Space The Final Frontier

Well I am sitting here on yet another gorgeous fall day on the coast all alone in this silent beautiful space with just the sound of the surf distantly wafting through the windows and a little native flute music softly coming through the speakers as I prepare for going up the hill to lead a retreat 3 with the Water Dragon tribe. Retreat 3 is all about the space, the breath, the silence and the energy that is always swirling around and through us. I love this retreat. I love this journey that I get to take people on, this declaration that leadership isn’t just about lining up people and marching them in a direction, it’s about the space we all are moving in too. It is about getting that space right so that people yearn to move, long to move, desire to move into it. Every time I lead this retreat I discover more and more about this space that we float around in, that these letters are floating around in, how empty it is and how full it is, how vast it is and how intimate it is, how calm it is and how filled with energy it is. What an amazing journey it is to feel into something that is all around me and in me at the same time, to know that with every breath I take I am breathing in space that is filled with all sorts of stuff, and yet the stuff is such a small part of the space.

It is so easy to focus on the stuff and forget all the space that the stuff is floating in and filled with. I know I focus too much on the stuff of life and often get lost and overwhelmed with it all. I know that we humans are obsessed with our focus on the stuff and it drives us mad with a compulsive need to consume, aquire, store, own, claim, steal, break, fix, replace, borrow, and throw away all the stuff. All of that stuff that consumes all of our attention is just a tiny fraction of the space that gets little or no attention from us. How different life would be if that focus was reversed. If instead we directed most of our attention and energy on comprehending and exploring the space around and in us and how we moved in and impacted that space I think we would discover that the stuff takes care of itself in a cared for and conscious space. It’s not like space=good and stuff=bad at all, they co-exist brilliantly and together make up the universe. It’s just that, my belief is, when we become conscious of the space and our impact on it, then we naturally take more responsibility for ourselves and our environment and when we do that the stuff starts being taken care of responsibly and seemingly takes care of itself.

Well anyway that is what I am off to do today to awaken that in this beautiful tribe of Water Dragons.

It is interesting in my space right now as Karen is off in Spain being brilliantly presidential and I am heading off to Wildwood to be with the Water Dragons that this space of this house will be left alone to take care of itself, which of course the space and the house will do magnificently. The space around here changes when there are different ones of us here or not here in it. I wonder sometimes what the space is like here with the both of us gone. Does it change? Does it exhale? Does it feel? Ah.

Empathy

How far do my ripples go?

It is a crisp and clear day, gorgeous with a sharp line at the horizon that separates the sky from the ocean. The early morning sun is lighting up the foam as it breaks over the crest of the waves and turning the cliffs of Tomales Point a rich gold with sharp contrasting shadows to define the cragginess even more. It is Thursday and Karen came home last night and stayed, because we have this all day CTI management meeting today at the house. She came home midweek which is unusual for us and she will be here tonight and tomorrow night, so we actually get to feel like a couple for a couple of nights again. It’s fun. Alas she heads off to Spain for a week on Saturday and I leave for a Leadership Program on Tuesday, it’s all good though, because as we head into the holidays we will get to spend even more time together and if things go according to plan she is moving back home completely in March. So everyone keep your fingers crossed that things go according to plan.

Splinters are still working there way out and the more time we have together these days will allow for them to be completely healed. I am a lucky guy, I must confess, I have a great relationship, splinters and all, I live in a beautiful place, I have work that both satisfies me and makes a difference in the world, I have close relationships with family, friends, and co-workers, and I am attending to my own growth in ways that satisfy me. I am aware of so many people I love that are having tough times with some of these things, and lord knows I have had terrible times with all of these things, my thoughts and prayers are going out to all of those loved ones that are suffering, separated, isolated, busted, broke, depressed, lonely, hanging on, overwhelmed, scared, and just trying to make it through another unpleasant day. As my thoughts and prayers go out to you to let you know that I have traveled down those paths and will again some day I am fairly certain. I feel a great empathy with you as you travel this journey and in that empathy I know that your ears are fairly tuned out to hope and possibility, understandably so, still I do want to hold it out and offer that as you tune into yourSelf and open up your consciousness to who you REALLY are and what it is you are up to, no matter the circumstances, I absolutely know that you will begin to find pathways that open in front of you that, if you are willing to risk it, may indeed lead you out of the messed up state you are in.

