Meditations...Update

The greatest gift the pandemic has given me is the space to give more space to meditation.  Ever morning, 1. 5 hours.  Now my friends the trees get to participate.  All of them.  Even the glen and the culvert in front of the property:-)

 This is an ongoing summary of the different paths I have been taking.  They change almost daily.   I get prodded in new directions, and back to old ones.  All of these paths overlap.  All of these paths are really the same path.  I suppose that is the whole point:

1.  Feel follow experience the breath.  The old standard.  When you no longer have the energy to do any of the practices that follow, this is always the default mode so to speak.  You can't get away from it, the breath is always your friend.

2.  Portals.  I really dig this one.  What you are and what you experience comes from something else that arises.  And you let it run the show, and you watch and listen.  You are a spectator of sorts on what unfolds.   In this way, we are like an endless series of channeled energies,  each coming through the portals.  Mediums to a host of spirits.  Egregores.  And the more you can feel that you are not what you think you are, or what you have been, things open up.   This links to all the practices which follow, especially the next one...

3.  Centering Prayer.  Now I know Father Keating and the Benedictines do it differently, but this is like #2 only the portal that opens up for you and runs the show is the divine.  You are a vessel for the divine.  If you want to do it like they do, read some religious passage and let that show the way.  This doesn't have to be Christian centered.  It can be shamanic, what opens up for you is your higher self, you ancestors, you name it.  There are so many portals.

4.  The heart/The tanden/the ground .  Imagine the breath is coming from the heart.  Imagine the heart open and close like a lotus flower.  Imagine the seat of your consciousness emanating from your heart or you tanden (hara).  Or breathe up from the earth.  Its a much slower deeper form of consciousness.  Lately, its almost like the object of the meditation is right behind the heart, and the world slows down from that place.  Its such a different experience than experiencing reality from your head.  

5.  Open Focus Meditation.  Ever morning on the way to work:-)

6.  Feel the Vibrations/Heart beat/Respirations/Body sensations.  Similar to 4 and 1.

7.   Mantras.  Om Mani padme hum.  whatever comes to mind and is repeated.  Sometimes a drum rhythm.  

8.   Just Listen.  Observe.   

9.  Observe the Observer.

10.  Sing a song about coming back to him and come back to the body, not with the mind, but with the song.

Mediums, Lows and Highs

 I'm not sure about the whole spiritualism enterprise.  I mean its really cool when you listen to a medium in this big fucking mansion that springs up out of the farmland like a medieval castle outside Towanda (I kept looking for a moat), but not so sure the medium is connecting with what she thinks she's connecting with.  So I'm looking at it this way:

First, this particular medium is working within a basic Christian belief.  Something like, when you die your spirit goes up and hangs out with God and all is just peachy.  Like a big family reunited.  And that's all cool and within that container or belief system, I think some of the participants were able to connect with what they believed were lost ones given them helpful advice, or encouragement from the departed.

But in my experience, its not like we have one soul to begin with.  We have a conglomerate of voices.  Like a freaking portal for different things to emerge, be summoned, or appear at different times or in response to different things.   When we die, its becomes even more weird and expansive.  And this is where I superimpose mother Aya to the whole endeavor.  But I digress.

I think the universe is always pushing us in different directions.  Mostly to grow and evolve.  But those are also limited human concepts.  When we interact with someone else, or some other situation, or some tree, or whatever for that matter, something comes through our portal in response to whatever we are interacting with.  And its how people find people to begin with I think.  When someone comes into our life, or we hear someone's voice on the radio or we read some passage in a book all this is occurring because we are all networked together baby and the universe is trying to show us something, give us some little nudge.  And this is where I'm channeling schitzo Mike, in case you can't tell.  lol

Try this as an experiment, next time you are interacting with someone, just watch and see what arises, what voices come up inside you in response to what they are doing or saying.  The voice that arises is you is a different voice with different people.   It would be difficult to keep track of all the different voices that come up in you if you have been a busy bee during the week.   And if you have had some sort of trauma in the past, my sense is that the voice which arises in you and the other person is a recreation of some earlier trauma.  But I am digressing. 

So lets give the medium the benefit of the doubt.  She is intuitive.  Which means she is sensitive to the different voices that arise within her in different situations.  And she pays attention to those voices and is able to articulate them to others.  Because at some level, that is what the others need to hear.  So the voices within her, which may be parts or manifestations of the parts of the deceased (because we are all part of the same cosmic goo) arise, and she is able to articulate them to the participants.  And I suppose in some mysterious way, there may be some connection between the voices arising between she and the participant that bear some relation to the energy of the departed.  But that is all I got.

Of course, the voice that told her at the beginning of the ceremony that men are generally disbelievers and will think she is on a fishing expedition had the effect of summoning a voice in me to be wary.  Not surprising that she created in me (and us in the interaction) a fishing expedition in that she did not create or summon any voice inside me resonate with what she was saying.  Or something like that.  She cast a spell of nonbelief at the beginning of the ceremony, and I did not have any voice that thought of any counterspell....lol

Gollum and his Ego

 Christian de la Huerta analogizes our fixation on the ego with our focus on a baseball when in reality, we are the entire stadium.  This comes into play when someone tries to take our baseball away, or criticize our baseball.  We think we are under attack because we identify with the baseball.  But in reality, we are much more expansive.

Enter Gollum.  He is focused on his ring.  He calls it his precious.  He is horrified that he may lose it.  In this way, he is the personification of the aberrant egoic attachment.  I agree but for me the problem for Gollum is not his focus on the ego, it was that he was not able to create a large enough container to accept his gift of the ring.  For me, we are all given the Ring of Power, it is the wonderful gift of our life.  Our life is a gift, but it is not really ours to possess.  Indeed, it has nothing to do with possession or control, it is much more expansive and grand than anything we could imagine.  The question then becomes how much of the gift can we actually receive?  Can we expand our container?

This is somehow related to that sense I had at Nipper Wildlife Preserve several months ago that I'm looking at my life wrong.  There is this entire different perception that is right in front of us, that you can get a glimpse of.  And I suppose that you call this an expanded awareness, but even that is looking at it the wrong way because its not about expanding.  And its not about increasing the size of the container, but that is the only concept I have to describe it now.  Because it is an awareness that is not accessed by the head, it comes from the heart.