How To Do Jhana Meditation Level 6 (accidentally!)
Day 51: rye bread, old logs and infinite consciousness (Happy Father’s Day!)
It’s been a quiet Father’s Day. A lovely hug from one offspring, a WhatsApp message from the other, a card from both and then…time on my own, spent heaving old logs around for the base of a new dead hedge. A bit of pick axe-cum-mattock swinging, good old Dad based activities and then…peace.
There has also been the next instalment of the sourdough rye bread experiment. Flavour is currently awesome but the dough still suffers from a bit of stickiness. So, further reduction in hydration, down to 75% to see if this reduces the sticky but still retains enough moisture for the dough to rise quickly enough not to produce excessive sugars which, as I’m sure you know 🤔, increases stickiness. It’s a balancing act.
I’ve also upped the temperature and went for a hot bake to see if that’ll drive off enough moisture to de stick it even more. And just to add way too many variables into this now impossible to decipher baking trial, I’ve had to use different rye flour because Bachedlre Mill has run out. The loaf has baked well but it’ll be tomorrow lunchtime before I can cut in and see the results for myself. Fingers crossed.
Aside from all that, I was awake in good time again, rousing at 7am, dozing a little and up just before half past. That gave me a good 90 minutes on my own as it turned out. So, meditation down the garden was the order of the day. Cup of green tea in hand for post meditation sipping, even though it’d be well cool by then, I took myself off to the garden bench we’re all becoming used to and began.
If you were listening yesterday, you’ll recall that my meditation didn’t go to plan due to a massively fizzy brain and all that distractive nonsense that turns up when you sit down to be quiet.
It didn’t go to plan today either but in almost exactly the opposite way. It was Jhana time and as I’ve not been able to get a successful one in for while, I was a little unsure of how it’d go. To cut a long story short, mostly because I have a time limit as you know, I managed to work my way up to the 5th level, ‘Realm of Infinite Space’, a title I remain uncomfortable with because it seems unnecessarily whatever the word is for something that is too ethereal and grand and over the top and meaningless and all that.
So there I was, doing my expanding-my-awareness thing and it seemed to be going reasonably well. It did the usual expanding out, (and then contracting back, or there’d be a loud sound or a distracting cool breeze and so on). Occasional thoughts would appear and then move on. Until I suddenly found myself seeing, well not seeing exactly except it was sort of visual, a bit like ‘seeing’ something that isn’t there, (weird, like seeing a feeling or something dreamlike in that sense), a massively vast sense of huge space opening up.
The book says the feeling is a bit like an ‘oh my god, that’s big!’ sort of an experience. It did that. Except my internal thoughts were a lot more sweary.
Describing it’s tricky. It’s more one of those things that gets tagged with ‘you had to be there’. It was a mix of suddenly realising there’s a cloudless sky and gazillions of stars stretch vastly away but there are no stars. You know that sense of awestruckness that can slap you round the head and grab your attention? A bit like that. All mixed up in a dreamlike state where as soon as you try to recall it or nail it down with human language, it all fades. Mind you, it could be that I don’t know the right words yet.
You get the gist, anyway. It was a good place to hang out in for a bit, even though I’m still not entirely sure I was properly in whatever it is I’m supposed to be in. So I’ll assume I was. There you go.
The next level up from there is called the ‘Realm of Infinite Consciousness’. Yup another one of those names that I don’t really get on with. My recollection of how this one works, (I haven’t been back and checked this out as I didn’t think it’d be turning as yet), is that it’s the same as the spacey one with a flipped perspective. Instead of being the thing that is aware of the realm of spaceywateverness, you become aware that there is an awareness doing the being aware of the infinite space.
And the flip is that when you notice the awareness being aware, you can no longer be the awareness that was aware of the space, you must be the space being aware of the previous ‘me’ being aware of the space. Twisty isn’t it? And as the space that you have just become in your awareness is infinite, the awareness you become must also be infinite because it’s the same thing.
[My hypnotherapist head just switched on and went ‘ah! Complex equivalencies and post hypnotic suggestions’. But that’ a whole other article that I probably wrote years ago and right now don’t have the time to dig around to find so I can link to it for you. If I ever do, I’ll let you know. Maybe.]
Anyway.
I think it happened, to paraphrase that phrase from The Day After Tomorrow, another film that I enjoyed and watched many times over.
That aside somewhat diluted the effect I was after, so here goes one more time.
I think it happened!
There I was, drifting around in this enormously spacey space thing and my mind went, “so isn’t the next stage when you notice the awareness being aware” … and my perspective instantly flipped and for a split second, (OK maybe three or four), it seemed as though “I was / there was” an infinite awareness (consciousness) being aware of the small awareness that was (previously) me being aware of the infinite space.
Had I not been used to weird shit from my trancey hypno training days, it might have been a bit freaky. Also, to be fair, some of the weird shit that turns up unannounced during an Enlightenment Intensive is pretty damn freaky too, so that’s another context that help keep this (and me) in the realms of sanity.
To sum up, (I’m sure I’ve not used ‘to sum up’ in these posts yet, not sure I like it…), yesterday was a non starter and today went better than intended.
So on average, I’m still average.
[And two minutes over my 30 minutes, so goodbye from me. Hope you enjoyed it.]
If you enjoyed reading this, please…
drop me a like ❤️
leave a comment 💬
share it far & wide
Photo by Daniel Shapiro