I know that I am sounding preachier then I usually do here and I am not sure why that is coming out today. I am just feeling so blessed and yet so aware of my journey to this place as well as being so completely aware of the journey cycles that so many of my loved ones are on, that I have tears in my eyes of love, the blessed love and the painful love at the same time. I am aware that I can hold both consciousnesses and loves simultaneously and that is new. I don’t have to collude or leap into someone elses pain to know it and I don’t have to ignore my joy in order to relate to someone elses suffering. I don’t have to somehow change my inner state to meet, understand, and even empathize with someone elses state. To be responsible for my world means I have to be able to hold it all. I have to hold it, know it, appreciate it and pray for it all at the same time. And I can.

Playing Games

Favorite Board Game these days is Settlers of Catan

There is something other then addiction that draws me to these games that I am really enjoying playing on facebook. Instead of acting all enlightened here in my blog and then running off to facebook and hiding as my alternate personality “Lylewyn” and seeing how many more times I can hack at the monster or see what quest I am headed out on next or what new “friend” from what part of the world has joined my army to fight the bad guys, I thought I would bring some consciousness to this part of my recent life and look at it like I do with the other things I have looked at and will look at.

I have always loved games, when I was a kid I would play Risk and monopoly a lot. In my family my Mom taught us “Poverty Poker”, she would stake us all to $2 in pennies and we would play, if we ran out of money we would get put on “welfare”, which was always very embarrassing, and some of us would hate it and try to get out usually failing and one or two of us would really start to work the “welfare” system and find creative solutions, still staying in “welfare”, and then one or two of us would have stacks of pennies in front of us and get very protective of those pennies. We learned a lot about the world playing these games. Risk and monopoly taught us strategy and thinking ahead and poverty poker taught us economics and most importantly they were fun, engaging and a great way to connect with family members on a rainy day.

When I got my first computer back in 1984, an Apple Mac 128k, there was a couple of games that showed up that were text based mystery games where you had to follow the clues and make choices that would lead you to more clues and, if you were good which I wasn’t particularly, you would solve the mystery and get the prize. I really enjoyed being on a quest and engaged in the mystery of it all as I wandered across deserts and through forests in my imagination as the game took me to places and often got me lost. This game was more of a solitary experience then the old board and card games of my childhood and yet in some ways it wasn’t. I was living alone in an apartment in New York City, I was surrounded by millions of people every day and worked closely with people at work and it was kind of nice to come home and spend some time with my little mac wandering the deserts alone up in my apartment. Then of course games exploded onto the scene in the next 10 years. There were all of the video games and arcades, which I never really got into, because to me the joy of playing the games was that it was I way I could be alone and having fun and get a little break from being around all the people. Then the games started showing up for the computer that were much more visual and interesting and the computers were more able to take you on the journey and it became more like interactive movies then something in your imagination. I still played these games and went on quests with Lara Croft and battled with Diablo in the pits of hell, and a little something got lost when it came to the imagination.

Then in came xbox, nintendo, and playstation I resisted these games for a long time thinking that I had gotten too old to get involved with them. They were really for the younger folk and for the folk that really didn’t have a life. Then one Christmas I was celebrating with Karen’s family and the nephews had a couple of friends over and they were playing an xbox game on the big screen tv, each of them had a controller and each of them were looking at the screen they controlled and moving their character around in that screen and at the same time they were aware of what was happening on the 3 other screens and where the other players were in both their screens and on the other screens and they were casually talking to each other about what they saw, while they were busily knocking out the enemy and sometimes each other on the screen. I was blown away by the ability to literally hold so many things competently at the same time and also quite astounded by my inability to do so. A new level of respect arose for these games and what they make possible. I saw that the next generation will be able to handle complexity in a completely different and more effective way then my generation can and I was grateful for what the games were teaching. I went home and got an xbox and Karen and I sometimes play games together and we are pretty pathetic when it comes to what my nephews can do and it is clear that there is a learning curve and even us old dogs can be opened up a bit when it comes to dealing with complexities.

