Thoughts Arise

In today’s meditation a poignant emotion took hold of me. I remembered friends that touched me deeply. Our lives have taken us far from each other, yet that old familiarity lingers. I felt nostalgia, but it took on a different hue as my awareness detached from the stream of memories. I realised that at some point in my life these cords of familiarity might pull me back. Or maybe they won't. The mood became less covetous and more joyous. Treasured moments come and go. If life continues, I will someday feel nostalgia for the present as well. Even our deepest connections are transient, and with anything of value comes the inevitability of loss. Our mind is in a state of flow on every scale of time. Pause for this moment and feel the rush of life that has led up to it from the last few seconds to decades past. We can’t stop or manage the flow. The only salve is to learn to let go.     Photo from gracecirocco.com  

I once believed in God. Surrounded by people who shared, affirmed, and enforced the belief, my faith became almost unquestionable. Religion gave me a glimpse of something. Not in the prescribed prayers, but in the moments spent searching my soul. Not through its practices, but by giving in to the magnificence of the world. Not through the words of scripture, but by contemplating infinity. I remember sitting at the edge of my bed, peering into the rain and becoming mesmerised by the spectacle. Emotion overwhelmed me, tears ran down my face, and I felt deeply connected to every raindrop falling from the sky, and every leaf that they touched.  I knew what caused rain, but my conceptual understanding of reality was swept away by the intricacy of subjective experience. I wept in awe and gratitude. It was one of the most profound moments in my life. I went through a phase where I searched for insights in holy scripture. But what I found there destroyed my faith. It was a myopic text,

Meditation Log April 18, 2020: I was on a run that hadn’t gone well. I wanted to attempt a personal best, but the wind was against me and I couldn’t keep up the pace. It felt like conscious effort at every step. I switched my watch from pace to distance, and on the last kilometer decided to let go. I dropped the goal, ignored the tug of discontentment, and let go of conscious effort. My feet kept moving and my breath joined the rhythm. The world pulled me onward and my chin lifted up. I consciously tried to move my sense of self down my body, towards the sensations of heart and breath. My vision seemed to shift lower too. Soon, the boundary of the top of my head disappeared. My vision became an extension of me; the observer. I was now running with the feeling of being shaped like an octahedron, the bottom starting around my cheekbones, expanding outwards, and shooting up into the sky. “Why an octahedron?” a thought asked. And the shape responded with change. It became a

Meditation Log March 29, 2020: The instruction to look inwards must frustrate every student of meditation. I think I've finally found a technique that works for me with some degree of repeatability. Look at a wall, letting any objects in the foreground dissolve into a haze. Try to keep the gaze dispersed, extending to the corners of your eyes. Treat sight as if it were sound. Accept the fact that you are not sending out rays from your eyes, but that vision is appearing to you without effort. As the light from the wall comes to you, let it observe you. Look at yourself from the perspective of the wall. Are you in your head? Do you fill the room? Or does the room fill  part of you? Let your sense of self expand to encompass the room and rest in that moment.     Photo from TheMindfulGrind  

Meditation Log March 14, 2020: I woke up from a dream last night in a state of disorientation. I was aware of darkness and a feeling of discomfort. This state fully occupied my mind, perhaps in-between sleep and being fully awake. I later realized the discomfort was from a sore back, but in that moment the thought of having a body did not enter my mind. I then heard a noise; a movement next to me. And a murmur; my one year old daughter. And in that moment my consciousness expanded to her, the knowledge of my wife next to her, my body and the room around us. This change in awareness brought an immense feeling of relief and gratitude. My existence was not as limited as it had been a few moments ago. An ordinary moment, taken for granted every night, became exquisitely cathartic through a shift in perception. In a few seconds the depth of emotion faded. My mind contracted again to its usual self. But now I know there is something worse. And something far more expansive that can

Meditation Log March 3, 2020:  Early morning run, on the return leg nearing home, I looked at the sky and my mind soared. I began to marvel at the reach of vision. In a vaguely vertiginous moment I felt the enormous volume of atmosphere above me. And then my gaze fell on two birds on a pole. There was a feeling of oneness. I perceived the creatures as similar to parts of my own body that I don’t notice until some sensation brings them to the fore of the mind. I started to notice my senses as fields of varying sizes. Sight, sound, smell and touch. The last of these is restricted to arms length, but the others can be far reaching indeed. And what they touch becomes closer; deeply associated with my identity in that moment. I recall that when I started to develop myopia in my teens, I felt a level of distress and anxiety that went deeper than the minor loss in ability itself. It blurred out details that I used to be able to perceive and left me feeling that my world had shrunk.

