Reclusland

While meditating a few weeks ago, I had an experience that, when properly contextualized, may help to explain a little portion of what I’ve been thinking about recently.  But first, an explanation on meditation plus a bit of back-story to set up the context:

1) Meditation:

My meditation practice is to sit and count my breaths, while focusing on both the movement of my breath and my hara.  I sit and keep my focus solely on these things, while fully acknowledging and then releasing any thoughts that happen to arise.  Even the subtlest  intention of a thought requires acknowledgment and release, and then I back at 1 again.  The goal is to count to 10.  I usually don’t get past 3 or 4.

For me, this combines many different forms of self mastery/understanding in a simple, repeatable act.

- First and foremost, this is the unification of action and intent, by way of the keep-it-simple method.  I have only three things to focus on: body-as-still-point with the hara focus, body-as-movement with the breath focus, and using the counting to keep my intellect focused on the entire process as well.  Anything other than that and I’ve stopped acting on my intent, so I have to start over.  This is a very easy intent to put into action, but a very hard one to honestly maintain.

- Second, it combines (and hopefully coordinates) awareness in all three “brains”, as Gurdjieff called them.  The physical, in the posture, breath focus, and hara focus.  The emotional in the breath focus, the hara focus (“smile from your hara”, I have been told, is a beginners qi-gong practice), and the acknowledgment and release of thoughts.  And the intellectual in the breath counting, the holding of all three focal points, and the acknowledgment and release of thoughts.

- Third, the meditative posture and the focus on bringing the breath into my hara seem to work as a Reichian exercise as well.  The breath massages the armoring in my neck, shoulders, diaphragm, abdomen, core and back.  This seems to help ensure that when thoughts do arise under intense focus, they are things which need to be acknowledged.  When I was first taught meditation, I was told “All your karma will come back to you on that pillow”…

(Make a note: karma stored in the body.  The body as akashic recorder…)

All in all, this makes mediation into a sort of alchemical pressure cooker for me, burning out impurities.  At least, that’s the idea.  I sit for the time it takes to burn one entire incense stick, and the incense works as an external signifier to yoke my practice to the flowing of time around me as well.

Of course, having typed all this out, I’m now going to have to forget it, or my practice won’t work any more.  Because I’ll be thinking about the practice as I have described it, instead of actually practicing it.  But that’s a risk I’m willing to take for the sake of sharing this with you lovely people…

2) Back story (a touchstone):

Up until last September, I was putting myself through a program of therapy (the basic sit-on-a-couch-and-talk type of therapy).  For me, it was a really good kick-start for getting my head out of my ass and beginning to act in the-world-as-it-is (of which this site is but one of many fruits).

During the therapy sessions, I came to realize that a specific childhood event of mine (of which I was already aware) could be thought of as a sort of seed for the growth of many other problems later in life; a small flaw in the early foundation of my personality that threw all my later ego-growth out of whack.

Now, I would like to emphasize that this was not a “recovered memory” nor did it involve any attempts at hypnosis.  It was a real event that occurred to me when I was about 6 months old, which I had learned about from my parents prior to putting myself through therapy.

Yet it was only in therapy that I came to realize how the feelings/fears that this event engendered in me were, from then on, carried throughout my life, and how they were still present and active in my current behaviors, despite the fact that I now knew better than to be scared by such things.

When I was about 3 months old, I was taken to Minnesota to visit my grandparents for Christmas.  On the plane flight back, I caught a cold which came and went for several months before turning into severe bronchial pneumonia.  (This was also right about the time when my mother ended her maternity leave and went back to work, so I was already dealing with a standard emotional milestone of childhood, even if I hadn’t gotten sick.)

Once I came down with pneumonia, I was hospitalized and kept in an oxygen tent, cut off from physical contact with any-and-everyone by thick sheets of plastic.  I was also strapped down to be x-rayed several times, and no one was allowed in the room for that either.

Basically, I imagine there was a lot of aloneness, a lot of crying, screaming, and need for physical comforting, but not much external response to any of these expressions of suffering.  I’ll leave it up to you to imagine what opinions about the world this may have formed in my little infant mind, but they shouldn’t be too hard to figure out…

All in all, I think this only went on for a few weeks.  Then I was sent home with a good dosage of antibiotics.  And granted, this is really nothing that extraordinary (many people go through much worse as children), but it was by imagining how this would have been experienced by my infant-self (who had no real language skills, barely any motor skills, and very little sense-of-self) that I came to understand it as a core element of my being which needed to be released.

