My Story
Ed Conley is a photographer and meditation teacher in Blackstone, Virginia, where he lives with his wife, Tilly, a native of Blackstone. From the early 60’s Ed was consumed by hunger for truth and in 1968 he had a profound and life changing awakening through a connection with the world teacher J. Krishnamurti. In the 70’s he found a direction for his journey through association with Alice Christensen, American Yoga Association, and Swami Muktananda of Siddha Yoga. Ed and his wife, Tilly, ran a meditation center for Siddha Yoga in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in 1980-1981.
Having settled in Southside Virginia in the early 80s, Ed began teaching yoga in Blackstone, but his practice had not matured yet and all of his interest turned to feature writing for the local paper, the Courier-Record, and photography, Leaving the newspaper in 1994 Ed devoted all his energies to building a photography studio.
In 1986 a connection was made with Swami Satchidanada at Yogaville in Buckingham, Virginia. And in 2005 during a visit to Yogaville (although Satchidananda had left his body) that initial connection opened into a dynamic spiritual awakening that has transformed Ed’s life and channeled all his energies into writing and teaching meditation full time. Ed’s driving interest is to make the healing principles of meditation easy and workable in our busy modern life so that we can awaken to the basic goodness that is our essential being.
DIVE! DIVE!
We can begin when I was in the submarine service stationed on a boat in Norfolk, Virginia, a place I had taken refuge in because I really didn’t have a clear course for my life, so I thought I would just dive deep and run silent. One of the great things about our stories is that when we look back clearly and without regrets or grievances we can see how each stage of our life is a metaphor for our life course, just as each act in a play contains the whole play in itself. The two events that were to shape my life journey while on the USS Cubera were meeting Thomas Merton in his books and my wife at a beach party. Both opened me to a love that would take me deeper into my life than my submarine could ever go.
HEAD MEETS HEART
While in the last year of submarine service I met my wife to be at a Virginia Beach party and the following summer we were married. Who knows why we marry, especially young sailors like me. I just knew this was a ship I wanted to be on. There were no charts or cruise destinations when I signed on. Marriage is a voyage of discovery. And so I married a small town Blackstone girl (I have picture of us before we were married) who like everyone else was shedding the corsets and white gloves of the 1950s and breaking free into the open waters of the 60s. Oh, and how rough that passage was going to be. I went to Old Dominion University for a degree in English and a career teaching, so I thought. It seemed like a good idea to me.
HEAD MEETS ME
The first life changing event I encountered on my voyage through the 60s was meeting my friend Lee, a fellow teacher in Loudon County, VA, who had a house in Leesburg where I began to taste the intoxicating yet disturbing food of freedom from the known. I thought I knew who I was, but I was just beginning my dive beneath the surface of my known world. Lee cooked, designed clothes, drank cold shots of vodka, and had eyes that pierced through the walls of my identity like a laser. It was as if he knew more me than I did. My known world with its careful charts turned over and everything I knew spilled onto the floor. Since Lee was gay, I began to think I was, as I had to have something to hold onto now that what was had died.
I remember the day I dove beneath that conceptual layer. Plagued by a fierce civil war in my mind—was I, wasn’t I—I remember saying with absolute surrender, “Okay, I’ll be that!” I would do anything to get out of the double bind. There was a sudden release of confliction, and then the slow realization that I wasn’t that either. Nope, there was more to me than that. But now I knew what death was like, because something old had died when I met Lee. And that death would free me to go deeper into the unknown depths of me.
HEAD MEETS A MASTER
1968, now that was a year to dive deep. I was closing my third year of teaching high school, and the whole world was shaking like a California quake. I went to sleep one night listening to an audio tape of J. Krishnamurti, the first realized being I had ever encountered live so to speak, and I woke up awakened! There was no known world to cling to. My personality that I had been living in, suffering in and trying to escape from was dead. I looked in the mirror to see what had happened to me and I laughed that Zen laugh of satori. I just was and I recognized myself, finally.
