New Adventures in Big Mind

Whoa!
(or however that is supposed to be spelled).

OK. Typing pretty fast as well... it seems I'm a bit inspired.

Just finished a highly successful meditation session, and I'm still a bit buzzed. I actually feel quite good, and seriously awake and aware. Anyway, I feel like I need to be journaling these meditative experiences, at least while I'm still discovering. It really does seem to make the experiences more solid, otherwise I think they would tend to fade.

After Sunshine & Laz went to sleep tonight, I read a bit and looked at the FSU physics department website. I really do hope the interview goes well this weekend and next week. Technically my interview is next week, but I'm meeting people for dinner on Sunday, so really the process starts soon after I get there. It's a huge physics department at FSU, and it's a little bit daunting. Still, I need to be brave and have confidence in myself. And not say anything too stupid and then just hope for the best. Confidence, clear minded-ness, openness, joyful, insightful... these are the things that people look for right...

Anyway, that wound me up a bit. I read a bit of this Buddhism book I've been reading, (very dense and confusing book, but more on that some other time). About 9:30 I decided to head toward bed, but before sleeping I decided to try and do a bit of breathing meditation.

Now I have been searching for a good position to meditate in. At work I can just use my chair, which is OK, but not great. Finding a good position at home has been less easy. (We don't have the most comfortable home). Last night I came across the technique of sitting at the edge of the bed and putting pillows on the floor and then sitting cross-legged with my butt on the bed and my knees on the pillow in a vaguely lotus-esque position (but a lazy one without the leg contortions which my knees aren't up too.) So that worked reasonably well last nifht, but I was too tired to meditate much without falling asleep.

Tonight worked better. I started counting breaths to 10. As I settled in there were lots of thoughts and sensations cropping up, but I just tried to keep at it. I lost count a few times, but just restarted. I couldn't tell if it was doing much, but at the very least it's a pretty relaxing exercise, and a decent way to settle the mind before going to sleep. I started to get distracted by bodily discomforts, mostly muscle pain in my back and chest and neck from sitting in this weird position, but I just kept on counting through them or starting over if I got distracted. Then after a while my concentration slipped down just slightly as if I was starting to nod off. Indeed, that may have been just what happened. (Jeez, I over use parentheses! I've taken about 4 or 5 sentences out of parentheses already in this post!)

Anyway, as I slipped, I caught myself and restarted my counting, pushing up on my awareness to try and counter the sleepiness. But then I noticed that the counting suddenly seemed very easy. In fact, the thoughts and sensations that my 'monkey-mind' usually tried to hold on to had gone quiet. Perhaps the monkeymind thought I was already asleep. In any case, the counting exercise was now trivial. Even the slightly sore sensations of the sitting position seemed faint and distant, and I felt like I could just sit there counting for hours and hours and not exert any effort.

Well, something in my mind intuited that I'd arrived at a pretty centered and open state and that it might be an opportune time to try something more adventurous than simply counting. So, as I remembered most of the bits of the simpler version of Big Mind meditation I gave it a shot.

I first asked for the Controller, which is a voice I have had a bit of difficulty resonating with at times. That probably means something, and sitting here now, I wonder if it might be related to some classic issues I have with focus and decision making, and impulse control. Hmm... food for thought. Anyway, I tried to find the Controller and then having decided I was there, I thought I should investigate my Desire voice which, not surprisingly, was chattering away about the Florida job. So, i sat listening to that voice for a bit, just absorbing the story and listening compassionately and patiently and starting to feel things settle. Then I decided to go back to the Controller, and then (though I hadn't been planning on going to the non-dual side) I followed an impulse to ask for the Master.

Whoa!

Damn if it didn't work again!

I asked for the Master, and all of a sudden, a tingling sensation runs down my spine and my forearms and I suddenly feel very confident and powerful, as if my hands were charged with Earth-shaking energy. I was the Master and I could do anything. I was the über-controller. Whoa! Now, I'm not terribly comfortable with the Master (though I felt quite comfortable with myself at the time), so I decided to ask for Big Mind instead, which is a non-dual voice I am less wary of. So I asked for Big Mind and Big Mind showed up.

Well.... What can you say about Big Mind. Well it's big. And it's Empty. Yep. There you go. It's a big open black space. A gigantic silent space. I can only assume that this is the Emptiness that Buddhism is always banging on about. There it is.

The thing about Big Mind, is there's not a lot to say about it. I asked it a couple of questions because I suddenly remembered I was supposed to do so. So: "Is there any limit to You?" (Nope.) "Do you need anything?" (Nope.) "Is there anything you lack?" (Nope). Not very chatty Big Mind, but a pleasant enough place to visit I suppose.

I then asked for Big Heart and shifted. Now the tingles came back big time. Now I was floating in that big empty space that was Big Mind, but I was now a buzzing body of energy in that space. There wasn't the sense of gushing that burst from my chest the first time, but instead it was as if my body were a perfectly equilateral tetrahedron and buzzing inside with tingly energy. A really really quite lovely sensation.

I found I didn't really have any questions for Big Heart, so I just sat with it at glowed for a while. Indeed, I think I probably quite like Big Heart and could spend rather a long time hanging out there. Perhaps this is a taste of what the Traleg Kyabgon book I'm reading (The Essence of Buddhism) calls sambhogakaya, a state of blissfulness which manifests in a place called Akanistha, which is apparently not anywhere. Hard to say for sure, as Buddhism seems awfully vague sometimes, but it could be a description that fits.

So I sat with Big Heart for a while, and then decided I should head for home. I probably could have stayed longer if I'd tried, but I did feel my concentration start to waver slightly toward the end with Big Heart. So I packed it in and asked for the Integrated Free-Functioning Human Being. Quite a mouthful I know, but the Big Mind folks are big on winding up that way and I can see why. The IFFHB feels like a bridge back to the samsaric world. It's a voice that is connected to that non-dual world, but exists in our world. It's centered and compassionate and confident... etc... Probably it's something like the idealized Bodhisattva of traditional Buddhism. Anyway, it feels like it lives with a foot in both 'realities' and that's probably why it's a good exit from the Big Mind ride.

After being the IFFHB for a while, I returned to the breath and counted (Noting that my breath was loud... as if it had become quiet and shallow during my non-dual journey). After a couple of repetitions, I ended the session, feeling buzzed and with a strong inclination to write the experience down. And so here I am.

Actually, the process of describing sort of cerebral-izes the experience. It fixes it in the mind as a sort of abstract memory, but the sense of excitement has died down. I must say the excitement is a little distracting during the meditation. When first starts to work, there is a part of my brain freaking out, going "Holy shit! It's really working! Wow! Check it out." This voice is of course terribly non-dual, indeed, it's even a bit of a distraction from the breath. It takes a bit of effort to focus past it. Perhaps as the experience becomes more 'normal' this voice (lets call it Enthusiastic Incredulity) will calm down. 'Till then, I guess I'll just have to try and be mindful and pay it no mind.