About a year or so ago was when it all started. From somewhere or another I got this idea for experiencing Other as myself and myself as Other.
Like looking at a cloud and the cloud looking back in the way clouds do. You know, actually being the cloud while being me at the same time. No not under the influence drugs.
Or, standing on an ocean beach. Feeling the wind, listening to the crashing surf. From somewhere feeling the ocean as your lover. In your chest, a presence, deep and rapturous.
During my daily meditation I have been exploring deeper into this state. Following a process of emptying myself of thought, sensation, and attachment to symbols reality kind of loosens. Often to greater and lessor degrees a swapping or closing of distance of various kinds happens. Distinction between self and other isn’t so clear.
This is the space I am exploring. Not to get lost in it giving up self to non-self. Present in this place where my brain is not (yet) equipped to manage being.
What might be possible? Can one develop some capacity to maintain the non-dual presence and still act or create change?
Some of my experiments include:
- sensing or imagining sensing the web of connections between all things,
- interacting with the strands of the web, a touch or even drawing strands to each other,
- having out there (other) be in here (self),
- acting internally with out there.
A lot of this seems very similar to holograms. In a way there is something to the idea. Everything present within everything.
The question though is how to be awake from within that state. This is my latest practice. Not just in meditation either.
Can definitely be practiced while taking walks. Self-other experiences can range from the trashcan on the sidewalk to the mountain top in the distance and anything and everything else.
Including a curious idea I had. Ideas! What if thoughts and ideas were as much an other in a duality reality experience as other people?
So if we think of a web which connects everything in existence. With everything in existence reflecting everything else. Add in every thought and idea to that web of connections.
Now this net is unimaginably complex and diverse. How would you even contemplate a tiny patch of it?
Here is where we get drawn beyond everyday experience. Drawn into what is beyond our physical brain. Venturing into what?
Here I will admit my lack of formal spiritual training probably leaves me with a lack of vocabulary for sharing some of these concepts.
Approaching these states throws open some mighty interesting doors. Treating them as other valid ways of perceiving and being suggests maybe we have levels of agency not often realized?
Might it be possible that we are touching into a source of miracles? Where limits of time and space really are not what they are in the “normal” world?
I don’t know. Reaching out and tapping this thread or that one? Pluck one of the threads of creation and what happens?
Certainly, many have gone down this path. The writings of mystics through history and spanning geography affirm the mystic experience is a very human one.