Dictation

This week I am no longer alone.

I've noticed of the course of many years of practice that if I manage to maintain a one hour meditation time for more than a couple of months that I start to feel an intelligence in my life. A voice starts to speak to me, to reassure me, to guide me, to bring my attention back to the present again and again. At times I've thought of this as my muse.  But from now on I'm going to think of it as a daemon.

Not a demon. A daemon, in the Greek sense of the term, and energy that drives the soul.  Thomas Moore, the Jungian psychologist, writes in Original Self, that the daemon is to the soul what the ego is to the self.  If we are to live from the soul, from chi, from kundalini, from whatever vitality we've chosen to cultivate, having that intelligence that keeps us on the path is an essential drive.

Ben's been studying the Renaissance this week at school. So I'm conscious of this shift we made several centuries ago as a civilization to place man at the center of the world instead of God. What we ended up placing in the center was the ego. If we could shift again what would we place at the centre? I would like to think it would be the soul.  Perhaps consciousness.  Whatever this energy is that transports us to a better place, a more peaceful place, a more joyful place.

This week I have felt it become more central to my life, not just because of my daemon emerging.  I've started to feel this kind of double body. Almost like double vision, but it's more like double feeling. Sometimes I see my heart as a green energy pulsating a little bit outside of and to the right of my body. Sometimes I  just sit with waves and the rythms of the universe.

Last night I did a long meditation.  Almost two hours and felt the undeniable deep warm coil of energy. Not the whole flow yet,  distinct parts in my neck and my upper abdomen.  Nothing imagined there.  This was a physical energy.

Daemon has instructed me to stop watching T.V. and Netlix, so I don't have much else to do but to become aware of it.

The adventure continues.

Enough is More

My practice has started feeling dry this week.  I think it might be because I've been expending a little too much effort trying to recreate some DMT experience.  I've been trawling around the internet and books and I've become interested in the pineal gland and the concept of "The Blue Pearl," a visualization experience.

It's not really working.  I have had some new experiences, a sense of clarity last night that was interesting, and an increased feeling of dissolving.  But this morning I'm feeling more drained than nourished by my practice. 

The other thing I've been working on this week is the cultivation of a tulpa.  I read about this in The New York Times this week, and it ties in to what I've been feeling this week about needing some kind of presence in my life, and about some of the thinking I was doing a few years back about muses. Tulpas are part of Tibetan meditattion. They are thought forms that cultivated over time take on an emotional presence in the meditator's life. 

A few years back, when I was regularly meditating an hour a day, I started to feel this presence and this voice coming from a part of me that seemed more peaceful, intelligent and insightful than I usually am during ordinary consciousness.  I began to think of her more as a muse, but maybe for now tulpa would be a more practical term.  When I consulted my tulpa this morning (who for the time being sounds a little too much like me), she said that I needed to just stay with the basic feelings and stop putting so much energy into out of body experiences or seeing light.  

Keeping to the Joy of Living Practice is hard for me. I'm so needy. I want to go whole hog and love the universe not just my son and neutral people.  I want more all the time, and it's one of the reasons I'm having all these financial problems. 

I've been re-reading The Soul Of Money, and I'm struck once again by the wisdom of trying to free myself and this world of the three toxic myths, that there's not enough for everybody, that more is better, that this is just the way it is. 

If I am to believe that there is enough for everyone then I have to first start believing that there is enough for me and enough for Ben. I need to create a good life out of what I consider is enough.  

I need to feel the sense of abundance in that word.  

And one place to start is to stop being so greedy for spiritual experience. 

Listen

Lately the wise, smart, advising voice in my head has been shouting:

LISTEN

I listen, and nothing is said.

It's taken me a while to realize that what it wants me to listen to is the silence.  I am having gaps in between thoughts.  This scared me at first, but this morning I realized that this is an amazing process.  Gaps are moment of awareness, rests between notes.  Gaps are where the magic happens and one's truest sense of self is born.

Gaps are a place for me to place my hands over my navel and ground my energy.  They are a place for me to restore my energy.  They are my brain unhooking from the stress, the past, the conditioning.

Gaps are power.

Gaps get bigger if you let them.

thoughts

This morning I'm starting to feel some of the chi return. I've been in the grip of a lot of anxiety. Some of it no doubt useless. But I am clearly in the grip of thought. Not in the grip of chi.

For a small moment while I was holding the balloon I remembered the importance of surrender. I remembered to stop trying to hold the balloon up, to just relax and rest in the magnetic energy that will do a far better job of holding this balloon up than I will. I forget that again and again and again.

Much of this has to do with the continuing dominance of the ego in my life. My ego is still convinced that only it can, should, will drive my life. And for the most part I still seem to be in its spell. I don't want to be there anymore. I want to be allied with nature and with consciousness, not careerism, ego building and status obsession.

I've been writing recently about The Muse. To work with a muse you have to be willing to surrender your creative ego. I'm not there yet. I'm trying, but it's still hard.

Fog

This morning there was no warm window filled with dawn. Just a grey fog, which turned out actually to be an early morning frost. It's gone now. But I did take it as a sign.

I am in a fog these days. I get up like I've planned, but it is no longer a really energizing meditation. It's all I can do to just stand in one place for an hour. Which as I write that is still probably more than most people would be willing to do.

Willingness. That word pops out at me. I have a willingness right now to get up early. But not as much of a willingness to do the other things I could be doing. Standing in a challenging posture. Even putting in the time I need to put in to clean the house.

I need a guide, so for the time being I'm working on my muse. On what I believe the muse is, and in actually cultivating a relationship with this muse. Maybe I need to research that a bit. Maybe I need to really commit to that subject for some substantial time. Because without some kind of guide, inner or outer, I feel a little lost.

letting my body dissolve

I'm reading the Dalai Lama's book on Enlightenment. And coming aware of the importance of meditating on this illusion of separateness from the world. Dependence arising he calls it.

Here's what's happening in my Zhan Zhuan practice. I wait now until I connect with a voice that is mine, and not quite mine. A voice that comes from the center of my brain. It is authoritive, it tells me what to do. It tells me that I have to wait patiently and allow my body to disove into the energy that surrounds me. That the pain in my body is mostly my anxiety that the universe isn't supporting me. But once I realize that this is an illusion that thre is this magnetic energy surrounding me and supporting me, I can relax and the energy starts to flow in me.

At this point I have a concrete feeling of my connection with this universal energy. I realize, or I feel that it is true, that my body itself is just something I, as this energy, am inhabiting. I am the energy that surrounds me. I always have been and I always will be.

This could be just a "trick" of my parietal lobe shutting down because I'm in stillness. But intellectually there is some truth to the interconnectedness of things. And it is a wonderfully liberating feeling to feel part of the world, or an energy greater than your one little body.

My goal these days is to meditate four times a day. At dawn, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. I want to re connect with this feeling four times a day. And I can. I know I can, it's not just a "lucky" feeling anymore. I can connect with this voice now regularly, it's just a matter of waiting until that part of my brain opens up. I can teach myself now.