I began doing spontaneous yoga asanas, sitting in the lotus posture, standing on my head, and I had never heard of yoga. I opened the Bible and read the words of Jesus and I was there when he spoke them. The same with Walt Whitman. Time had dissolved and there was only this eternal now. And while others had to think about what was going on, I seemed to be in a free space where everything was just happening, and what ever happened was full of wonder. I saw a horse or a dog or a flower, and it was for the first time we met, and that meeting was full of depth. I had dived deeper then the test depth of the ego was designed for and it was left behind bobbing on the surface of the mind like a jettisoned life jacket. At school I threw the text books in the trash and began to teach as if I were J. Krishnamurti, and I didn’t know what he said. Some students gathered and began taking furious notes, other moved to the back of the room and talked among themselves.
I knew I was riding a tiger and that I might fall off, never having ridden a tiger before. But I also knew that God was real and that He was completing Himself through me. But I had to come back to the surface where it was safe. One can’t dive too deep on the first dive without more training. I wanted to find my teacher master. My personality began to come back, but now my life course had been changed forever. It was no longer horizontal on the map of the world, but straight down into the depths of my own being.
A BOAT OR A HOUSE
We left Loudoun County for Miami and the promise of a teaching job, which lasted maybe two months. Apparently they didn’t hire J. Krishnamurti, and I couldn’t teach unless he could speak. We lived on a houseboat at Rama Yacht Basin on a small river dumping into North Miami Beach, and there I decided on its flat white deck to be a minister as that seemed to be the only path that was open to a Son of God.
My own son was born there and after nine months of bobbing up and down when boats passed, eating beans and hot dogs and washing diapers in the tub, and working as an ambulance attendant, we set out for Vermont and a summer cabin of a minister friend of mine while I waited for the Union Theological Seminary to accept my lone wolf application. I didn’t know then that this course was going to eventually lead me to Swami Rama and the path of yoga. But I should have guessed when I wrote a book of poems on that houseboat called Birth of a Soul by Rama.
ON THE WAY TO RAMA
To tighten up this story, we had a memorable summer in Vermont where I met Will the farmer who did everything by hand and taught school in a Cutler Academy where most of the students cut school for Woodstock. Then when I went to the seminary they reviewed my somewhat skimpy resume and rejected my knocking on God’s house, so I began my path to God by working with the adult retarded, which was another good metaphor for my current state of disillusionment, having been kicked out of God’s house. Tilly and I ran a home for adult retarded in Norfolk called Hope House, and there our daughter was born.
But the thread of hope was thrown to me from Alice Christensen, a yoga teacher in Cleveland whose master was Swami Rama, and I found myself rushing to see her and humbly asking to be her student, and perhaps, I thought, I would meet her master Swami Rama.
In an hurried almost offhand way , she said “Stop eating meat, drinking, smoking, and do these yoga practices for a year and then come see me.” Is that all, I thought and happily went home to practice and earn my credits. When I met Rama, I immediately went to my knee and submitted myself to his teaching, but master’s don’t teach in words so much but in giving you the grace or eye to awaken through your karma or everyday actions. Awakening is not a state but a process that has no path but the one you are on.
HEAD MEETS GODDESS
So the 70’s was even more turbulent than the 60s. In my impatience for deliverance I went through Alice’s The Light of Yoga Society, and sought even deeper waters with Swami Muktananda. In between these two Tilly and I got divorced. Seeing and falling in love with the goddess in other women drove me into a madness that destroy my marriage. It was not a ripping angry split but I needed to travel alone to find my place, or so I thought. Looking back I can see what Karl Jung called the anima archetype projections of my own psyche. I was in love with being in love. So when I met Muktananda, I met a master that was like the ocean and in his presence all my boundaries melted and the insanity began to subside. Baba, as he was called, was both joy and terror; joy when he looked at me and the terror of non-being when he didn’t. This is a little extreme, but you get the idea.
