Reality on top of reality….
I took this photo two weekends ago on a photo trip to Alabama Hills, here in southern california. I was playing around with multiple exposures and my camera settings and ended up with this. I love it’s dreamy quality, and ethereal-ness. Sometimes when I see, hear, or read about things I’ll have a little zip in my energy, like all the right notes coming together to make a chord, that tells me that there is a truthiness to a thing. This photo was like that.
My meditation sessions have begun to grow more bizarre and visual – and it’s also been intersecting with my dream life. For a very long time I wasn’t doing that great at remembering my dreams upon waking, but lately they’ve been very real. Bizarre, and not profound necessarily, but very visual and real.
My meditation has been likewise – I’m not necessarily having stereoscopic hyperreal imagery as if I was in a movie. It’s more like the sense of the imagery, of the knowing that it’s there, with periodic splashes of a real visual sense of seeing.
That might make much sense – but what I see and sense is like this photo above. Worlds laid on top of of worlds, reality on top of reality. This is more of a sense of thing, a sense of what’s real.
In the past few weeks, despite lots going on in my regular life (crazy work, trying to buy a house etc), when I’ve managed to sit down it’s been intense and highly concentrated fairly quickly. This is surprising to me because I feel so scattered off the cushion. It’s so interesting how consciousness doesn’t give a f* about what’s happening in your boring old life – no matter how UNboring you might think it is.
In that state, and then off the cushion I’ve been feeling a deep sense of what I can only describe as wobbliness. Similar to the flicker I felt on my retreat, but instead of all of awareness flickering, it’s more just a weird feeling of wheeeeewhaaaaing and instability. It’s a sense of pressing up tightly against the side of a bubble of reality, and trying to figure out what’s on the other side.
It sounds totally nutty, but yesterday I was walking around all day after meditation with this knowing that there was another whole world just on the other side of some indiscernible energetic barrier. I know, it’s totally crazy. In my defense though, it’s been a documented felt experience by other spiritual seekers, meditators, witches, shamen, magicians, monks, saints you name it.
So I did more research on these experiences and found a kinship with all sorts of other esoteric traditions. And I feel less crazy now, but still slightly like Alice falling further and further down the rabbit hole.
the Good Heretic 