Meditation

[Rough Draft]

I am only within the first step of my journey into meditation.

Objective 1: Fundamentally change the baseline of my existence by deliberately designing spiritual anchors within the mundane and repeated moments of my life.

- These 'spiritual anchors' are mindful moments of focused thought. Because they exist within the same repeating schedule, day after day, they can become a powerful way to synchronize my mind to thoughts and feelings that I find important. Secondly, I want to connect these anchor points with a narrative that represents my larger identity.

Objective 2: Reach a state of detachment from the physical body and external stimuli

- Aging and the transition into death is the primary motivating reason for having this objective. With aging, my body will fail and my influence over what I want will significantly diminish. It is also very likely that towards the end of my life, I will be mostly alone. For these reasons it is very important that I develop a practice of meditation where I can be content, happy and detached from misery with minimal external stimuli even in the presence of pain.

Objective 3: Reach a mental state where the inhibitory boundaries of reality dissolve away and I can gain access to my subconscious, allowing me to find a world of creativity and ideas.

- There have been brief moments where my mind has freely rambled down a stream of consciousness of idea generation...where I have been genuinely surprised at the ideas/memories/thoughts that have emerged because I have obtained them from an unknown depth and not from a logical incremental system of steps from my rational/conscious mind. I want to be able to impregnate my mind with some question or idea and then see what nucleates from there, mixing all the layers of my existence. Many people have suggested doing drugs (such as mushrooms), however I am confident that I can reach it through the path of meditation as well.

Objective 1: Fundamentally change the baseline of my existence by deliberately designing spiritual anchors within the mundane and repeated moments of my life.

Why are mundane moments such as standing in line not an equal representation of our identity as our jobs are? Perhaps, these mundane moments are not empty transitions but rather hold most of our interaction with the word.

After leaving my grandmother, I traveled to Hong Kong, where I felt the fabric and rhythm of my existence fundamentally change. I spent all day walking and observing and feeling instead of sitting, thinking, and analyzing. I realized how intrinsically intertwined we are with our environment. Our mundane routines, our repeating schedules, the moments of frustrated waiting, the moments of driving, when walking, when showering...they all capture our identity...who we are...because like a vascular system they connect together everything that we do and are a passageway to our goals. What if instead of ignoring these connection as being an inconvenience we deliberately design it, and have them add to the larger storyline of our lives? In the next few months, I will search for my identity within these forgotten baseline moments of transition and then weave them together with the larger narrative of my life. Since everything that I do is fundamentally immersed in these moments, by changing how I interact with them, I think it will fundamentally change my identity and how I perceive and interact with the world around me. This photo was taken in Hong Kong where I was thinking about these ideas. In it, I am doing my symbolic nastypose, if you are interested, you can learn more here (it is still very rough).

Anchor point 1: White and black rocks in the morning and night. The white rock is from capecod and represents the morning and the black rock is from hong kong and represents the night. HongKong and the US are 12 hours apart, so when one enteres morning the other enters night. The block rock is some type of volcanic rock and when you put water on it, it goes from grey to dark black and within moments it drinks that water up and goes back to grey. The white rock always remains the same. I shower at night and pour water on the rocks and then when I brush my teeth in the morning I pour water on them. When doing it, I try to disrupt my stream of thought. I remind myself of what I need to accomplish in life. To feel the ineffable mixture in the present. Connects me to gaytri mantra and so to my ancestors and the progession of themes and ideas from there. It connects my morning to my night. It impregnates my dreams and hoepfully disseminates seeds in the thought stream of my morning.

I could do anything lofty, like be time itself or connect to all the lineages. I did imagine the superpositoin of all my ages...that could be somethign I grow however it takes mental effort. Instead, what seems to be working is trying to clear my mind of useless thoughts and just get focused. Once I am focused I just try to feel motivated and pumped about the trajectory of my life and I feel driven to realize my dreams...I feel like I am on a true journey and that I am my ally and that I am on my side. I try to pump myself up by being my own supporter and cheerleader.
I also do basically a mindfulness body scan but with my hands. This isn't sensual or anythig but is like a checkup or goodmorning of my body. It reinforces the connection of mind body soul. This is parlleld in my stretch.

Anchor point 2: Work day, no more email/facebook which break the continuity of the day

Anchor point 3: Driving

Anchor point 4: Working out, aggression and focus on the pump. Running: mindful breathing and balance of stress with relaxation and also meditative mind set.

Anchor point 5: Eating

Anchor point 6: Stretching: like a body scan where I say good morning to my body and parallels the nightly version of this in the shower.

[Caption]

As I left my grandmother, my thoughts swam in the meaning of identity and the experience of existence. Her past has faded away and her future no longer matters, she relives the same day everyday and within that repeated day she experiences the entirety of her existence...and because within that day she merges with the larger river of divinity, she becomes a living prayer. It made me think, that as we grow older and retire, most other things begin to dissolve away, and our baseline existence begins to represent a larger portion of our identity. Why are mundane moments such as standing in line not an equal representation of our identity as our jobs are? Perhaps, these mundane moments are not empty transitions but rather hold most of our interaction with the word.