This is my favorite game on facebook

Which brings me to the current iteration of game enjoyment. These games I am playing on facebook have a different feel to them as does everything that facebook and its ilk have introduced to us in this world. In some ways it is a return to the original text based games that stimulated my imagination in the early days of computers within the game itself. There are quests,
accomplishments, levels to achieve and dragons to fight. There are farms to take care of and mobsters to kill. The difference is you have the option, and it makes the game much more fun, to invite in lots of other people to join your army, mob, or be neighbors on your farm. At first these are people that you already know that are in your facebook world. You are thrilled and excited to see them and send them gifts and leave them notes and you help each other along. Then as you expand your world you start inviting in people that you don’t know that are from all over the world and every continent and pretty soon you are connecting up with people of all ages and from all sorts of societies that you would typically never run into and some of these folks actually start to have short conversations with you, usually about the game, and you start to be surprised by the variety of people out there engaged in the same game you are playing. It is actually quite fascinating.

So that is me coming out of the closet about my enjoyment of games. I still love all of the old board games and the games we played and still play like the dictionary game and taboo and charades. I like playing cards and Karen and I sometimes get a cribbage or gin game going until one of slips into being whipped and defeated and we head off to bed with our tail between our legs in shame.

Shame is an interesting word to end the last paragraph on, because there is some sort of guilt and shame I have about my enjoyment of games. I think there is a part of me that still wants to look good and “enlightened”, and playing games doesn’t do that particularly. I really thought I had unearthed those nasties. More work to go there clearly.

There is another part though that is the shadow of all this for me. There is an addictive quality to it. It’s always a temporary “addiction” and fades away to some sort of sense of acceptance, followed by loss of interest for awhile. This “addiction” is really more of an obsession I think. I get pulled in and am aware of the game in the back of my mind a lot even when I am not playing the game. When I meditate it goes away and when I stop meditating that awareness returns, when I pick up the phone or lead a class or talk to Karen or any of the other myriad of things I do in my life this awareness slips out of consciousness and returns when I have nothing in particular to focus on. The part of my mind that judges me thinks that I “should” be focusing on “something important” in those times and not on some game I am playing on facebook, thus the shame and guilt is born.

What I do know about mySelf is that I love questing and I love questions.

The Splinter

Ouch, our splinter will someday work its way out and be this easy to spot.

As Karen and I were muddling around in our third downward spiral dance since she got home, and I was reacting more and more and the anger and the hurt were building and growing, and the terrible disappointment in the crumbled fantasy we each held of the loving-leaping-into-each-other-return, a realization emerged in the incredibly brilliant and insightful Karen/Golden Elks heart mind. That it felt like there was a splinter under the skin of our relationship working its way out. You know that kind of splinter that you don’t see but you know is there and it is irritating and annoying you but you can’t do anything about it no matter how much you try. Well there we both were at the bottom of this spiral of yuckyness when Karen noticed that there could be a splinter in there somewhere trying to get out, and that is a good thing. It’s not an enjoyable experience and sometimes you just need to be a little patient and it will work itself out. The fun part is being conscious and learning something as it takes its journey and finally taking a good clear look at it when it’s out.

The hard part for me was that I should know better how to stabilize my emotions and not have to allow myself to get swept back into victim, blame and wrong. I do in fact know a lot of great tools and spiritual practices to do when the spiral starts to spin. Yet obviously there is still more walking to do down this path of learning. I still need to practice breathing and stepping into the center of my being, that place of patience, compassion and love for mySelf. When I can do that there is no victim, blame or wrong there is only responsibility and ownership of what it is I am creating in this situation and desire and yearning to be in a deeper connection with Karen. When I do that the co-dependent need to please her and make her happy, which leads to all sorts of acrobatics, back stepping and double talking, completely disappears and is replaced by a deep respect, trust and knowing that she too can work out and through whatever she needs to and I am here to support her in any way that is needed. So these are the things I know about me and my relationship with my beloved. Sometimes I really want a magic wand so I can just make that so forever and not have to keep waiting on the splinters to work themselves out, maybe there is some magical universe someday that I can create where that will be the case, however today I am in the universe of splinters and practice and learning. I am happily breathing mySelf into that universe and looking down the path for what is happening as I take this next step.

