I had an intriguing meditative experience this morning.
I've been experimenting with a tweak on The Mirror exercise that I learned a few summers ago in the advanced Tergar workshop. In that exercise you look at everything in front of you as though it were a mirror, and everything you see is really only reflection. While I was doing that workshop I had a dream that I was in a car and someone gave me a virtual reality headset to pass the time. Except that when I put it on, all I saw was a virtual reality representation of the same scene I would have seen without the head gear.
This week I was sent by CBC to write about a virtual reality exhibit. With a sense now of what this actually feels like, I decided to use this in my practice. Sit as though everything I saw and felt was a construction that could be changed in the same way I could change it if I were a virtual reality director.
I rested first in some uncomfortable emotions, some anxiety I'm feeling about my writing career, my usual concerns about Ben as he makes his teenage decisions about life. Then the ease and comfort that I now normally feel when meditate began to flow. I rested in this for a while, but then continued to apply the construct frame to that as well, forcing myself to step back a little from the positive, blissful feelings.
Suddenly I was in this somewhat unfamiliar place. A place of no thought and no feeling. And there like a real perceptual shift. Like everything in front of me took on a 3D quality, as though I actually was seeing it in virtual reality.
Today, I'm going to try to bring this perception into my tasks. See if it's a thread of presence I can maintain. It felt like a real and solid equanimity. A place in me that is there for whenever I need it, and that I absolutely want to return to.
