Awareness
You're either God, or you're not; pure luminant emptiness or a subject in a world of objects.
"If there is any awareness at all, “it” is either all that is and ever will be, or “it” is an awareness confined to “subject" in a word of objects."
It’s been some weeks now since I landed in Reno, some 40 hours of traveling brought me back to the States from my month of working in Kenya. My roommate Lauren picked me up from the airport. After I woke the next morning, we spoke of travels, of books, of mind, and meditation. The Path both of us share in common.
After her shower, she asked me what I thought of reincarnation. The tipping point between death and life again. There are many translations and beliefs packaged into that word reincarnation, like God, karma, birth, and death, some of which I believe, depending on your definition, some of which I don't, some of which I am still trying to put my finger on. But I suppose that's always the nature of words, of translation, of symbols, and allegory. They can be useful, binding, distracting, even illuminating, depending again on multitudes within multitudes.
These definitions we can get into, a morass of mind, meaning, context, and viewpoints, but I think for now, I made it as clear and concise as I can with the thought above.
“If there is any awareness at all, “it” is either all that is and ever will be, or “it” is an awareness confined to “subject” in a word of objects.”
I think this holds true for her question of reincarnation as well as many other Truths, both big T and little t. Ever since my back injury this winter, I have been drawn back to a reinvigorated look at mind, matter, meditation, and subjectivity within this epoch we call, life.
The pain itself was the reinvigorating catalyst, a pain I could not escape from no, matter what I did. No position, no medication would reduce the intensity. I felt as if I was a drowning rat, doing anything to claw my way to the surface for a chance at one last breath before the void beckoned me back. I remember screaming into the pillow in the dawn’s early light, having had no respite from the pain, nor my waking conscious moments.
That journey, through the night, through darkness, through pain, showed me unequivocally the vigor of my unenlightenment. How important it was for me to try and get away, ultimately from something that I will never in fact get away from. Pain, death, suffering, and my own mortality. A brief glimpse into suffering, into despair.
Since that time, I have explored once again the depths of my own mind, in ways of my past and in ways anew. My trip to Kenya allowed me time to digest a book, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: Practices for Awakening, and gave me time away from spliffs (marijuana & tobacco cigarettes), which in turn brought back dreaming to my consciousness (or should I say unconscious? the fact is, it’s not that simple).
Turns out the Tibetans have been studying their dreams (and non-dreams) for thousands of years, both in ways most of us would be familiar with in ways that seem very, very unfamiliar. I bring this to mind both in terms of mindfulness meditation (bringing one closer to spirit or awakening (buddahood), and in practice for death. It turns out dreams, dream yoga, and sleep yoga can be very powerful tools and very much why I am so intrigued with them, the removal of suffering and the practice of dying before death.
It has only been about 5 weeks since I started the practice. Specifically of Dream Yoga, which in the common tongue refers to the practice of gaining more and more lucidity and thus power over your dreams. In effect, you use mindfulness tools both during the day (state checks), while falling asleep (visualization, mantra, or guru meditation), in the dream world (lucidity, dream manipulation), and while awakening (dream journal, state checks, mantras, etc).
As with any meditation, it takes time and practice. If you can’t remember your dreams, then you probably won’t become lucid, so you have to start with dream journaling. If you are only sometimes lucid, then you can only change parts of your dreams and probably don’t have full lucidity. If you are lucid all the time and able to travel wherever you want, speak with whomever, and do whatever, then you have mastered the astral plane, and there is further yet for you to go.
After dream yoga, there is practices both during the day, going to sleep, and while asleep to practice non-duality (the next step), which, in terms, would ideally allow you to practice in a non-dual way while you sleep, e.g., sleep yoga. Sleep yoga itself isn’t really sleep at all, but a non-dual state where awareness is never lost but the body and brain still go through the stages of sleep. There are fice stages of sleep, these I won’t get into now but we go through all of them multiple times a night. Some advanced yogis don’t even sleep at all in the traditional sense that we think of, and actually just exist in this non-dual luminant emptiness through the night.
This practice is a practice of dying before death or bardo, which is the transitional state between life and death. Some Buddhists believe that if you can remain unattached and undistracted in this state before you die, then you will be able to maintain non-dual awareness while you die and, in doing so, will exit the endless cycle of birth, death, and suffering (Samsara). This may sound far out or woo-woo, and it may be, but the further along this path I get, the more I have seen and the more that has convinced me that if nothing else, the buddhists are experts in managing awareness, attention, and lo and behold, not suffering. Which I think we could all use a little less of.
A friend asked me recently, with all of this, and with heavy amounts of psychonauting (psychedelic exploration), “Are you not afraid of never coming back, or losing who you really are?” To that, I said that I don’t really think of George like I used to, not a thing but a process. I mean, have you ever really thought about how we fall asleep? I mean the subjective experience of it? Does your ego not disintegrate and reassemble each night and each day? It does, and we rarely even think about it.
At this point, I am still very much in the lucid dreaming and dream yoga phase, I have had some incredible experiences; experiences with my father and mother (both deceased and their suffering is a big reason I am on the Path), experiences with old friends and strangers, I have seen things from my deep subconcious that I havent thought about in years, and much more, all of which are baby steps in the grand scheme of things but the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.
