Hi Ganesh, let me see if I can answer your question in a cohesive way.
I've been meditating for about 27 years total, since the age of 14. After about 13 years of strict, daily meditation, a conversation with a friend led me to see that there were issues inside myself that I wasn't directly addressing. An examination of my behavior in daily life led me to question many emotional patterns that I assumed to be a natural part of me. After a while, I began to realize that all my years of meditation and achieving advanced brainwave states had really done nothing to "fix" or even slightly change the psychological damaged state I had grown up in. I was calm, centered, and focused in the life that I was living, able to confront any problem or defeat any conflict, but having to do war in a calm, mentally focused state, had become a habitual way of life. I may have been calm and centered, but my life was one of disruption and disturbance, continual forces I always had to battle. The question I began to ask was WHY?
During this period my lucid dreaming was at an all time high. I literally couldn't sleep a night without being involved in some lucid dream drama for almost a full year!! It got to the point where I sometimes couldn't tell the difference between waking and dreaming. One day I was in my kitchen washing dishes (which is rare because I can't stand cleaning
), and while rising a plate in running water I realized I had dreamed this exact event the night before, although in the dream, the objects were different. [Okay, here I run the risk of sounding confusing, so I'll try to be as clear as I can be.] The "objects" in the dream were different, and yet they were a symbolic match to the "action" in the kitchen, or more correctly, what led to me doing the dishes in the first place. In other words, the dream captured the overall meaning of why I was doing the dishes, and the emotional impetus behind it. The moment I had that recognition, at least a dozen details from other dreams flooded my memory, and I was able to see there exact relationship to the events I had in waking life. From that moment on, I began to compare my dream experience with my waking experience, and the connection between the two was always there, the dream events showing meaning in symbolic form of action that occurred in waking life.
Well of course I was fascinated, so I began to focus my meditations on the connection itself between dreaming and waking. I mean why was there such a prominent connection, and was it just me?? This led to an endless study of dreams, dream psychology, dream symbology, Jung, you name it. Take about going in circles!! There's so much crap on the subject of dreams and dreaming, I think I could have gone blind. Anyway, the books got me no where, at least not close to a definitive answer.
Then one day, and at all times in the heat of a sparring match (I'm a black belt in karate), my mind literally jumped out of my body and made an intuitive leap. I could see myself in this sparring match with a 360 degree view, and watching my opponent from that vantage point, his next move became so obvious, and even though I saw this from an outside view, I countered with the correct move in my body. And suddenly I knew at that moment (in a how or a why I can't explain), that there was no difference between dreaming and waking, that both "realities" operated by the same principles, the only "apparent" difference being the time distortion, events running in a linear construct, one moment coming after the other in a more or so straight line when we're awake, and then almost as an all at once holographic experience when we're dreaming, and yet both of those perceptions of being "in time" are gross distortions. In that moment (still in the sparring match) I realized that the most pronounced distortion of perception in waking life was the separation between us and other objects. There is me, there is you, and there is everything else, all isolated by varying degrees of distance in an objectified universe. Nothing but illusion!! I knew right then that all pervading separation wasn't real. I was countering my opponents every move not because I could see it from my outside vantage point, but because that seeing was a cognizant realization that I was my opponent. I was me, I was him, I was the crowd in the dojo, I was the dojo itself. I was everything. All at once. And then the moment was gone. I was back in my body, and was hit in the face. No lie, lol!
After that rather dramatic experience, I began to realize that my life, the day to day experience I was living, was a direct reflection of my own inner state. The habitual conflict I would experience was a meaningful reflection of emotional convictions I held within. When I used meditation to look at my own internal conflict, and change what I thought about my own self in relation to that conflict, is when the pattern disappeared in my life. In other words, my life, the life I experienced, was a direct result of my own inner state.
And that's a very brief summary of a very long journey. Trust me, it's a bit more complicated than what I just wrote.
Topic: Adjustment (Read 283 times)
