In Neutral

There must be a purgatory of spirit. A place where you have no desire, feel no impelling. Where you can’t even feel the longing, or the fear. A state of mind where you idle in neutral, your eyes tending to unfocus, your brain tending to mundane concerns, your body oblivious to anything but the most obvious level of energy, pain or weariness. Where even dreams abandon you before memory can grab them, their color and emotion fleeing from the scene of the crime, where they dared to live out anything that might actually mean something.

I haven’t meditated in… a couple weeks? I think.

I start to do so. I pray a little, I focus on The Four (or at least 3rd of 4).  I visualize myself with my Aeons. Nothing. I feel nothing. They are not real to me. They could be as distant and flat as a picture on the wall. As the ancient painting of someone else’s god.

I ‘ground’ my energy, and I open up that line from center of the galaxy to core of the earth, the superstring that goes right through me. Nothing. I feel nothing. My body is a stranger to the very idea, it seems. My chakras living in hiding… I can’t sense them at all.

I think of the ‘Largers’ as I call them, Aeons I’m inside, instead of being composed by. Their bigger energy. The spike in sexual energy they seemed to bring. I bring them to me.

But it’s not real. It is genuinely “just imagination.” All me. Not the interactivity of the imaginal realm. Not the fundamental energy moving through archetypes of interaction. Not the Jungian or shamanic ‘relationships’ we have with the universe that is our larger selves.

*

This is how I felt at one point in my life, I recall. When I was an ‘official skeptic’. When I was an arrogant intellectual. When I was sure that anybody who believed in God, in Spirit, in Metaphysics, in fact in much of anything at all, was a self-deluded, wishful-thinking, less-intelligent moron.

It had not occurred to me back then, that like the humorous observation once made on review of psi testing results, perhaps it wasn’t that skeptics were smarter about how nothing existed, but rather, that they were just so singularly incompetent at the subject, if not subconsciously doing-badly to-prove-disbelief (while actually demonstrating it–in reverse), it become obvious they were oblivious to all of it.

They were the bull in the china shop of perception. They were the Church officials refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. If it wasn’t real to them, and of course “they” were the sole measure of intelligence and enlightenment (ego is truly man’s downfall), then nobody else had any reason for their own experience or opinion.

Back then, it hadn’t occurred to me that if, at that moment, nothing was real to me, it might be because my attention was (intentionally, though not fully consciously) disconnected from the parts of myself capable of perceiving such things at all, let alone with any degree of reality. I thought the human body, and what a skeptic’s body could perceive, was all there was.

As man develops each new technology — sonar, and X-Rays, for example — when we invent a machine capable of sending information that we cannot perceive, into the minuscule range of frequency our bodies can — at that time, the additional ‘frequency range’ becomes ‘real’. It’s not real until some translating machine can show it to our bodies. We might be oblivious to everything within that frequency, still, but ‘that frequency’, at least, then becomes Officially Acceptable to the Church of Scientism officials.

Of course, only ‘the machine’ is acceptable for perceiving it, still. That some individuals appear to perceive energy patterns and colors similar to what Kirlian photography indicates, is not acceptable. And KP is only acceptable as a physical science; should you call that energy pattern it records ‘the aura’ rather than a ‘bioelectric field’, that invalidates it completely. Energy recorded by machine so it becomes translated-visible to the human body of skeptics: real. The same energy perceived by humans: not-real.

I learned this lesson well: If I’m going to associate with people as arrogant, shallow and oblivious as I used to be, I have to take pity on their ignorance, and remind myself that we all have the same criteria for “reality:” it is what we consciously perceive. Perhaps it is our own responsibility for ‘awareness’, but on a more mundane level, it is not their fault if they are oblivious. Of course they don’t believe in something they don’t consciously perceive: who would?

The variable is a point of genetics and psychology and sometimes intentional effort: what we “consciously perceive” has a vast spectrum. In most humans it has a slight ebb and flow. In some humans, something–genetics, formative experiences, fear, who knows–keeps it tightly in check, tightly limited. Some people don’t even remember dreams, and if they rarely do, they are just the ‘chaos vent’ level of mundania, leading such people to be sure dreams are nothing more than trash collection of daily perception.

And in some humans, possibly those same elements as restricts people, has instead removed the normal physical and cultural barriers from their perception, to various degrees. Sometimes this is just in one area: a 60 year old man begins having precognitive dreams after  his wife dies. Sometimes it is slightly larger and more personal: a 30 year old woman begins not only psi-dreaming but having detailed psychic flashes of crimes and major world disasters. Sometimes it is in subtle ways, so un-talked about culturally, that the person doesn’t even know what to say about it at all: maybe in their late 20′s they suddenly began to just occasionally be aware of the sentience in a tree, or even a degree of raw ‘awareness’ in some inanimate object like a car.

