The Not-a-Thing.
On April 18th, My wife brought me to the emergency room for what I thought
was a flu. My respiration was running about 25 inhalations per minute. I
was
running a temp of about 102. I had a pulled muscle in my rib cage area.
Otherwise I was felling OK.
They gave me some IV fluids and some Albuterol. I do have occasional
asthma.
They took an X-ray and there I waited and waited. After being there for
two
hours, I began to notice some visual hallucinations. It was actually kind
of
fun. Wherever I looked, I could see faces. I played with the phenomena. I
could see all kinds of faces, animal faces and human faces. At the time I
didn't think much of it. It was just a game to play while I waited for
some
results. The faces were all fun and goofy. There were no bad or creepy
faces.
The results came in and I had Pneumonia. They admitted me. They also gave
me
some pain killer and antibiotics.
Later that night, I was in my room fully awake. I was mentally fatigued. I
was pretty sick I guess. My breathing was still rapid and shallow. My
mental
state was as follows. I was too tired to focus on anything. My entire
system
of self was in a state where the attention could not focus on anything.
Instead there was a complete letting go of trying to focus on anything. I
was too tired to stop myself from focusing on things as well. I found
myself
in a state where my attention was on No-thing. There were things in and
out
of my sphere of awareness, but they came and went as in an automatic mode.
I
remember that there was a playing with the No-thing notion. But I was not
really generating the play. Instead the play of my attention was more like
an echo of my past habits. My natural curiosity was of itself just part of
the collection of things that danced about and interacted with one another
in a way that caused other things to emerge. All the while I was not
focused
on any of these but caught them in kind of a peripheral way.
From somewhere within the mess of cognitive soup, there emerged a thread
of
some kind of voice. It said that there were an infinite number of things
but
only one No-Thing. This no-thing was not the concept that was forming but
that concept was like a manifestation in the mental soup that emanated
from
it. Once it entered the soup, it was no longer a vital representation of
the
No-Thing.
The theme of the no thing carried on for the two days I was in the
hospital
and for several days afterwards. The intensity of the experience wore off
with each day.
The best part of this whole experience was this. I could close my eyes and
listen to all the sounds around me. I could stare at the red tint behind
my
eyes and in just 5 seconds, there would appear some textured patterns.
These
patterns would rapidly become more complex and within one minute, I would
be
totally projected into a lucid dream. The kicker was that my ears were
completely hooked up to the sounds in the room and my center of self was
in
a position to explore the visual and to see how the two were connected.
The
audio and visual were connected in a way that was not that the physical
controlled the visual nor was it the other way around. I found that there
was a root source driving both the physical and imaginary worlds.
I have had many lucid dreams in my past. I have spent many a day
manipulating the environment and discovering my relationship to the light
and sound that composed the dreams. This experience was very different in
that I had no desire to manipulate or control the flow. Whenever I found
myself inside a thing or concept, at some point I would just let it go and
like a bubble I would float back up to the No-Thing at the center. It
seemed
like every Thing had a stub that connected it to the Not-A-Thing. If I
found
myself in a plot of some visual projection, I simply removed my attention
from it and floated back to the No-thing. But I didn't have to even do
that.
It was like I was not interested in removing myself from any plot. I just
was and everything else happened by itself. Its like I had no desire to
exert free will, and yet my essence exerted it anyway. It reminded me of
chapter six in the tigers fang when Paul T said that he could not resist
the
urge to move into that light (or something like that) . It was like My
real
free will and the will of the No-Thing were compatible, the same.
Yet the process of weaving in and out of the various states in and of
itself
was like a dance. It was like a dance that had its own purpose. I tried to
focus on the master but that was a thing and I found that the practice of
focusing on the master only led me back to the No-thing. This also
reminded
me of chapter six when paul described the master and sat nam merging to
become one.
I loved this experience because it showed me that total surrender to
anything but the No-thing falls short. And at the same time showed me that
one can totally let go and surrender to that something that is not a
something. And in doing so, then the journey is controlled by It, and It
is
not-a-thing. Also that there is a state of being that is totally detached.
When you are detached from any thing, you are operating in harmony with
the
No-Thing. VAIRAGI.
This may sound like a bunch of disjointed mental images and echoes of
things
I read in books etc. but it is what it is and my goal here is to simply
report it and maybe it will be of some use to someone out there.
Thanks
Jerry C
|
