March 11, 2007

Today I was walking around at a local flea market scanning the isles for things I could use and occasionally doing my Walking Zen meditation, which is to work on my Koan “who am I?” while doing other things – spiritual multitasking.  At one point I had a sudden awareness that something was up.  Something in the atmosphere had changed. I stopped browsing and looked around.  My first thought was there had been an explosion or some significant event.  In these first few seconds of noticing this I was trying to figure what this “disturbance in the Force” was but I didn’t see anything.  I thought it was something in the external environment but soon realized that it was something about me or the way I was experiencing things.  Whatever was happening, it was quite startling when I first noticed it but as that feeling faded the experience became quite beautiful.  Everything seemed somehow cleaner and clearer. It all looked the same yet colors seemed brighter and more colorful and it was as if some kind of invisible fog had lifted.  I stopped by a tree out of the ambling traffic and just looked around.  There was a deep calmness and stillness and a kind of subliminal joy present  – and that’s when I  realized that I had stopped thinking!  I could still think of course and was doing so but now I could clearly see my thoughts rise into awareness, serve their purpose, and descend into oblivion. Now when I stopped thinking intentionally, my consciousness was quiet.  No thoughts came up!  No thoughts below the surface!  Silence!!  Not ordinary silence but much more profound – a silence undercutting the noisy colorful chaos around me – absolute silent stillness.

So I continued in this state for several minutes as it was easy to “not think.” There was a newness to the experience which I can’t explain and I felt something more phenomenal was going to happen with my awareness – a sort of “silent drum-roll” feeling.  But nothing more profound happened although  I did have some interesting  insights.  I noticed that when the thought machine is turned off what I’m left with is just pure and somehow heightened experience.  It seems that the “thinking” this machine generates is like a massive amount of static that contaminates EVERYTHING, not by the kind of thinking, positive or negative etc., but by its very nature. It’s like a refrigerator that is noisy and blocks other sounds but it is constant so you don’t notice it until the compressor turns off.  Suddenly you notice the silence and you also become aware of the presence of quieter sounds you didn’t hear before.

As I started thinking more and more ABOUT what I was experiencing, I was unknowingly turning the crank on the thought-engine, like you might crank up an old Model-T.  After maybe 10 minutes of peace, the machine was running again. When it had turned off spontaneously however, keeping it off felt easy because it actually required some effort or intention to think, but now when it kicked in, I couldn’t turn off the unconscious noise.

This experience gave me the impression that I am addicted to thinking – it’s like a constant noise that keeps me distracted from a higher awareness, like biting one’s nails or gambling or even taking drugs or a million other things.  Most of my thinking is a mechanical rehashing of the past mixed in with imagining and rehearsing various futures and a lot of just talking to myself in my head.  In his books Carlos Castaneda talks about turning off the “internal dialog” as a means of “stopping the world”.  What happened today reminds me of that.   When my thinking ceased, the silence was startling.  I was compelled to look around and  be more aware of my surroundings – to be more present.

Thought is not a requirement for enlightenment or waking up.  Awakening  is not verbal or conceptual or even an understanding.  It is purely the knowing of Self and thinking just gets in the way. .  I’d like to be able to turn the noise off more often.  Of course there’s a deeper reason than “habit” for any addiction.  I’ll have to look into this.

I noticed that I could feel my arm and let that feeling be itself, without me somehow.  It made me laugh.  Everything is as it is and if we leave everything alone, there is only what is and no observer is needed.  It seems that there is no suffering then, even in great pain, as the pain has no receptacle, nowhere to go, no one to hurt.  This makes me want to laugh too.  It’s like letting everything go, to cease ownership or possession.  What disappears was never really there.  Self is more like an assumption or presumed solution based on a question asked while in a fog.

In 1969, when I was twenty one, I started doing Zen meditation.  I chose the Koan “who am I” and at one point I was aware of this question continuously 24 hours a day for about two and a half days.  Basically the question became a non-verbal awareness of looking into my own being  and was present even during sleep!  I would get up from sleeping and notice that I had been aware the whole time both of dreaming and of dreamless sleep. This awareness was aware of both the content of my dreams and just of itself as timeless being whether I was dreaming or not.

On the third day I was walking through the house and there was a sudden shock.  All I remembered of this moment was that everything went black and the blackness shrunk to a black dot in front of me and vanished. But there was a lot of fear and I didn’t attempt Zen meditation again for 22 years.

In 1991, after I had learned how to successfully process trauma and work with various altered states, I recalled the missing pieces that I had blocked out.  What actually happened was that my awareness had suddenly expanded and my center of perception was above my body so that I could see my body, the entire house, the entire neighborhood for several blocks and I saw several spirit entities (people)  around me, looking at me.   Some looked surprised, some looked afraid, and some looked happy – I had no idea who they were or what was happening.  In a state of panic I immediately suppressed the whole experience, regained my previous perspective, and perceived whatever had happened as a black dot.  There is more I could say about this but the bottom line is, I simply was not prepared for this experience and what might have followed had I allowed this perspective to continue.  I did other forms of meditation starting in the mid 1970’s, mostly for concentration and relaxation, but not Zen.  After 1991 I did resume the Zen meditation but only occasionally until my interest was re-awakened in 2005.

* This is post #1 – Read this first – for the most recent post click HERE.

I first learned about meditation from the book Zen Combat when I was 14.  I was trying to learn Karate and Aikido from books.  I tried to meditate from the meager information I had about it  but it always produced some weird experiences so I backed off.  In 1968 when I was 20 years old I found a book on Zen Buddhism by D.O. Suzuki on a bench in a hallway at a hippy-run church near my college in Sacramento.  I opened this book to a page discussing the common Zen koan “Who am I?.”  I recognized immediately that I didn’t know who I was and that this was a critical question.  I was intrigued.  I took the book home and studied it.  I soon found the book “The Three Pillars of Zen” and read it many times.  I quit college shortly after this and moved home.  I began reading spiritual material from other religions and philosophies and took a class on Eastern Religions at a local college which involved some interesting field trips.   I began doing meditation by counting my breaths and moved on to contemplating the koan, “who am I”.  I had a few powerful insights but after about two years of meditating on and off I decided to get serious and tried to maintain self-reflective awareness 24 hours a day.  After maintaining continuous awareness of my koan for two and a half days, day and night, I experienced a frightening moment that caused me to stop meditating immediately and not return to the Zen meditation for many years. I resolved this problem in 1991 and took up Zen meditation again but only very occasionally. My enthusiasm for awakening was rekindled in 2005 through conversations with a friend of mine.  Since 2005  I have practiced daily self inquiry and contemplation as well as sitting meditation and have had many insights and experiences relating to spiritual enlightenment,  awakening, self realization, or the search for inner truth.  This blog is simply a place where I can a share these insights with you. Most of these stories occurred after my interest was renewed but some are much earlier.  They are in chronological order and some are just copies of earlier write-ups. To read these in order click the next arrow → link below.   Pip Skywalker    –  October 23, 2013