A student shares vivid imagery from meditation, including encounters with confined versions of herself and a newfound sense of spacious sensation. A second student describes discovering that the "terror" behind resistance is actually dullness and ordinariness, and finding unexpected beauty in simply being an open gate of knowing.
A student shares vivid imagery from meditation, including encounters with confined versions of herself and a newfound sense of spacious sensation. A second student describes discovering that the "terror" behind resistance is actually dullness and ordinariness, and finding unexpected beauty in simply being an open gate of knowing.
I will try to do my best with the language. I have images, so I will relate them.
It started when you talked about the rabbit hole. I went in, entered the tunnel, which was very dark. On one side, I saw myself in a space, a cave. There was thinking, thinking, thinking, talking and moving the hands, using the mind very heavily, going on and on. Then another space, and again myself. This time I saw myself frightened, not terribly so, but frightened. I didn't know where I was.
I came out of the tunnel, thank God, and it was a beautiful day with a fantastic view. There was the sea, and two hands came to me, one on the right and one on the left, a man and a woman. I saw only the hands. They took me and sat me down to see the view. I was there smelling, feeling, really fantastic. My body was very open.
Then, because you continued talking and I continued seeing, you took me to different places. I heard voices and saw little vendors, little stores like you find at the beach, selling things. In one of them I saw little boxes containing the things I had visualized in the tunnel: myself, moving around, in little boxes. It was so funny. I was so happy to find them so little that I bought them, or they were given to me, I don't know. I took them and went back to the place to see the view again. So interesting.
At one point I saw that the figures in the boxes continued doing the same thing, but it was okay. Then in one moment they grew, grew, grew, very big, and I said, "Oh no, this is too much." So I put the lid on. The boxes had a door, and I shut it.
Then, as you continued talking, I took these little boxes with me, with both versions of myself, and started walking. When you began speaking about the sensation of the body, not of the body exactly, but sensation itself, that was the first time I could say: I got a little bit outside of my body, and it was so beautiful, because it was all around my body. I had never felt like that. As a medical doctor, I know all the parts of the body, and I could give you a very long account. But this time the sensation was truly fantastic, something I had never had.
So it was like a little film. I think it is better for me to speak about myself this way, through images, than to use my mind. I am discovering this, and I appreciate it, because I feel the hands in the vision were the two of you guiding me in this process. This is my little sharing for the whole group, all my friends. Thank you. I am open to you and to everyone.
Keep sharing. That is a beautiful vision. Really beautiful. Is there something more you feel like saying about it?
Sometimes I don't want to create; I want to perceive what is coming from the unconscious. What you say now is very good for me.
I want to add one more thing. These images about that part of myself, I have them in daily life too, and this came at the perfect moment, because sometimes I feel so trapped by those ideas. That part of me in the boxes: it was great, because I had been asking, "What do I do with this part of me that I cannot relate to?" And the answer came just from the meditation.
Sensation without boundaries
Thank you. I just wanted to comment on your experience of sensation. It is very clear that you shifted past the mind, because only the mind, as you said, being a medical doctor, knows the biology and all its categories. Direct, raw sensation doesn't have a boundary. It is experienced as spacious, without very clear lines.
Yes. Thank you.
The terror of ordinariness
Most of the time when I want to share something, it is just to share the beauty. I found it really lovely today, like a synchronicity, that throughout the meditation you were talking about piercing through the veil of whatever is appearing, and at some point you mentioned terror. I clearly remember telling myself, "I don't feel terror; it's more of a dullness." The resistance to the ordinary dullness is not a fear. Actually, I would prefer it to be a fear, because emotions, good or bad, are the common, the known, the preferred. Then you started talking about dullness, and I thought, "I guess I called for it." The ordinary. When the current moment feels plain and dull and ordinary, I realized how much that, at least in my conceptual world, is the terror: that things are dull and plain and ordinary.
That was really something. It is so good to keep looking at it. But truly what I wanted to share is something else, and there is a question in it.
What is the experience of being?
What is the experience of being? Because I keep looking at it and the pull to look for it in the phenomenal world is so strong, even though I already have all the evidence that it is not in the phenomenal world.
I guess what I was getting at is: just training this horse of mine to be a little more comfortable with not knowing, as opposed to trying to bounce from knowing one thing to knowing the next to knowing the next. Because today it was really beautiful. At the end, there was this experience of beauty: the realization of how all the objects have a glimmer and a shininess, yet nothing is as beautiful as the open gates that receive them. That just made me weep.
Nothing compares to being an open gate
But once again, phenomenally, it is a very strange experience, because it is nothing special. It is just the ordinariness of knowing, in a sense. And I kept weeping, because no matter how beautiful anything in the objects was, from sensations to the sun and the windows today, nothing compares to just being an open gate. This knowing: I don't know how to call it. It is not a perception. It is not a knowing of something. This knowing is just so beautiful. It made me weep for the entire end of the meditation.
Perhaps because you were talking about certain teachers, I also had a vision. I remembered a dream from years ago that today felt as if I had dreamed it last night. In the dream, I was swimming in an ocean in a primitive world of volcanoes exploding and primitive creatures returning to the sea. What was salient to me was that there were all these doors underwater, closed doors. And today the experience was the opposite. If I look inward, truly to the background, everything there is, is an open door.
The contrast of those two images: I don't even know how to put it into words. I can say "beautiful," I can say things like that. But if I just stay with the actual experience, it made me weep. That's it. Thank you.
You're welcome.