Blog plans - Self-enquiry and self-examination

As readers may have noticed, I've been a little inattentive to this blog lately. In part it's because I haven't quite figured out what I want to do with it, or if I want to do it at all. I'm settling down, in my mind at least, on two basic projects. One involves an ongoing consideration about the practice of Self-enquiry. The other involves answering a question Hatley posed not long ago, which is how did my practice evolve away from Adidam. I think I need to answer Hatley's enquiry first, to give some perspective on my interest in Self-enquiry and non-dual teachings.

Answering that second question will make me go back pretty far into my life, and at least touch on my involvement with Adidam. I don't want to get into a full account of my Adidam experience simply because that isn't what I care about anymore. I look upon it as a karmic involvement that seemed necessary at the time, but no longer does, and so I am looking instead at the threads of spiritual practice that were present before, during, and after my involvement with Adidam that are now the focus of my practice. For a time the two seemed to coincide, and I presumed for many years that Adidam was the greater rope of which these other threads were merely a part, but now I feel that they simply co-existed for a time, and were bound to separate - that Adidam was just a frayed thread that didn't go anywhere, and now I am simply returning to the core impulse that was always there, but which I didn't notice because I was so concentrated in the Adidam meme.

One thing I'm going to get into is a series of "visions" that I had many years ago, which at the time I always tried to interpret in terms of Adidam and its purposes, but which now I see quite differently. This may be amusing - visions usually are - but they have a particular meaning and purpose behind them which may be particular to me as an individual, and yet seem also to have some sort of larger import as well. They are the kinds of psychic events I could never forget, and which always seemed to "work" on me for years afterwards, even now, representing to some degree my own internal struggles with spiritual understanding. As I parted from Adidam these visions came back to me with increasing strength, nagging at me that I needed to understand and appreciate them better. So I'll put these out there, at the risk of ridicule, because I think they help give a sense for how my leaving Adidam helped right my spiritual practice, rather than the opposite, as so many who leave Adidam are told. I'll try to explain what these things mean to me, and maybe others can help with their input as well, because I know my understanding is far from complete.