I feel more and more like an island unto myself lately. I've pretty much felt that way all along, but recently my mortality threatens as I reflect upon my death. Maybe it's because I studied acting for a while and I deliberately made the drama vocabulary an important part of my nayme game that I see people doing what they do because they choose certain behaviors like an actor chooses to play a role.
In other words, they do what they do because it's the expected behavior of the role they've chosen rather than because of how they think or feel. I won't let people love me because I know where that leads to, and I don't like it one bit. To get them to let me be, I have to convince them they're an island unto themselves also, and I get better at accomplishing that with age.
Sometime I think Being is a bigger deal in my life than I've allowed up to now. I suspect I've concentrated on trying to understand consciousness as my reason for being when just being without rhyme or reason is good enow. Being still and gnowing that I am is God oughta be the cat's meow in my life.
In the wisdom books it is written that there is only movement and rest. I figure being has more to do with the resting part. With the idea being that when I ex-is in a state of rest that all I do is that. I've entertained a bunch of different kinds of feelings of satisfaction while experiencing profound rest.
Probably the most profound state of intentional rest I've ever experienced happened serendipitously or haphazardly. I write that because in this particular situation I entered into being with some definite goal in mind. It was a form of meditation I read about in a book and I decided to work the ritual to see if it led me to an interesting spot.
I lived with my first wife in a townhouse apartment in Charlotte, North Carolina at the time. This was a good arrangement for me and my wife because it gave us both some privacy by allowing both of us to be home at the same time, but one of us could go upstairs and create a sort of separate reality for ourselves.
That's what happened this day. Aftter asking my wife to guard my privacy while I went upstairs to meditate, I went to the spare bedroom, sat down and started working the meditation ritual. It's a simple process that's easy to imagine. I had to think of the hairs inside my nostrils as if they were seaweed on a coral reef being swayed by and forth in the tidal current.
When I breathed in the hairs that grow just inside my nostril would bend with the inhaled air going up through my nares, and when I exhales the same hairs bent the other direction. The focus was on just observing the wave-like action of the hairs in my nose as I breathed in and out.
The method included a counting pattern of base ten. I counted One silently on my beginning exhale, and Two on my inhale. The pattern was even numbers on the inhale and odd numbers on the exhale, but when I counted up to ten, I would stop and start at One again. Even meditation system I know uses a similar counting method.
After about a half-hour I matriculated up into a calm place. My breathing became effortless, and my mind was lucid and shining with light. My breathing became shallower and shallower as I dropped deeper into the ecstasy of release. I remember thinking about how well this new process was going.
Then, since my breathing had slowed down to where there were longer and longer spaces between my inhales and exhales, I decided to see what might happen if I just stopped breathing. Nothing. Nothing happened when I stopped breathing. This was amazing. This was pure being, and I just sat there in this soft grayish light in total peace but a persnickety curiosity.
In this state of calm my heartbeat seemed to be the only distraction. So out of sheer curiosity, I decided to see what would happen if I stopped my heart from beating. Nothing. Nothing happened because my heart simply stopped beating. This was more than amazing. I sat there in that grayish white light for what seemed like a good long time without breathing or my heart beating.
Eventually, I decided that my inexperience in doing stuff like this might get me in trouble I couldn't know about, and started my heart beating first, and then started breathing again. I don't know how long I sat there in pure being astounded beyond belief, but it had gotten dark outside. When I went downstairs to ask my wife how long I'd been up there, she had gone shopping.
That's never happened again. I've managed to rest in pure being infrequently, but I've never experienced that state where I could stop breathing and my heart from beating. Sitting in that grayish white state of pure being is fairly spectacular all by itself. The only description I've come up with that satisfies me to say it's like being an innocent, unborn babe wrapped in swaddling clothes. A year later I experienced full-blown Kundalini while walking down the beach one day. After that, I tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. Why would I not? What could top that?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
