Tag: reality

the uses of imagination

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The psyche consists essentially of images. It is a series of images in the truest sense, not an accidental juxtaposition or sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose; it is a ‘picturing’ of vital activities.  

CG Jung

Last year, towards the end of a 10 day meditation retreat with a well known teacher, I sat the Yaza.  The Yaza is an all night sit – from 10pm to 6am the next morning.  The intrepid leader leads the small group through a sequence of traditional sitting and walking meditation, maybe a break for snacks, and the always entertaining yaza march – in which all the yogis line up and march military style around the neighborhood.

Somewhere around 4am, after the march, I was sitting and was visited by an Angel.

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worlds on worlds in worlds

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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.

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delta-breezes:

Spencer Kirk | @spencer.kirk

Oneness

This morning I had a moment in meditation in which the birds outside the window were no longer outside the window but were instead inside of me.  While the small one chirped I could not determine if I was causing it or not, it felt as if it was my choice for it to chirp, just like it would be my choice to dance or sing in my own body.  When the raven cawed my jaw opened ever so slightly, but in meditation space it was as if my own beak was open to the heavens and I was pouring out a call to the wildness.

I then saw my body as an outline, through which I saw the wind blow and rivers flow, I saw trees grow and catch fire within me.  I saw oceans swell and waves crash, and bison run.  It was as if everything in the universe was pouring through me, and I was in part one with it, and in part merely stepping out of the way to allow it to pass without judgement or control.

the boundaries of who we are, and who we are not, are constantly more and more diffuse, and have never been defined.  It’s just always been safer to assume a seperateness, a level of lack of control.  But in reality (whatever that is) it’s clear that there is no separation.  We are the rivers and the waves, the trees on fire, the mighty wind, and the birds singing their morning song outside of the window.