The BIG Picture

    Many of us are wrapped-up & lost in the details of our personal life - 'the story of me.' Naturally, we all want happiness, but our experience tells us that happiness is fleeting. Keeping our attention on our own relatively minor personal concerns at least distracts us from the great global human-caused problems we now face.
    Many remain dubious about, even disinterested in the BIG PICTURE - why we're here, what we're doing, or where we're going. We're disoriented, lost without a map - almost as if we've been plucked out from the fabric of real life & as some movie fans propose, locked into "the Matrix."

    When we are narrowly focused on surviving as if we were alone, in a harsh, meaningless world, we actually bring about suffering, and can only perceive a harsh, meaningless world. Our present oddly cynical, fearful, narrowly-self-centered culture makes it challenging even to consider the BIG PICTURE. No wonder more & more nations are democratically electing "strong-men" (dictators) to rule, and then allow them to become "president for life." Rest in peace Alexei Navalny.

    "Every nation gets the government it deserves." Joseph de Maistre

     IF we have the wisdom, courage & spaciousness to be connected to the BIG PICTURE, feeling intimately connected to other people & Nature in a loving, nurturing way, we CHANGE THE WORLD FOR THE BETTER.

    Fortunately respected scholars, researchers & increasingly others are becoming deeply interested in & open to the BIG PICTURE, integrating the direct experience of ancient wisdom traditions with research data of modern science :

    "The author Frank White conducted interviews with a range of astronauts. Based on his findings, he coined the term ‘overview effect’ to describe the paradigm shift in consciousness that many of them reported when they viewed the Earth from space. The most dramatic was that of Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon. In 1971, two days into his homeward flight, he was lying in the console of Apollo 14, monitoring the spacecraft’s systems & peacefully contemplating the scene through the small capsule window. Because there is no atmosphere in space, almost ten times more stars are visible to the naked eye than on Earth. As the craft rotated, multitudes of stars and planets, including Earth, tumbled in and out of his view. He had a wondrous sense of ‘being swaddled in the cosmos.’ He felt tranquil & relaxed, safe after his foray on the unforgiving surface of the moon. Then, without warning, something happened that would change the course of his life.
    ‘Somehow I felt tuned into something much larger than myself,’ he writes, ‘something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big. Even today, the perceptions still baffle me … looking beyond the Earth itself to the magnificence of the larger scene, there was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught. My understanding of the separate distinctiveness and the relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony – a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. … I was part of a larger process than I’d previously understood, one that was all around me in this command module as it sped towards Earth through 240,000 miles of empty black space.’"
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008. EXCEPTIONAL BOOK!

    Rupert Sheldrake PhD    “One of the most obvious findings of research on the effects of psychedelics on the brain is that psychedelics shut down the default mode network – those regions of the brain that are linked together that are concerned with mental chatter, discursive thoughts & the internal dialogue. And as soon as that’s shut down, you become much more present. They also lead to connections between different brain regions that wouldn’t normally be connected. It’s not very surprising really if one’s had these experiences where very unusual things can happen.
    More recently, there have been a lot of studies on the therapeutic use of psychoactive substances, for example psilocybin & its effects on chronic long-term depression & on addiction. What’s interesting about these studies is that it’s not the drug itself working at the purely chemical level that’s helping people. And they’re much more effective at relieving long-term depression than any of the standard anti-depressants or talk-therapies. It’s not the drug itself, it’s the experience it induces – it’s really that sense of being connected to a greater consciousness – a kind of mystical insight that changes people. Some chemical companies say they’re going to try and make versions of these drugs that don’t have these ‘undesirable effects’ of visionary states, mystical union, etc, ‘just stick to chemicals.’ But I think if they do that, they’re almost doomed to failure, because it’s the experience which is what changes people. And sometimes people who’ve been depressed for 25 years, resistant to all known forms of therapy, after a couple of experiences with psilocybin, together with a therapist helping them integrate this, have proved much more effective than any other treatment at changing their state.
    And the usual interpretation of mystical experiences is not that our brain produces these experiences, it’s that they’re always there, available to us, but we normally block them out [[[by the Default Mode Network]]] because we’re so busy worrying about all the things we worry about, obsessed with our preferences and so on, so we block them out. But if we shut down the bits of the brain that block them out [[[Default Mode Network]]], then they can come through. So I personally prefer the idea that there are experiences coming through, and the effect on the brain is really to permit these experiences to come through, rather than blocking them out through our 'normal' mental activities [[[repetitive self-centered chatter]]].
    Of course with peoples’ world views, you can’t in the end persuade them just through logic, I mean it’s really experience that will have to tell us which is true in the end.
    What I find perverse about the materialist point of view is that it claims to be based on science, reason & empirical evidence. Empirical evidence means literally the evidence of experience. The Greek word empirical means experience.
    So if you’re going to have empirical evidence about consciousness, it has to be based on conscious experience. And to dismiss conscious experience in favor of an ideology – that says it’s all about molecules, & consciousness doesn’t do anything, it's just an epiphenomenon of the brain, or an illusion produced by brain activity – seems to me utterly perverse & deeply anti-empirical.”
    Rupert Sheldrake "Psychedelics and Consciousness, University of Sussex"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tqe6xE7WEE

