EA#22:
Read From the Beginning or the start of Trial Two or Three or Four
The Mountain in the Clouds, Part Twenty-Five
“
Meditation.
Sublime peace.
Inner tranquility.
Yet no answers.
I sat there for some time trying to quiet my mind. But the whole time it continued to creak and lurch about. I couldn’t help but wonder what I was doing in that strange place on the rock platform floating in the black void. I couldn’t help but want to demand an answer of the gods as to what to do next.
Patience. I tried to remind myself that it can take patience. Continue to sit. To quiet. To settle. To be mindful.
Or maybe is it mindless? To let the mind empty?
Jaran always told me to meditate without expectation. To not expect some sudden insight or answer to come to mind. Though it may. Just don’t expect it. Mostly, it’s about being, about stilling the soul.
So I meditated. And I meditated. And I meditated some more.
And still nothing. But I did begin to relax. To feel calm. To feel at ease. Though my back was at first sore, it grew more and more adjusted to my sitting position. Muscles in my shoulders even began to unwind, letting off some tension in my body. My breath deepened. My belly rose and fell in a gentle rhythm.
Thoughts raced through my brain. And I wished them well and urged them on their way. More thoughts and I said, no, thank you. Yet more thoughts tried to enter my mind, and I continued to turn them aside. I imagined an inner being in my mind brushing his hands threw the air as if to push the thoughts away like insects. Little insects of thoughts that buzzed through my head that I told time and again to fly elsewhere.
I had one more thought: ‘Ah, this is more like it,’ before the thoughts themselves dispersed. I was left with sensation. The sensation of my sits bones on the ground. The sensation of my legs crossing one over the other. The sensation of my hands resting on my knees. The sensation of the soft air against my face. The sensation of my eyelids softly closed over their orbits.
And I listened to what I may. I heard little, but I garnered only faint airy noises. Soft noises that soothed. Noises that tuned me in to more and more unawareness.
And I saw things. Unlike thoughts, but inner visions. Swirling colors and masses inside, like a theater in my mind. Sometimes these colors were shapes, objects, creatures, people, places… But mostly they were amorphous forms that could not be identified. Nor did they last long and they continued to transmute into newer and more wondrous images, changing through countless possibilities.
One such possibility started to gather, soon becoming more familiar to me. A world I could perceive and understand. Not like that black void. It was that field again. The hills. The trees. I could begin again to feel the breeze. It began to cohere more and more into what seemed to be very much a physical reality.
Ok, I thought. Pause. Breathe. Don’t rush it. Don’t open your eyes all at once and expect to see it. Allow it to be. Trust that it is there. I know that it’s there. I feel it coming. I feel it all around me.
With my eyes closed I came to my feet. I took a step forward on the stone platform. I ignored that tugging notion that I was still in that void. I blocked the memory of it as I focused on the green grass ahead. I could almost smell it.
Fears tried to enter my mind to tell me that I would fall if I kept walking. That there was nothing there after the edge of the slab of rock. But I pushed the fears away. After all, I had fallen into the void before and not been hurt. I have come back time and again unscathed, back onto the platform.
I took another step. Still solid rock below my feet. I stepped yet again. Eyes closed.
There was a panic sensation tugging at my solar plexus region. A pounding of my heart, a quickening of my heartbeat, a shortness of my breath. The fear continued to try to rattle me. But I kept telling it that it had no power. I was trusting this walk. I was trusting even the fall, if it were to come.
I stepped. And I stepped. And I walked forward. And more forward. Still my feet touched solid ground. Still I felt the hard surface of rock below. I kept walking.
At last my feet came to the edge of the platform as I had witnessed it. I still had my eyes closed, not acknowledging the blackness in which I was, forgetting that I was even there as I kept my mind only the green hills and fields in my inner vision.
Part of that fear crept up once more to say that this edge I felt beneath my feet was all that was left for me. That that was where this walk ended. Surely there was nothing beyond it. There was only space, only blackness, only a fall. The fall could kill, the fear said. The fall could be your very end, it coerced me.
No, I will not agree! I shouted back to the fear. There is something there. I know it. I feel it. I FEEL it.
I took a deep breath, I lifted my left foot in the air. I shifted my weight forward on my right leg. I remembered my trusting step into the giant, Gumpelthwomp’s, hand at the waterfall. And for a moment I remembered how I had fallen and he had not caught me. That the waters of the river had swallowed me up, dragged me under.
Again, no! I told the fear. I will do this. I am going to step forward and I will put my feet on solid ground. I know it!
Poised there on the edge of the platform, foot held high, breath held tight… I inched forward… I placed my foot into the void… and…
“
Thanks so much for reading.
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Blessings to you,
Matthew