I believe this is but another evolution, another step forward on the journey of the Path. Ideally, at some point, I will be able to stabilize non-dual meditation both awake and while sleeping, but for now, moments or glimpses will have to do. A peek into Pandora’s box, you might say…
And speaking of peeking… The practice and understanding of both dream yoga and sleep yoga, dualistic and non-dualistic practice (there are many other forms), have also brought my attention full circle back to the psychedlic realm. DMT and 5meo-DMT are both psychedelics, but both offering wildly different experiences have, what seems to me, parallels in both forms of yoga. DMT offers experiences of dualism, operating mainly on the plane of subject and object. 5meo-DMT, on the other hand, offers experiences of non-duality. So I am hopeful to experiment with these compounds safely and spiritually to allow me to glimpse states that I have not yet stabilized.
Richard Albert AKA Ram Dass always emphasized the fact that psychedelics could show you the door (to heaven or hell), but you have to do the work to stabilize. I highly suggest reading the book, Be Here Now, for a look at his journey and a practical guide to mindfulness.
Of course, our nature, life, and living are much more complicated than anything I have stated in this rambling. Much more than these two opposing states of mind (dualistic or non-duallistic), or the moment of conscious conception (reincarnation), or of dropping out and doing psychedelics.
We are a gradient of opposites, sometimes one, sometimes many, sometimes something in between, sometimes dropping in, sometimes dropping out.
I guess I say all this just to share with you my mind, to give you permission to be yourself, and to notice the dance. To live in present awareness and notice for yourSelf what is actually happening each and every day. Do your best to wake up and not be swept away in the dream (that’s why they call it waking up).
The journey is long, but the path is the goal, and if you forget everything I said, remember simply, “chop wood and carry water”.
You’re either God or you’re not.
Pure luminant emptiness or a subject in a world of objects.
What are you? What is in between?
Picture 1: This picture was one of the first I took in Kenya, and for some reason resonates heavily with me. An illumination to a world beyond, not yet revealed, not yet known, a clarity not yet defined, waiting, watching, opening to the world unknown.
Pictures 2 & 3: I shot these images while touring one of the oldest stone tool sites on the planet. The coalescence of man, mind & nature felt in that place, undeniably moving. I’ll never know why I shot what I did, but in these images and quotes (below) I continue to wonder, where we have come and where we are going. I employ you whether it’s today or in times to come to do the same.
Picture 4: Naivasha, Kenya. All images were shot on my Fuji X100V. The beauty in the juxtaposition of this landscape, the rubble, the trash, the beautiful people. Like above, the coalescence of all that is in this image marked its beauty for me. Paradox.
Here are some quotes I will leave you with…
“By and by comes the Great Awakening, and then we shall find out that life itself is a great dream. All the while fools think that they are awake, busily and brightly assuming that they understand things.” - Chuang Tzu, The Tao of Abundance
“The whole journey is — and always was — about being present with reality. But something must differentiate the ground, or starting place, from the fruition. When we begin, the ground — our day-to-day reality — is experienced as if it were the whole story. We believe it to be completely real. Not only that, but we embellish it with a running commentary in our mind — “content” that keeps us from noticing the “context” in which our experience is arising. During the path phase, we gradually shift our perception so that we no longer focus solely on the content of our experience — our thoughts, feelings, sensations, and ideas. Instead, we begin to recognize the context in which these experiences arise — a context that can never be captured and understood conceptually. We call this context “awareness.” We still experience the content, but we are simultaneously aware that it’s not the whole story; it does not completely represent reality. So you might say that the ground is our present-moment experience without awareness. The fruition is that very same experience with awareness. The path creates the conditions for this shift of perception to arise . . . this whole approach is not about improving the content of our experience. Instead, it’s about creating a shift in how we relate to the experiences we are having at any moment . . . freedom arises from a profound disidentification with any content.” - Bruce Tift
“I believe in the night.” - Rainier Maria Rilke, Love Poems from God
“As long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, you are but a sorry traveler on this dark earth.” -Goethe
“These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence... But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he, too, lives with nature in the present, above time.” - Emerson
“When the company turned in to sleep and the low fire was roaring in the blast like a thing alive these four yet crouched at the edge of the firelight among their strange chattels and watched how the ragged flames fled down the wind as if sucked by some maelstrom out there in the void, some vortex in that waste opposite to which man’s transit and his reckonings alike lay abrogate. As if beyond will or fate, he and his beasts and his trappings moved both in card and in substance under consignment to some third and other destiny.” - Blood Meridian
In other words…
-I know ever so much less than I think.
-The Path in eloquent terms. You’re probably overlooking it.
-Dont run from your monsters, sometimes they can heal you.
-Relax, release, or destroy the idea of your “self” and be set free.
-The present moment is the only thing that is. Your salvation lies in its recognition.
-The Kosmos will forever be filled with beauty, horror, awe, and the unknown. Be comfortable in this event horizon in which we live.
Endlessly thankful for your support, your shares, and your love. We are all in this together.