Where is the center of the universe? From the perspective of a human observer, it is here on earth. Where is the center of your universe? From our usual perspective, it is in our heads. Both points of view can be shifted. Consider the sensation of your heart beat. Does it feel at some distance from you? Is the sensation not part of you? Does it not arise within you? Your head is just the place where certain sensory apparatus is placed. It is not the center of your universe. Let that center that you think is in your head shift. Let it move down towards sensation. Perhaps imagine it centered around your heart and observe the difference. Do emotions become more palpable? Do the boundaries you imagined around your head start to recede?     Photo from peacekeeperproject.com  

Meditation Log February 17, 2020: Yesterday, while looking at myself in a mirror, I had the odd sensation of shifting into the reflection and then back into my physical body. I had the same feeling of disassociation after tonight's meditation as my index finger hovered over my phone and was reflected on the blackened screen. The finger existed and I was aware of it, but I did not feel a sense of it belonging to me. As my gaze remained fixed on the reflection, my finger moved. The movement seemed autonomous, without the feeling of me being its conscious agent.     Photo from edelements.com  

Meditation Log February 16, 2020: Today's session was uneventful except for the last moment, just as the guide was ending the meditation. As a somewhat contrived thought ended, I saw the silhouette of a bird dash through the darkness of my closed eyes. The image was spontaneous and surprising, yet did not disturb my calm. I noticed the bird's appearance as an illusion, and as it flew past and disappeared, it did not feel as if it had gone past my head. Rather that it had disappeared from the space from which it emerged; consciousness.     Photo from nzbirdsonline.org.nz  

Meditation Log February 9, 2020: I am trying to retain focus on the sensation of breathing. At times my attention centers on the movement of my chest, sometimes on the amplified sound of breathing through my earphones. But every few moments I find myself distracted by thought. Each thought easily grasps my attention and runs away with it before I realise the shift in focus. After a while I notice having less of those ‘first person’ thoughts; when I’m talking to myself in my head. Which is in itself a thought, but more subtle than a conversation with myself in my mind. The meditation guide draws my attention back to my breath. I try to do so, perhaps a bit too forcefully, and end up focusing on the blackness at the back of my eyelids. I peer into the blankness. After a while, during a calming pause in thoughts, I sense the desire to roll back my closed eyes to look upwards. This comes with a hint of trepidation and the feeling of something weighty bearing down on me. Imagine walking

Death is by definition the end of life as we know it. Losing the body, means losing the five senses. Close your eyes and try to imagine existence without sight. Now imagine it without sound. Then touch, smell, and taste. And the death of the brain means the loss of memory. Any hope we may have of our memories being saved somewhere outside our physical body, must be discarded in the face of reality. Damage to the brain is demonstrably associated with the loss of memory. And we have found no evidence of the brain being a receiver or transmitter of signals beyond our bodies. Similarly, the loss of language should be expected. This implies the loss of higher thought, especially rational and structured thought, which is really what separates human experience from every other known life form. Even further, brain damage and abnormalities are associated with loss of emotions like fear and empathy. So death means the end of familiar emotions as well. So what is left that could possib

More than a decade later, this blog still exists! I quickly looked through the posts to delete the most embarrassing ramblings of my youth. What could survive the wisdom of another decade? Finding love, becoming a father, having lived life more fully; I expected to delete everything and start fresh. But then I found this: January 27, 2009 I am a lake, many fathoms deep. My shores lie beyond what eyes can see. I am a man on a boat; its bow marking the extent of my world. I remember nothing of before, yet it is too cruel to imagine that this is all my existence has ever been. I yearn to escape my wooden boundaries. I am a lake, many fathoms deep. I lie placid, my surface untouched. I peer down into the waters on which I float. I see a man inside! No; it is my perturbed mind toying with me; it is but my own reflection. I try to reach out and touch his hand; the man shatters into ripples. Was he just an illusion or was he truly me; a shallow reflection on the surfac