A spatial Spiritual Anchor Point

[Caption] (Grand Canyon, part 4) Sometimes I wonder whether a significant portion of our identity is stored within the mundane and repeated moments of our life, such as driving to work or showering. Some of these moments, we repeat over and over again for decades. What if we could take those moments and add some meaning to them? What if we could turn them into rituals that reinforce what we find beautiful and meaningful in life and thereby fundamentally change the baseline of our existence? In a later post, I will talk about how I try to add spiritual anchors into different repeating moments of time during the day (eg how I connect the beginning and end of the day with a similar ritual). In this post, I will talk about how I create a spiritual anchor in space. On my coffee table, I have placed this beautiful black pottery that my mother made, which like a womb holds martian-red sand from Red Rock Canyon and a red rock with lines like Jupiter from the grand canyon. Whenever I pass by it or everytime someone comes and sits and asks me about it (while slowly surfing the rock through the sand), I am able to momentary teleport to a vast landscape that has been scraped and compressed by time, that holds a breathtaking forgotten divinity that can sometimes be spoiled by the echos of meaningless thoughts that infest my mind. I am reminded of my determination to be umbilically connected and devoted to the Earth and Nature, and I am left wondering about the Destiny and Identity of Humanity

Objective 2: Reach a state of detachment from the physical body and external stimuli

When I have experienced spiritual injury, my mind has looped uncontrollably. I need a way to turn off my brain.
Objective 2 is focused on enhancing inhibitory control over the various sectors of my thought whereas Objective 3 is focused on diminishing the inhibitory walls and letting thoughts, memories and ideas to be spontaneous created and mixed without out too much inhibition from rules, logics, reality.

Objective 3: Reach a mental state where the inhibitory boundaries of reality dissolve away and I can gain access to my subconscious, allowing me to find a world of creativity and ideas.

My altered state journey through alcohol and marijuana: I drank and smoked for the first time in my life at the age of 36, after finishing my phd. While I experienced altered states with both, I was severely disappointed by them. Everything that they provided, I had experienced before. More than that, because I never depended on them, I developed other ways to get to the same place. At least when it comes to alcohol and marijuana, I have no need for them, I can induce those states mentally.

Meditation through Science

[caption, Grand Canyon, part 2] When I left undergrad, my frozen mind was submerged in layers of callouses that had slowly congealed to protect me from the years of binging and purging knowledge and the acidic disappointment of bad grades. With an untethered destiny, I did not know where I would go, but I knew I wanted to feel the warmth of beauty once again. It was only when I became a high school teacher that I slowly fell in love with Science again. I realized that Science isn't textbooks or facts or my failure to get good grades. Science is the sacred meditation that allows us to see and feel beyond the capabilities of our senses...it is the divine vision that allows us to see the collective journey of humanity through history and to see the breathtaking hidden architecture of the universe.

Without Science, the Grand Canyon is a vastly beautiful landscape that escapes explanation. With Science, the Grand Canyon becomes a journey through time that connects us across billions of years. Because of Science, we know that 2 billion years ago there was an entire mountain range bigger than the Himalayas on top of the Grand Canyon. It is so amazing! But, where are those immutable mountains now? I can't find them. Believe it or not, that entire mountain range eroded away across hundreds of millions of years! An entire mountain range completely vanished! With the mountain range gone, almost 1 billion years ago, the area filled with seas that deposited thick mud which became exposed as the seas retreated, exposing seashells and eventually the sea was turned into a desert with sand dunes! And then, again as time passed, those sand dunes were submerged within a sea and these cycles of seas and sand continued for millions and millions of years! Then came a time, when the Earth was pregnant with another mountain! And through intense labor pains, the tectonic plates heaved up the Grand Canyon...and from the newborn Rocky mountains, eventually was born the Colorado River that cut open the Canyon like a c-section.

And unbelievably, you can actually hike down the Grand Canyon and with your hands touch red rock that used to be the mud underneath a vast sea and, an hour later, touch yellow rock that used to be sand dunes and then touch white rock that used to be seashells! You can hike all the way to the bottom, across the layers of history, until you can, with your hands, touch the remains of the 2 billion year old mountain!!!! There can be no purer and intense orgasm than that! There is a hidden universe all around us...the world isn't boring...and through Science we can gain that divine meditative vision to see everything that humans have known since the beginning of time.

