Journey to the Abstract

The physical reality is part of our experience. It represents the lower vibration of all physicality. We also experience thoughts, desire, mood etc. which are higher vibrations. Creation comes from the infinite to the finite i.e. from infinite vibration to the lower vibrations. Depending upon your awareness level, you would either feel the world is very static and unchanging or that the whole world is in an ever changing ecstatic flux that operates in harmony when seen from the whole. Along with the physical elements we can also perceive the invisible thought, emotion (feeling), desire, proprioception, energy level, intellect, memory, time and space. So these are some of the higher dimensional realities.

When you do something you do not really want to do or believe in, it is pure resistance. You could do it with dedication and steady incremental effort, but you would only get more of what you don’t want. This becomes a habit pattern and you end up with the mindset that life is hard and we have to work hard for success or any attainment. Do you work hard to get involved in an excellent movie or documentary or an interesting hobby? Do you even call that work? Naturally inspiring things just move our attention to them effortlessly. That is exactly what is meant by flow. Even the mildest form of resistance felt means you are impeding the flow. I had seen both the sides intensely since, when I’m alone and intensely reading, I am in flow while in many social situations I am putting a lot of effort in trying to entertain them and make them accept me. There are elaborate logical systems we use to justify why we oppose this natural flow – culture, society, family traits, concept of habits, conditioning etc. So all this creates a basic lack of TRUST with very detailed hypnotizing elaborate stories to hide this fact – like mythology, religion, evolutionary sciences. We are told what our fears should be in a very subtle way.

Perception and language are so finely intertwined. The person with finer perception would have longer descriptions for things and would try to improve on vocabulary. Our language also denotes our persistent perceptions. If I use the word “I” everyday 100 times, that means I perceive this “I” word experience that many times too. My choice of words determines my personality, interests, passions, what matters to me, meaning etc. We all have the same basic senses, but language adds whole new layers of concepts. It is connecting engine among humans. Each human has a language (verbal) module and we convey and receive information through this. It’s like a router.  Language and memory are also totally connected. We convert our experiences into language symbolism to encode them in memory. It is the descriptive layer of memory that allows us to be selective in our focus, differentiate, categorize etc.

Because we never put full effort we can never know what we are ultimately capable of. At some level we are afraid that we might discover we are no good at something, so we never try OR we try with partial effort so that we continue to dream. It’s almost like we are divided in such a way that a part of us purposely prevents us from putting full effort since it’s very afraid of failure or hiding from us some deep unpleasant truth. That’s why full effort totally allows you to see what you is true and what is not with far greater clarity. In fact full effort = quite analogous to perfect clarity on whatever it is applied to.

When you drop everything, you reach an undifferentiated state without verbal thought. Basically when you pull yourself back to see the entirety, there is just experience. I use thoughts and break this pure infinite experience down into space, time, objects, other people etc. If I just totally pull myself to observing the entirety or the whole, I see that there is just ever changing experience. All value lies in the experiences themselves. All our categorizations of good/bad, right/wrong, self/other, inside/outside are just coming from our mental models of reality which we collect over our lifetime. But the model will only be an accurate as the depth of our investigation of reality. Generally people get lost in an infinite horizontal space and fail to see that this space they are standing on is itself resting on some unquestioned beliefs. In diving to the depths of consciousness, we see that there are only 2 states – awareness and non-awareness (sleep, part of dreaming, perception in waking life). You could take it even further and ask the question, who knows about the unawareness part – well awareness knows. So there is ONLY awareness and nothing else. The experiencer, experienced and the experiencing are happening in awareness. Awareness/Consciousness/Light is all that there is. Everything just is. Every moment is full of it, including illusions, mental conceptions, preoccupations, physical reality etc. – all of them are mental concepts occurring within awareness. You are everything there is. The magic of questioning helps to get through the layers of illusion.

This was my 2^nd attempt at Jhana meditation without a timer. Sat in a room which was mostly silent with very mild road noise and a clock tick. In this session, I was able to concentrate on my breath for up to 60-70% of the time. On closing my eyes the mental plane started mildly swirling and dancing but I tried to look at the entirety of the movement from an empty space again and again. I noticed that I needed to relax further down, this helped get rid of the ‘holding on to an image’ problem. The perceptions were still dancing about initially, but this time, I stayed more firm with my observation frame and caught the breath. The breath in the very relaxed state felt non-physical. It was a pure feeling and I could not locate it in space. I could not even feel its direction beyond how I chose to visualize it: as a sphere expanding and contracting, as a piston moving back and forward etc. I could drop the physical aspect, space and direction of it. It felt like a ‘subtle feeling’. I tried to reach this place again and again during my 15 min meditation and then concluded.

Sex is a pleasure object that is so outside your egoic control. When you really want it, you don’t get it. When you’re in an average mood, you get it. Then the whole power game kicks in with questions like: Why should I do it when you want, when you don’t give it to me when I want it? This lack of control about the whole experience and you being at the mercy of luck and your partner is so ego-destroying. It makes me a slave at the whim of my master. My master is actually the attachment to the pleasure I get from it. My partner would be the agent for evoking the pleasure, so in a way, she is the master. It makes me feel vulnerable, pathetic, pitiable, helpless, a slave, and at the mercy and whim of my master. It gives so much of my power away to the other person. It makes me feel like a puppet which the other person can abuse. It’s so demeaning, humiliating, hurtful and insulting. The entire internet keep ramming into my head that it’s the most pleasurable thing in the world even more than all drugs. Then why don’t I have access to it? Am I supposed to just wait my entire life at the mercy of someone who would provide me that? Too dis-empowering! Why is it such a pain to get sex when you exactly want it? Why is the sexual part of all my relationships always kind of pressured, non-optimal, guilt inducing and so ego based? There has to be some pleasure FAR better than sex so that I can get rid of this bondage forever.

While walking on the road, initially I noticed that my perception was locked in a certain pattern. I tried to open that up a bit by conceptualizing in new ways.

I can intellectually understand that reality at any moment is infinitely complex and I can also feel my own experience is continually different and changing. I imagine it to be a fractal which is continuously morphing. But yet, my day to day experience of reality seems so enduring, persistent, repeatable, stable, very slow changing. That is where I feel stuck and the element of boredom or dissatisfaction kicks in.