This is a long post. You’ve been warned.

And if you read it, and if by the end of all this mess below you are no more enlightened or better off, I’ll reimburse you for the coffee or whatever it took for you endure it all. Just send me the bill.

Scene and Setting

So, last night I was in a rather expansive mood. My mind was a bit scattered, but in a good way. I was open. Light. I felt receptive to new ideas and ways of looking at a number of things in my life, but no one thing in particular. It’s that place where different angles and different lighting come into play. This state doesn’t come natural to me. It’s usually something that just happens, comes and goes, but it’s pleasant.

I liken it to how you often stare at a problem for hours only to find you’re not only unable to solve it, you’re also losing a grip on the composite parts that you thought you understood at the start. You set the pen down, go make ->tea<-, and then boom: the answer surfaces and unravels for you. Thinking too hard had been the real problem all along. Overthinking put you in tunnel vision mode.

Now, perhaps it’s because my Grandmother just passed this week and whole thing shifted me, got me reappraising things, I do not know. But why this expansive mode came is not terribly important. What happened in the hours that followed are.

A little background

The day after my grandmother died I decided to abandon practicing Astral Projection, Lucid Dreaming, and all such related “phenomenon,” for lack of a better word. This was the result of some clarity I received during meditation. I was putting in too much while neglecting weightier matters.

Now, when I say, I “received,” I mean to say that I understood clearly, without engaging my conscious mind, that I had lost focus on what was in my best interests, and those of my family. Call that understanding the voice of the higher self, God, whatever. (This type of thing doesn’t arrive on your door and insist you recognize its face before it gives you the lesson. It doesn’t show off its credentials and expect recognition or worship in return. I avoid characters and cosmic voices that do—they are everywhere and they only litter the spiritual landscape.)

Back to my story

Some time ago I set out to practice Vipassana meditation. After many, many years of spiritual neglect and floundering, this seemed like a worthy goal. The idea was to lay a proper foundation for obtaining legit enlightenment. I’m not a Buddhist, but I take the Buddha’s words very seriously. Strip away the formalities or the religion and you find Quantum Physics catching up nicely with what the man proposed.

Yet, somehow I got distracted by lots of other stuff. The manual had warned me about this. In fact, when novitiates enter monasteries (in most traditions), they are almost always warned about being seduced by budding psychic phenomenon. Not that the transcendental and psychic states are good or bad or right or wrong, but focus must be kept on the foundation before enrolling in other schools—learn first to slow the mind, bring acute focus to the breath and present moment, and then one may properly handle psychic and transcendental states as they naturally arise, which is bound to happen.

I’m doing my best to make a very long story short and failing. Bear with me or get that bill started because we’re not done.

So during last night’s meditation, with all other concerns and subjects off the map and out of consideration, I set my mind to go a little farther on the nature of suffering, with the specific intent to begin understanding how something as simple as bringing attention to one’s breath and tethering awareness to the present moment, as if it were the first and only moment to ever exist, could eventually result in liberation. After all, I’ve been doing a lot of breathing and still suffer plenty.

I didn’t like walking around with a disjointed view on how the mechanics come together to produce something lasting, and I wanted to at least figure that much out.

Meditation in successive parts eventually sums to enlightenment? How?

After a wild night of deep meditation in which I began hallucinating because I was so tired, but unwilling to give up, I had arrived with what I considered a fairly adequate set of analogies and metaphors to help me understand how meditation eventually overthrows our root problem. I had some handles, labels, and ideas. These ideas were simple, yet I also found in them a paradoxical complexity I didn’t like. I’m not going to put that all down here, it’s not important and you’ll see why.

Then I went to bed…

This morning I arrived at work with my mind still spinning on the topic. I was trying to map my new ideas to parts and plug everything together in alignment with what the Buddha taught. But the nagging sense of complexity was ever-present.

I crossed by the Metro train station by my office. This is an ugly, busy, and rude place (the Metro, not my office). If you’ve ever been to Washington DC, you know what I mean. However, on this day there came something unusual: a woman’s voice rose from the train station below. Opera. Her singing was so lovely I stopped in my tracks. Stopping is critical. Make sure you stop now and then.

After all, Augustine was converted by such an experience, but I’m not going to wax too philosophical here. You can look it up.

What matters

Is that universe was prepping me for something. I see that now. It had to pull my mind off my little theories, distract me with beauty so it could come in the back door and deliver truth. (Note similarity to opening paragraphs. We have a pattern going).


The delivery

All my analogies were fair, and I sensed I had done well in at least trying to think things through. The Universe was pleased I’d made the effort, but it assured me I was up against irreducible complexity the way I was going about it. NOT the way to enlightenment. So it kindly replaced my many pieces and parts with something simpler, something that made instant sense to ME: tea.

On liberation

Put a teabag in a cup of water. Wait. Wait. Done.

Get it?

Now this is where you, my beloved forum readers come in. At least, those of you still reading.

As I see it

That tea bag is you, me…us. Easy enough. It’s just a symbol for all of our parts. And for sanity’s sake, let’s keep the analogy to one person for now.

Inside your teabag exists a collection of leafy bits. Each bit is distinct and far too complicated to get your head around despite science (here’s where my previous efforts were failing, I was trying to figure out the composite parts, how they worked, the role they played, etc.).

Now each little bit is critical, for each contains countless properties that are about to be dispersed when the whole thing is dunked. Steeping is the practice of meditation. Heat, time, and water slowly begin to separate what had been glued seamlessly together in those bits.

Unless we make tea, the glue remains between thousands of bits and their dual inner states. For example: thought (leafy bit essence) and thinker (leafy bit) seem one and the same. Thinker thinks it’s the thought, and thought, well, thought just is. Eckhart Tolle does his best to drive this idea home in his books. I thought I got what he was saying. I didn’t…not until now.


The teabag contains a mess: the human condition wherein all your real issues are part of you, just like smoke in your clothes after standing next to a bonfire all night. The fire wasn’t you, nor the smoke. But never mind that…you can’t smell a thing.

Okay, I’m jumping analogies; time to get back on track.

In the steeping process, everything decouples, drifts, and changes. This may be confusing at first, but now you can see what you once thought was “you” floating off into the water, and so you see these things as they really are. There goes the idea that your too fat or thin. You watch that idea drift off and soon it smears around into two words: fat and thin. Fat and thin separate and no longer hold meaning because they don’t have you for a parent or shelter anymore, they’re just labels.

Some time after this, the tea water eventually settles, the cup clears, and we come up from the mat as a buddha.

I’m not trying to write a book. I swear.

Furthermore, I doubt what I’ve written here is news to anyone who’s given Vipassana (or any meditation) a serious spin for more than one day. However, I get it now.

The problem IS irreducibly complex. Who cares about the mechanism that forces tea leaf essence to abandon the tea? That matters zilcho. That leafy essence works its way out is all I care about.

I’m only stumbling across truths that folks have been stumbling across since time started. Nothing novel here, just novel to me. In fact, I’m a little floored that I’ve been reading this message over and over for naught. The stack of books I’ve accumulated is silly. All I needed was to pay attention to my tea.

Ordinarily I would never post something like this here. This would go in my journal, and it will.

The primary mover on my motivation to post is this…

The wisdom that surfaced in me today came with the assurance that once the tea has steeped long enough, and all essences have sufficiently diffused and settled in the cup; the ability to navigate the cup (Astral Projection) is effortless, natural, and utterly enjoyable. No longer are things of the mind veiled or punctuated by bewildering symbolism, characters, and back alleys.

So soak.


Soul,

p.s. I could be wrong on any and all points above. You were warned.