydreams.

about this exceptional state of the spirit and of the senses, which without exaggeration can be termed paradisical as compared with the hopeless darkness of ordinary daily existence, is that it has not been created by any visible or easily definable cause. This acuity of thought, this vigor of sense and spirit, has at all times appeared to man as t

I have no memory of ever having exhaled, or of being lowered onto the mattress and covered with a blanket. All at once I felt a tremendous rush of energy fill my head accompanied by a punishing roar. I managed, barely, to squeeze out the words I had prepared, “trust” and “surrender.” These words became my mantra, but they seemed utterly pathetic, w

And then Salam described how, in a remarkable way, his consciousness expanded further. He knew it was his body lying below, but now he felt he was also the boot kicking the body. He was also the peeling green paint on the prison walls, the goat whose bleat could be heard outside, the dirt under the guard’s fingernails—he was life, all of it and the