The fears I imaginatively attributed to that 6 month old child still felt particularly strong and real for me when I thought about the event, and these feelings also had a lot in common with my current fears, which I was growing more conscious of through the therapy.

3) The actual experience (and the whole point of this post):

One day recently I was sitting in meditation when some thought-content arose about this experience of my former child-self.  As I acknowledged those strong feelings of loneliness and abandonment, they became more and more real to me.  I did not push them away, which I won’t say was difficult, but I also won’t say was easy.  I felt that they were something that had to be dealt with, and so I delved deeper and deeper into them, letting the emotions rise up and out of my hara.

(Even before the mediation training, during the therapy sessions, I would notice that when a particularly heavy topic was first brought to light, a tension would become noticeable in my abdomen.  I came to look at this as a sign that I was onto something.  Once the topic was fully understood and resolved, I would feel an easing of tension, and a warmth and relaxation would rise up from my abdominal area toward my heart.)

This time, what arose while meditating was not simply a tension, but a real feeling of fear and loneliness.  I could feel my child-self’s desperate need for reassurance, and its horror at not receiving any acknowledgment of this need.

Figuring that if anyone had a right to reassure my younger self, it was my older self, I tried to communicate feelings of love, acceptance, and reassurance back to my child-self.  I knew exactly what he was going through, and I also knew that in reality, he had nothing to be afraid of.  I tried to communicate this through my hara, back in time to that small child, and it seemed to work.  The fear subsided and was replaced by a feeling of child-like peacefulness and love.

Ever since then, I haven’t been able to summon up that same feeling of real fear and panic when I bring that event to mind.  It feels like those demons, at least, have finally been laid to rest.

4) Conclusion

How does this tie into my explorations of the self/identity/higher dimensions/quantum metaphysics?

You might notice that I said “I tried to communicate this through my hara, back in time to that small child”.  The obviously response to this from psychology would be, “You didn’t send anything ‘back through time’, you just recovered and processed some repressed memories”.

To which I reply:  “Why can’t the recovery and release of repressed memories be seen as way of journeying “back” in time?  Why aren’t memories considered to be true pathways (in a subjective sense) back to our earlier experiences?”

The problem lies in their interpretation of memory, not in my interpretation of time travel.

If time is just another spatial dimension, then our memories are simply reference points of consciousness in the time-space “behind” us, which we can make use of in our current position.  And if there is a reference point which we are not aware of, but which still affects our current behavior, then in becoming aware of it we can correct for its influence and move that much more accurately through our current state of being-in-reality.

It is only when we see our past self as unchangeable and constant that we are unable to release its troubles.  By understanding the present as part of a spatial dimension that also very much contains the past, we are able to use our memory-consciousness-connections to effect changes in the past.

From my future perspective, I was able to reach back to my past self and tell him that he was loved.  That whatever fear he was feeling was completely illusory and everything that was done had been done out of love all along. And because I could honestly be aware of his feelings, and honestly relay back to him feelings of acknowledgement and safety, I could bring into consciousness and resolve that particular unconscious split-of-mind that I had been carrying around.  I was able to put that part of my “burden” down.

This is a meta-perspective.  I had to recall, interpret my childhood experience from clues within my own behavior, as evidenced over many years experience.  Then I had to hold this current mental/intellectual/linguistic interpretation in my mind, and go searching through my emotional memory for corresponding feelings.

By comparing the intellectually/linguistically understood solution to my various problematic emotional memories, and adjusting the intellectual thought-form to better align with my past emotional interpretations of my experience, I was able to create an entrainment between the two that “gave birth” to a feeling-hologram of my child-self, which I could then reassure and love.  And when the intellectual thought form came close enough to matching the feelings, when they were both tuned into the same frequency, the suffering was released.

What I did was reach back with my mind along the 4 dimensional snake of my body to help loosen a part of myself that had been emotionally constricted due to a false interpretation of reality (or if multiple interpretations or reality are allowed, then it was due to a contradictory interpretation of reality).

If everything exists all at the same time, increasing our inner awareness should allow us to take better care of our 4th-dimensional-flowering-energy-entity-self.  But it requires a 5th dimensional perspective to be able do so…

Let it go, put down your burden.  You need carry nothing, everything is whole and complete and singular already, and you are already a part of it.  Observe the splits in your quantum self, collapse the multiple/contradictory positions into one true/acceptable position, and you will end all your sufferings.