And sometimes, the borders are so wide open–perhaps a genetic issue, or birth result, or something developed during early childhood–that the person is so wide-open to conscious perception of so much, that we think they are insane.

When we share a child’s perception, we gradually teach them to recognize and evaluate their perception. The sticky glob of beads of toddler-art becomes the better pictures from a child, where the color and size and texture of the beads is separated and used to help draw the story.  But if we cannot share their perception, if the parents deny it exists, if they even give a child a sense of shame for perceiving it at all, then the child learns nothing, the perceptions may become much more frightening, and the child may graft-on the only ‘outer models’ they have for such things — from sunday-school or campfire stories, to television characters — and either they learn to not talk about it, or other issues make that impossible for them, and they are eventually medicated and labeled.

In the Country of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King, was the saying in the famous story. But actually, it turned out that the blind people decided the guy who could see was “obviously insane.” They were going to operate and take out his eyeballs, which they had determined were the primary source of his insanity. In the end he barely escaped with his life, let alone his vision. I always thought that novelette was a profound analogy on many levels, but it certainly works for the topic of ‘perception’.

I had plenty of awareness of less-than-mundane things when young, and I lucid dreamed and had out of body experiences regularly my whole life, which I’d thought was normal for everyone. But I forgot all of that, and suppressed anything that occurred during the time I was an official skeptic. I gave occasional talks on hypnosis, using “alien abductees” as great joke material. Everybody cracks up. I went to psychic fairs to experiment on people with subtle conversational hypnosis and NLP. I considered everybody there to be deluded.  Sometimes charming, but not very bright.

So it was probably a degree of well-deserved punishment when my larger awareness seemed to first appear as the tiniest ‘crack’ in my seemingly solid belief system, that was forcibly widened by experiences both physical and mental, as my ‘awareness’ opened up whether I consciously wanted it to or not. Sometimes a flash of insight would make me realize it was me driving this all along, a larger and smarter me that was more than my conscious “focus identity.”

And eventually I realized I’d been not just a complete jerk during that era, but a complete idiot as well. And to think I’d been so smugly superior!

I still run into people like that. They have the same arrogant smug attitude that I recall having. They are so ego-bound, so invested in “how smart they are.” They’re too smart for God. They’re too smart for psi. They’re too smart to believe in divinity or soul.  They’ve managed to maintain ignorance and unawareness of anything more than the most brute, gross-level of the body’s perceptual faculties, and they actually think this somehow makes them better and smarter than others. It’s hilarious in a black and rather sad way.

The fact that I used to be there, and I grew out of it, grew beyond it, helps me not take their patronizing personally. I find it amusing, but I notice most others tend to find it insulting.

*

I feel as if I am temporarily back there, minus the attitude.

Beached on the flat shore, while the deep sea of awareness swells and crests and crashes, separate from me. Lost in the midst of the endless sand, where nothing is alive. (In the desert, the oasis seems unlikely, if not impossible.) Seeing only the deceptively smooth surface of the dark water past the swells, and the rough, dirty and perhaps meaningless chaos of the turbulent shore.

I want to care. I want to feel something. I want to feel the deep longing that usually drives me. Tempts me. Calls me. That subtly persuades me to work past the drama, the trauma, the change in fundamental belief systems, the shattered identity that has to be rebuilt again and again, every time I accept that I am more than I previously believed.

But I don’t feel anything at all. It all seems impossible. It all seems kind of ridiculous. Like when connection to “consciously perceiving” anything is in eclipse, as if it is passing behind a dark moon, and in the meantime, I cannot even dream of the sun.

*

My intellectual self reviews my recent history.  I was having some weird symptoms, the Oracle (part of Self) told me I was overstressed from major energy changes, I needed more life, more exercise, to balance the energy work. It told me if I didn’t make that happen, I’d end up in cognitive dissonance, and just walking away from many of the gains in awareness I’d made; or holding to it but getting ill.

I did make an effort to get a little more of a life. To move around more. To think of other things. I reduced my effort in the metaphysical areas. It did feel like I needed… a rest. A vacation from my larger self. Like my soul needed a long stay in a floatation tank, isolated in the calm and the dark, floating and unchallenged.

So maybe that’s what it is. Maybe that’s why I feel like I’m in neutral.

P