Just Tell The Truth, Who Knows Where It Will Go.

I woke up this morning grouchy, stiff and in some pain, I think from yesterdays swim. Actually it doesn’t matter what it’s from, what matters is I grumbled and grouched my way to the morning tea. I was thinking about writing a note from that other self to my self, I was filled with yuckyness as I woke up this morning. I wandered up, showerless (I mean why take a shower when you “know” it won’t help) to the office with my cup of tea and settled right into my new addiction of playing my game on facebook. I took a couple whacks at the monster and did a quest or two and I wasn’t feeling any better. I looked outside and saw that it was a cold, gray, murky and rainy day and said to myself “of course”. This was not a good start to my day. In this place I can get very resentful about all the good and brilliant things I say to mySelf and that mySelf says to me. I can sort of look up sideways with scorn and contempt on my face and say something like “who do you think you’re kidding?” So I put some music on that I usually journal to, Carlos Nakai and Peter Kater and their ilk, I make another cup of tea and a bowl of hot cereal and I click on the journaling program that I write in. (One of the features I like about this program is that I can make it be the only thing on the screen, so that there is this light blue screen and the font is large and purple. So that I can pretend there is nothing else going on with the computer behind what I am writing, no emails, no games, no calendar, no browsing the internet, no news, nothing is happening except what is happening right here. It’s sort of cool, but I digress.) After I clicked on my MacJournal program and blot out the world I sat there and stared at the screen “trying” to change my mood, looked out at the ocean for inspiration, thought about something wise or inspirational to say, if not to myself at least maybe I could be smily and inspirational to those of you who might be unfortunate enough to click on this entry and think you were going to get some wisdom, consciousness raising or inspiration from me today.

Well there I sat, nothing, and I sat, nothing, and I sat some more staring at the blue screen and the murky ocean. Finally a little voice said “just tell the truth, tell yourself what is going on and who knows where it will go.” And I started writing. As I wrote those first few words my mood already began to shift, even as I was writing about my resentment and my grouchyness it was beginning to disappear. My chest started to open up and I stopped feeling fat and ugly and started to feel my substantial self. I stopped feeling my pain or stiffness and started to want to stretch my feet and sit up straighter in my chair. I coughed out a few deep breaths and found mySelf breathing again. I’m back.

Man oh man the journeys we humans can take in a short time are remarkable. I truly can move from a contempt filled, resentment generating grouch to a substantial man of power, patience and wisdom in an hour or so. I can move from a body in pain to a body alive in that same hour. I can move from harsh self judgment to beautiful self love. I can also move right back to those nasty places, or wake up in them. That’s not bad, that’s just true. The key is do I have the tools and the listening for that voice that just says “tell the truth, who knows where it will go.” It usually goes in a pretty good and powerful direction.

Note to Self

Note to Self:

You are doing a great job at living and at growing your consciousness. You are integrating all aspects of your Self and finding more love and compassion for your Self. You are not afraid to go into the basement and dig around in the muck and the crap and find the root of bad habits and limiting beliefs. You have done an excellent job at finding work that has meaning for you and meaning for your world. You have done a great job of taking care of the needs of yourself and your family. You have begun to learn how to master your emotions so that you can utilize their power and not get swept away by the sea of possible reactions. You have learned ways to still yourSelf and slow down to enjoy and experience more subtlety in life. You now know how to grow yourSelf and your consciousness and you know the practices you need to do to continue on a journey of deepening and discovery.

You can do better. You know you can. You can maintain your practices with more certainty and clarity and hold to intentions and practices that you create with more commitment. You can be more disciplined in doing what you know that you need to do to move to the next level of your consciousness. You can breathe more and meditate more consistently. You can take even better care of this body that you have learned to love. You can move into spiritual adulthood. I say these things not to scold you or judge you, I say these things as truths that I know you recognize. I say these things because I know that you can hear them without reacting because of all the great distance you have come. It is time, it always has been time, and it always will be time to Do Your Best. Not do what you can get by with or just make it under the wire. It is time to seek out the places where you are sliding by and, slowly, look at ways to do your best.