When I went to Baba’s Miami winter ashram (Ah Miami again), I dove so deep in meditation on day that my personality died again, only this time in a flash of light. “Oh, I’m going to die,” my ego said as it was being sucked up into a vast light of consciousness. And, unable to stand the light without thinking about how it was, back down my little self came thinking, “Oh, that’s what death is like.” Suddenly, death was no big deal, and on the way back to Cleveland in a state of perfect peace I realized that something had shifted and I no longer wanted to or needed to leave my wife and family. I had found my place, and it was nowhere to be found.
So we were remarried in a group wedding at the Siddha Yoga Fallsburg NY Ashram and I was charting my course to be a big yoga teacher full of grace from Baba. I knew he wouldn’t let me down. But Baba died in 1982 and without the physical connection I was adrift again. We had come back to Virginia in 1981. but the land was inhospitable to my yoga clothes so I gradually began to blend in with the surface ships there and forget that I was really a submariner. There were many quick dives into deeper consciousness, to be sure, but I always came right back up. I had too much ballast or hot air in my tanks, if you will, to stay submerged.
During the 80s I lived got fired from another institution, this one for the mentally ill, and again the experience was a good metaphor for where I was. I lived in a Siddha meditation center in Florida for six months to correct my dangerous list towards ego-mania, and got a job writing for my home town newspaper. Here I found my awakening through words and being interested in people other than myself.
WRITING AND TAKING PICTURES
The 90s were spent writing for the local paper, the Courier-Record, and learning photography until I left writing all together to build a photography studio. I suppose these two vocations helped balance my right and left brain, and I was happy drinking scotch, watching TV, eating big steaks, and working hard. I had forgotten all about diving beneath the surface and being a Son of God. But God hadn’t forgotten me.
THE LOTUS OF MY HEART
In 1986 I met Swami Satchidananda at Yogaville where he had completed his life’s vision of constructing a spiritual power center he called Lotus, Light of Truth Universal Shrine. Now here was a master that didn’t wrap himself in huge Disneyland yoga systems, but when I met him I wasn’t ready to submerge again because diving for treasure had not brought up anything but discord and life dramas, and besides I didn’t really need to be a big yoga teacher. I had thrown that chart overboard. It was not until 2005 that I heard the diving alarm again.
When I took my daughter to Yogaville to find some balance, I was stirred deep in my heart and I knew that the being that had grabbed me and shook me back in the 60s was back, only this time the dive was going to be slow and gradual. It felt safe to allow the water to rise and to let my eye drop beneath the surface of my personality and touch the ocean of my being. Satchidananda had passed away, but that didn’t make any difference as his spirit and teaching was cemented into the Lotus.
At Lotus the path to awakening is through the winding road down to the James River basin where the Lotus grows, and then around the circular stations of all the major religions on the ground floor, then up through a circular staircase that winds you up to the dome shaped meditation room where that same light of consciousness that killed my ego back in Miami is now replicated by a beam of light shooting up to the ceiling. When I got home my writing and meditation came back and meat, scotch, and most of my TV left—and just when I got a 50 inch screen and a stainless steel grill! But they left like relatives that didn’t like the change in the environment.
Since then, and it’s been four years now, the awakening dive has been consistently downward with only a few returns to the surface fleet where time and history create their wakes, but—and here’s the paradox about awakening—there is no diving downward or going anywhere because there is no path to awakening. One just awakens in the story you are living. Nothing really changes. You don’t become another person, successful and loved. You just become more you, more here with feeling. You learn to work with the story you’ve got. You get to the heart of your story. And yet, you leave your story behind like pages of a read book.
But what does leave you is the nausea of being lost in the waves of the world. Awakening is like standing in the ocean instead of being tossed around by the waves of circumstance. You have a ground of being to stand on. Waves hit you but they don’t move you. And you kind of enjoy the ocean of life. It’s just one great day at the beach.
And that’s the end of my story. I hope it has helped you understand that your story is the best story, one that has to be told as you are both the author and its reader. You are a best seller on God’s list. Just awaken to that fact and you will be okay.
