This morning’s sit was concentration coupled with insight into auditory hear space and the emotional and visual arisings that come from recurring thoughts.
I talked to my mentor last night about how I don’t have “clear talk” in my head during these practices – so I don’t have any voices talking to me that I can label as recurring thoughts or one-off thoughts etc. I do have one caveat to that, which is that I do have a voice in my head that is seemingly tracking my meditation progress and giving me a play by play on how well I’m doing. Outside of that however, I don’t find myself having any “clear talk” thoughts – often I’ll escape into visual images instead.
However, I do have incoherent murmurings – my mentor labeled them “subterranean murmurs” which I think is the perfect description of my experience. It’s like hearing a TV on in the room over – you can tell someone’s talking but you can’t hear what they’re saying. It’s coming from a deeper level of conciousness than I’m currently accessing – and it creeps me out a bit.
So what happens to me is that visual thinking takes over and I start seeing various things. I tried to take my only recurring clear thoughts down into emotional space, and didn’t get much out of that outside of feeling like I’d fallen deeper into consciousness.
In that space I started seeing images from the perspective of lying down. I sensed I was outside on the grass though I didn’t see it. I started to see flashes of mountain tops, and flashes of running through moss covered forests. These things felt so deeply familiar, and I sensed they were connected to the images I saw last friday. I doubt at this phase in my practice these images are attached to past lives – I dont even necessarily believe in past lives – but they felt so familiar it was the first experience I’ve ever had that gave me pause in my aforementioned doubt. More investigation necessary.
I found it very difficult to rise from this state, and felt glued to the cushion. It took me 15 minutes at least to be able to get up.
the Good Heretic 