There is no time like the present.

An Empty Pool

My view tomorrow morning I plunge into this and get the feel again after 25 years or so.

I lucked out. I got to the pool today to go swimming. The sun was out and the temperature was about 75 degrees, in other words it was glorious. As I turn the corner and head into the pool area I see there are only three people swimming, leaving 3 lanes completely open. This had never happened before and I went in to get my suit on and wet myself down in the shower, walked out, not believing my great good luck and slid into the slow swimmers lane, all by myself. I got a beautiful rhythm going with my breast stroke. It was completely quiet and the sun was shimmering on the bottom of the pool. I sank into a meditative state and for the next 45 minutes I just settled in to it all. My body felt terrific sliding through the water, I didn’t feel any energy competing with me for the same space at all so I could just find my own pace and rhythm and go. When I got to about 40 lengths of the pool all of a sudden there were some people talking and standing on one end of the pool getting ready to take their swim. I swam two more lengths, feeling the magic of the moment broken, yet still in the flow of the swimming. One of these folk asked if she could join me in my lane, and feeling complete with my experience and yet not exhausted I said that I was almost finished and she could take the whole lane. Without any feeling of being disturbed or resentful for having the spell broken, which would have been my old patter, I got out of the pool and headed back to the showers feeling such gratitude.

Boy oh boy do I like swimming like that. I have always liked swimming and yet I have been yearning for that meditative feel that I used to have when I swam. It finally clicked in for me. I am looking into how I can find times when the pool is more empty so that I can sink in more like that more frequently. I look forward to the day I can sink in no matter how crowded the pool is, and there is something so special about an empty stretch of water in front of you and no hurry up energy in the air at all that just can’t be beat.

Well it’s a short one today, I am off to catch up on a couple of riffs.

Accountability
Blog – yes
Riff – no
Meditation – yes
Food – 7-10
Movement 8-10
pipe dream – no

Understanding “Missing”

I think I finally get what it is to “miss” someone. I realize that whenever I am away for long periods of time and Karen misses me in big ways, she talks about being so lonely and acting out around food and other things. She talks about these deep tugs of longing and yearning that she feels moving through her. We strategize before I leave what she will do to fill her time and who she will socialize with to relieve the emptiness that seems to take over. When I would call home from somewhere out there in the world I would feel my expanded heart when I talked to her and I would feel closer to her and be able to relate that to not being in this kind of closeness just moments before and I would think that that was missing her, a pull on the heartstrings of love and longing for someone. I see now that what I had been called “missing” her was actually just loving her. Missing is something else entirely.

When Karen left for Black Lodge 10 days ago I started looking for the familiar signs of missing her. Of course I loved her and longed for her presence, that started as I drove away from the airport after dropping her off, and I looked for this “lost” feeling I used to have when she took a trip without me. That feeling of standing still between the kitchen and the living room and the office and not sure where to go and just standing there. I never have that feeling when Karen is here, even if she is down at the apartment and working and I don’t see her for 4 days I am always in touch with her and I always seem to know where to go and what to do. Well the feeling of lost wasn’t there this time, thank god, apparently I have done some good consciousness work and I always had someplace to go and something to do. Other things started happening though that showed me how out of control missing her I have been up to. My consumption of food, alcohol and screens has been 3/3s plus. I am not being bingy about it like I used to but I am acting out based on my new “paradigm” of consumption that I have been fairly consistent with over the last year or so. The two times I have actually had someone here I have turned into a chatty cathy like I haven’t been since I was in my seriously disturbed youth. My mouth just started talking about what ever there was to talk about until I realized I was doing it and stunned myself into silence as I started listening again. Both of these symptoms speak to me of an attempt to feed a hunger. So I have come to the conclusion that missing is a kind of hunger, a starvation actually. It’s not what I thought it was for all these many years about loving. The love of that person I miss is part of what stimulates that hunger. The lack of presence also stimulates that hunger. And for me the pause in the ongoing conversation of relationship really stimulates that hunger. When I am unconscious of the fact that I am starving for something I will respond in the ways I am familiar with, I’ll try to stuff it down my mouth or talk it out of my mouth. I’ll wander around leaving messes or “cleaning for Karen”, I’ll sit on my butt staring at as many different screens as I can for as long as I am awake and have “nothing else to do”. I now know that when I am doing these behaviors all at once, THIS IS MISSING KAREN.

