❧
Coming to understand that the main point of a meditation practice is to lower the oxygen content of one's breathing has revealed a couple of more ideas about why a meditator goes about reducing the body's diet in such away as to not take more oxygen to run the body than is necessary.
As I've explained about my going vegetarian, well, up to the last couple of days when I've eaten two steak sandwiches), the only reason for my doing that had to do with how difficult it is for me to digest meat. If I'm trying to lower the intake of oxygen by practicing certain meditation techniques, the fact that my GI tract is working all it's muscles and acids trying to break down the meat I put in it, that's gonna screw with me trying to lowing the oxygen.
This lowering of the oxygen intake also jives with what happens in a sensory deprivation or float tank. Floating in warm salt water that's three or four times as salty as the open ocean facilitates the body needing less oxygen. Nothing I've ever done has been more relaxing than spending a few hours in a float tank.
A day or two ago I wrote about how I've only been to the desired state of being via meditation just once in around fifty years of meditating on and off. I've been there a goodly number of times while in the float tank I once built. Now that I really need it to help with the arthritis I don't have a float tank anymore.
That's not to say, however, that every time I crawled naked into my float tank I ascended into this exalted state of being. I felt lucky if it did happen, but I couldn't prophesy which time I got into my float tank it would happen. It's a little like what the Tibetan monk stated about how death is always unexpected.
Something has to be abandoned wholly and abruptly to "wake up" in the desired state. That's why "falling" into this state of being is likened unto death. It's the Jesus child you were taught in your youth that you always should have been that's gotta be forsaken. It's not that easy to betray what you've grown to love for old time's sake.
There is the question of who's memories will you use to meet the future? Your naive, supposed-to-be life is the result of the rules of conscience you employed to create an identity for yourself or accept the identity imposed upon you by your family or tribe.
Having one's own identity seems to be the only thing that really matters to a homo sapiens creature. Having an irrefutable identity is truly to die for. It's so fragile, though, that one small whack up side the head in a bar brawl, and it's Irene Goodnight to one's personality. It's called getting some sense knocked into you. Back in the tribal days, aye, and even today in tribal areas, to not belong to an identity group is to risk lifelong slavery as a wannabe.
❦
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.
