I have a meditation that I’ve been involved with for many, many years. The thing is, I would never recommend it to anyone. There is a cost associated with it. I can’t say that it is “good”. Interesting maybe, but not good. I honestly think it is dangerous, it can lead to unpleasant experiences, for example an ego death, psychosis, and very strange phenomenon.
If it is dangerous then why am I involved with it? Because I am curious and I am never satisfied, I can’t help myself but to poke at the unknown.
I first ran into this, but I didn’t really know what I was doing at 25, this was back in 2010. There’s a lot of ideas out there, like in Scientology, this idea of going clear. I wanted to know what would happen if I got rid of all my fears, I anticipated that I would hit some nirvana or ultimate state, enlightenment.
Back then my meditation was very primitive, I didn’t know what I know now about how the ego is formed and how it is held together. The only way I can describe the event was that I tapped into the collective unconscious, I accessed ideas, including fears, that I didn’t know I had, that I didn’t know were possible. This ultimately resulted in hospitalization.
Even though that’s the case, I’ve always been drawn back to it. Again, that desire to know, that curiosity, that inability to be satisfied with the status quo, I can’t help myself. I just keep poking at it.
So what is it? The basic idea is to make the 2 into 1. They talk about this idea in certain religious texts, like the Gospel of Thomas, making the male into female and female into male. So the idea is to experiment with the boundaries of the ego, in my model, that being fear and desire.
One way this is done is through self inquiry or the imagination. You bring up a fear or desire, as you simply want to evoke an emotion. Then go into extreme focus, using the will, to penetrate through the emotion. It’s important to have no thought and no imagination when processing the emotion. A completely silent mind. Pure will and pure focus.
The mind will play games to prevent this process. I call this rationalizing and justifying. The mind chatter will get very seductive, and I’ve concluded that this is the ego building material on the foundation of the energy. The goal is to prevent this rationalizing and justifying but to instead penetrate through the foundation, the bottom, that being the energy itself. To go beyond it, to go below it.
Penetrating the energy is what is desired and to ignore the seductive temptations of the mind and its thought processes.
Another way to do it is to inhale the emotions. Same process of ignoring thoughts and imagination and focusing 100% on the emotion, the energy. Then to simply inhale in a slow deliberate breath through the nostrils, consuming and digesting the energy. It feels similar to consuming a milk shake through a straw, but instead of the mouth, you inhale through the nostrils.
The basic idea is we want to accept that energy. The normal response to negative energy is to push it away, and positive energy, we desire to hold on to it, control it. Instead, through this process we are learning to accept the energy, and to do that we have to move beyond what we think the energy will give us, or do to us. Instead we consume the energy for the sake of consuming the energy.
One of the things people might worry about is if they think of something, will it happen?
The whole thoughts create a reality perspective. In my experience, you move towards your highest preference. Does this mean negative things don’t happen? No, it’s possible, in my experience, when it is necessary to fulfill a desire.
Again, I’d say this meditation is dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I wouldn’t tell anyone they should do it. That’s a very personal decision, and like anything, there are consequences, good and bad.
So we are messing with the energy, which is simply one energy, divided by judgment, creating the two poles, the boundaries of the present ego. Our ego, our identity, is the preference between these two limitations. These boundaries are not real, in that they are plastic.
The ego is actually quite fragile. This can result in an ego death, and the formation of a new identity. The greatest desire is the desire for separation, to have an ego, a separate self. There’s no moving beyond that. I fundamentally disagree with this idea that one can exist without an ego. It’s the greatest desire, there’s no moving beyond that.
Maybe the temporary dissolution of the ego, but it always comes back. Ego is default.
On the idea in some religious circles that one can hit nirvana or enlightenment or go clear. No, it’s impossible. If anyone thinks they have achieved that, I would suggest that they simply became satisfied and they stopped penetrating through it. It’s merely a state of denial, though that state might feel good and give some sense of meaning, it isn’t real.
It’s truly endless. When you move through human emotion, there’s still more, that being what I can only describe as alien or like god itself, things that are awe inspiring, strange, again I say alien because that’s the only way to describe it.
There are many traps along the way, many traps. To give an example, I was diving down and I thought I had hit the bottom. I had a vision that at the bottom of this abyss was a cess pool. I saw very thick muddy water with bubbles coming up, the bubbles representing negative energy. An endless supply of negativity and I couldn’t penetrate below it.
I kept trying to go beyond it to no avail. Instead I had to change my interpretation of this cess pool, I had to change my relationship to it. Eventually I achieved that, and moved into another aspect of the spectrum. It never ends.
There’s no bottom, it is truly infinite. And there are many traps along the way. Again, I wouldn’t recommend this meditation to anyone, but then again, I wouldn’t recommend any meditation to anyone. It’s a personal preference. Cost and Reward. There’s a cost to anything, is it worth the reward. That’s a very personal preference.