sIt is probably not very profound a realization to most of you out there reading this, and it is remarkably profound to me. I have always said “I miss you” when I am talking on the phone with Karen and inside myself it was just another way of saying “I love you”, I now know that it means I am starving for you, that my universe feels like it has a hole in it and I am desperately trying to find ways to stuff it up. I am also realizing that as I get conscious of what it really means to MISS someone I don’t have to be carried away by the familiar and destructive habits that I have put in place to stuff myself. I can find ways to acknowledge the hunger as a fact and just know that I am on a healthy sort of fast. In fact to treat it like a fast when she is gone, as she will be while doing black lodge, I need to be with the hunger and release it like I release a thought in meditation and then move on to notice the next thing that bubbles up in my consciousness. I need to remember to set myself up to “fast” for Karen when she is gone rather then “hunger” for her. Oh boy I am getting some other ideas that I need to write down on actual paper, because she will read this when she gets home, “Hi Karen, my beloved welcome home, I have really hungered for you!”, and I need to have some things that I do for myself especially around this that are just my business.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – yes
food – no
movement – no
pipe dreaming – yes

Meditation Story

Imagine me with the sun at my back and down in the backyard.

The most common form of meditation I do is a form of zazen meditation that my teacher RainbowHawk taught me a year and a half ago. I sit on the ground on a blanket or a zafu, take a few cleansing breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth pick a spot on the floor, wall or bush opposite me and soften my focus by keeping my eyes open just a bit. I then count my breaths like this, easy full inhale – easy full exhale, say “1” inside my head, next breath, say “2”, until I get to 10 and then start over again at 1. This is marvelous because it gives my mind a simple job to do, and it’s easy to know when my mind starts to wander because I lose count and have to start over again. I bought a little timer so that I don’t have to be aware of thinking about or watching the time, and I set the timer for 20 minutes typically. Well the timer lives up in my little meditation cupola up on the roof of my house, where I usually meditate. Occasionally I like to meditate outside in the back yard, feeling the sun and the breeze on my skin and hearing the sounds of life all around me as I sink into my spot. When I go outside I take my watch with me, and I have this pesky little voice that says every now and then “is it time yet?” that I have to breathe through and return to the count. This voice particularly comes up as I get with in a minute or two of my standard 20 minutes, because the truth is I know the time and my brain sometimes doesn’t trust that I do.

Well, today I spontaneously started giving my brain a little game to play. When I got to the second set of 10 I started by saying internally 1a, 2a etc., and decided in that moment to go to 10z, in other words counting ten breaths 26 times. I had no thoughts or worries about it and just did an internal “ok” that lasted part of the moment between 1a and 2a, and off I went. The meditation went fine, occasionally my mind worried that it was thinking to much by having to remember the alphabet and I breathed through it and kept on going. It settled into a great meditation with the world in my soft focus starting to shimmer and sparkle, up until the S, T, U range and then my body started to complain. My legs fell asleep as they always do but I started to get some pain in my butt and I started to feel like I had to pee. I breathed through it and breathed my posture straight, and when I got to X &Y sweat started to pour down my head and my back. I kept breathing and got to 1z, 2z and everything calmed down and this feeling of appreciation and gratitude swept over me. This was a wave of blissful feeling that started with my body and zoomed out into the universe. I got to the last deep breath 10Z. I began to slowly move my body and stretch out my sand bag legs, put on my glasses and saw that I had been meditating for 45 minutes, over twice as long as I had ever meditated before. My brain and body knew I had meditated longer then I had before but not that much more. As I got the feeling back in my legs and started to stretch I noticed that my brain wanted me to get up and get going and all of the rest of me was really digging just sitting down in the sun with nowhere to go and nothing to do. So I sat there for another half hour or so and slowly got up and made my way back here to write about it.