Meditation through Photography

Meditation through Exercise (working out and running and yoga/stretching)

Meditation when in Nature (one technique)

(Grand Canyon, part 7) I wish, Freedom, from my infested mind that spills poison and pollution into the sacred lands of my moving experience and gives birth to demons like FiveMinutes who tear the continuity of my thoughts. FiveMinutes, who was born from my soul, eats my brain and leaves festering shit that endlessly leaks meaningless thoughts into my consciousness, through every moment, through every dream, through every beautiful place that I have traveled across the world. Thankfully, my weak mind has one divine technique that often can momentarily vanquish FiveMintues’ ravenous consumption of my meditation. First, I sit in silence and study every detail. I look at the layers of red rock that are dipped in shadows and punctuated by green bushes that grasp steep slopes that fall into sudden cliffs that are magically and mathematically parabolic with mesmerizing undulating curves of bare rock that suddenly turn into a skirt of green that flow into a gentle valley. I look at the sky and the clouds and the echo of shapes cascading as far as the eye can see. And then I close my eyes for Ten Minutes and try to recreate everything that I have seen. I paint again the cliffs and the plants and the colors of the rocks. And in that Ten Minutes, my eyes adapt to the darkness. And then while holding my reconstructed world, I tear my eyes open…..and light surges in!....and I feel a rush of panic and exhilaration and bewilderment. Breathless and reborn, that sudden shock of the enormity of the world defibrillates my reality and resuscitates my heart and once again I fall in love with the wilderness as my consciousness mixes with the world……..and then, FiveMinutes wakes again to feed on everything that is my mind...and I move onward.

Meditation through Spiritual Landscaping: Raking

Altered Mind through Inner Monologue

Altered Mind through Dance

Check out more in the Dance portfolio section.

(Grand Canyon part 8, dance part 1) Embraced within the womb of the Grand Canyon where the rhythm of millions of years of Time are captured in the layers of rocks, I danced for one of the first times in my life, as I tried to slip in between the seams of time and dissolve away within the immortal cycles of energy. And after the initial awkwardness that was drenched in confusion and hesitation...for a few moments, I forgot the Demon FiveMinutes and edged one step closer to a state of trance that was induced only by the heartbeat of my footsteps.

On July 11, 2020 (everyone is invited) I will hold my reBirth Ceremony and it will focus on dance that expresses the journey, identity and destiny of Humanity. In preparation for reaching a state of dance that can lead me into meditation, I am experimenting with different types of movements and I will eventually choreograph the dance and compose the underlying soundtrack. Everyone is welcome to collaborate.

In this picture, I am in a tandav pose which can be interpreted as representing the transformation of energy through the cycles of Life and Death. Some more information on the history of this pose can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nataraja

Altered Mind through self suggesion

Altered Mind through Survival

(Grand Canyon, part 10 (final))After hiking for four and a half hours down a remote and forgotten trail, I stood at an overlook watching the Colorado River gently seduce me with muddy curves embraced by mounds of ancient rocks. Before beginning, having accounted for water and the time to nightfall, I promised myself that I would turn back after 5 hours. But as the river beckoned me, with only 30 minutes left, I knew that I could never reach it…...but I just had to! I had to touch the 2 billion year old Vishnu Basement rocks and I absolutely had to touch the river! Mesmerized, enthralled, and completely infatuated, my heart made the bad decision to run the remaining 2-3 miles to the river which would also honor my 5 hour rule.

When I reached the river, underneath the raging violence of the dead-noon sun and the weight of a backpack pregnant with rocks, HeatStroke was hunched over my head and I was only moments away from succumbing to total collapse. For the next hour, I bathed myself in the cold water of the Colorado River which resuscitated my existence and romanced my soul, and in that passion, I drank too much of my bottled water. Because the trail had no markers and was often hidden underneath a landslide of rocks, I knew I had to reach the top before nightfall and therefore could not rest longer. Before leaving, I performed a water ceremony to honor the divinity of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.

Unforgivingly, the sun salivated insanity into the sleeping HeatStroke who partially awoke to consume me as I slowly hiked. An hour later, I stood before the most dangerous part of the trail where a narrow and uneven switchback path, littered with loose gravel, climbed up a steep cliff. My brain felt fat, and I felt dizzy, and feverish heat burned my dehydrated lips with every breath. What would happen if I fell? What would happen if HeatStroke consumed me entirely as my water dwindled? I had no cellphone or climbing partner and almost no one traversed this secluded trail.

For the first time in my life, I feared for my survival. This fear was different than when I used fear my father, or fear public speaking or fear Officer Candidate School. Within this fear there was something primal, ancestral and fundamental to not only the human journey but also the journey of all living creatures. The rhythm of my existence somehow automatically switched modes. Taking pictures and collecting rocks became meaningless and my hunger completely died. I no longer saw or cared about the beauty of the Grand Canyon. I only saw the path ahead of me and only heard the cadence of my feet and the tempo of my heartbeat. Whenever I would sense my heartbeat increasing, I would decrease my stride length while maintaining the same cadence. There was no thought, there was no past and there was no future, there was only the next step, hour after hour.

Who was I in that moment? If these moments of focused survival are written into our collective souls, our genetics and our history, are we missing something huge by not experiencing them? That is, as Technology and Society limit the primal range of the Human Experience, how much are we losing from the Human Identity and the development of the Human Destiny?

As the sun started to descend and my strength returned, I entered back into the womb of Humanity and my mind was once again infested with meaningless thoughts: distracted and shattered. After 13 hours, I finished the 18 mile journey with an elevation change of 4,800 ft. As I sat in a restaurant, I digested a romanticized memory of my journey and the primality of the experience while paradoxically enjoying the comfort, the safety, the food, and the water of a privileged human life.