What I love about this after meditation wondering is that there is NO judgments, good or bad, about what happened, where there would have been in the not too distant past. There were no plans being made to repeat the experience or to avoid it, there were no voices trying to determine if it was alright or proper what I did and if the teacher or some other authority would think I did good. All of those possible voices that I recognize would have been there in the past just aren’t there anymore. I think this is a good thing. This is the medicine of Bear and Turtle at work I think.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – no
Meditation – yes
Movement 5-10 I took a short walk and did some stairs
Food ??? I notice that I think I miss Karen more then I thought and that I have been acting out a bit around food for the last few days and attempting to deny it or fool mySelf in some way. Particularly with sugar and alcohol. So moving forward today I am applying the 1/3 rule to alcohol and removing processed white sugar again from my plate. (dab of honey in the tea and yogurt and teaspoon of Maple syrup in the oatmeal is ok)

Imagine me with the sun at my back and down in the backyard.

Meditation and Imagination

It's sorta like the bubbles in a lava lamp

I was doing a closed eye meditation out on my deck this morning and there was this wonderful psychedelic movement of patterns and colors on the screen behind my eyelids. I know you are all familiar with what I am talking about, at least those of you who have working eyes. The beautiful play of light and dark that is always moving and shifting and the patterns are always changing and colors are splitting off and disappearing only to be replaced by another color. As I sat there in awe, watching this inner fireworks display, one of those pesky thoughts came up, that often come up in a meditation. Most of the time I let them float on by and dissolve or change color, this one though stuck. It was a curiosity, a wondering, “Do blind people see these colors and patterns?” Because this thought stuck I started a whole thinking string that took me to imagination and the question “In a blind persons imaginary world are there images and visions? Are their imaginary worlds also without sight? Are the people and landscapes in their imagination and their dreams made up of sounds, touch, smell, taste, and all of the other senses, as they would be in their waking dream?” Then of course my mind went to other people without one of the senses that I possess, imagining and thinking similar thoughts. Then I started riffing on smell. What would an imaginary world be like with a smell dominated real world? How would music and color translate into smell?“ Oh boy you can see that my meditation was pretty shot now, so I took a deep cleansing breath, and another, and then one more, slowed it all down a bit. Returned to following the breath and seeing what I saw behind my eyelids, hearing what my ears were hearing, smelling what my nose was smelling, and feeling the coolness of the breeze on my skin on the front part of my body and the warmth of the sun on the skin on the back of body. I was filled with a kind of gratitude for all the sensations of life and I swam in that gratitude for a bit, my eyes opened and the meditation ended.

I came out with another realization that was huge for me but at the same time so obvious; Other peoples imaginary worlds are quite different from mine. In fact the way that you and I experience reality and imagination is in two different universes entirely. I had already had that realization around the reality that each of us humans experiencing being entirely different, but i hadn’t gotten that our imaginary worlds and our dream worlds are completely unique and different as well. Any assumptions I had about people seeing things either externally or internally the way I see them have been completely blown out of the water. Therefor what I have dedicated my life to, Brightening the Diamond of Human Consciousness, can only be done by me doing my absolute best to be completely curious about your universe, making no assumptions that there are any similarities with mine, AND to be impeccable in my translation and interpretation of what is going on in my universe so that you can understand, agree, disagree, enjoy, learn and teach. It just requires both of us opening our hearts even more to each other and being really curious about each others universes. Cool.

Accountability

Blog – yes
Riff – yes
Meditation – yes
Food – 6-10
Movement – 7-10 (I went to the pool and after my errands only had 15 minutes left of lap swim time. I sat there in that ”should I go for it, or just bag it cause I can’t get the full swim in“ I went for it and put that voice aside. For which I have given mySelf a gazillion bonus points.
Pipe Dream – I set mySelf up for one and it hasn’t come yet. It will.