    Iain McGilchrist MD, PhD    “I’ve become more & more convinced, that none of the things that we desperately need to do to solve, the various problems that we face and that we talk about a great deal, none of this in the end will matter unless we are able to get back to the spiritual ground of our being. In other words, by some sort of a miracle we could reverse the pollution of the seas, we could perhaps do something to at least slow climate change, we could make it harder for people to carry on felling ancient forests. All this I believe in powerfully, but I also think that none of it will add up to a hill of beans unless we re-engage with the spiritual basis of human life.
    I don’t think we any longer know what it is to be a human being. I think people haven’t got the foggiest idea what they’re doing here, what the cosmos in which they come into being is like, and what their relationship with the Earth that is their home is like.
    In the new book I wrote, “The Matter with Things,” I suggest first of all, that many of the ways in which we look at the constitution of the cosmos are upside down or back-to-front. So, in other words we tend to think for example that, first of all there are things, and then there are relations between them, some of which we make in our minds, and that’s the way it is. Whereas I argue throughout a very long book that, in fact relations are absolutely primary. There is nothing that truly exists that is not a relation, and is not in fact in process, as Whitehead pointed out.
    So in other words, relations & processes are primary, not places & things. And I also believe that for example, it’s not that there’s literal truth, and that’s the really important thing, and metaphorical truths are just some kind of semi-imaginary extension of literal truth. In fact I believe that all fundamental truths are metaphorical in nature, and that literal truth is just a very special kind that we’ve invented to describe a small subset of things that occur at a very everyday level.
    But for the purposes of what we’re talking about now, I want to suggest that it’s not that somehow there is inanimacy and then there is life, and then there is consciousness, and then there is a sense of the great values: goodness, beauty, truth and the sacred. I think it’s the other way around, that what actually exists fundamentally, is a field of consciousness which is divine, which has the qualities of attending to & drawing us towards goodness, beauty & truth, and the sense of the holy & sacred, and that it’s for this that we’ve developed our complexity as human beings, since we are not better than animals, but we are in this sense, above them that we can hope to respond to, to receive, to resonate with, and to give a full & fulfilling response to those leading values that draw us forward."

    Rupert Sheldrake PhD     “I think of it in a very similar way, and so do most people in the world for that matter. We in Western Europe live in a particularly Godless part of the world. But it’s not quite the same if you go to Africa, India, Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, or many other parts of the world. Most people in the world are religious. And this kind of secular, humanist, atheist-tinted culture that we have is a historical anomaly. Most people were religious in Europe. As Charles Taylor in his wonderful book, ‘A Secular Age’ points out, in the year 1500 in Europe, everyone believed in God. Everyone believed in the kind of vision you’ve just put forward. It was almost impossible not to, not because people were coerced into believing that, but because there was just no credible alternative.
    And what’s happened is through the growth of first through the Protestant Reformation, and the disenchantment of the world that happened in part through the Protestant Reformation, a lack of emphasis on Nature, a focus entirely on human consciousness, and then through the Scientific Revolution – the mechanistic materialistic worldview that’s grown out of it, we now have this very secular world where people think that evolution & life starts from the bottom up – from molecules, genes & cells and everything builds up until you’ve got big enough brains where the light of consciousness mysteriously comes on, and then we start thinking about bigger things like God, but they’re just inventions inside our own minds, and hence inside our own brains, and you’d be able to tell us exactly where.
    This is what you & I are discussing, and what in fact the whole scientific medical network has been concerned with right from the start is trying to find a way back to a world view that is still consonant with science, because science isn’t going to go away, and we’ve learned a great many things about nature through the scientific process, but to recover a sense of this connection which is actually there in all traditions. Shamanic traditions all just assume that there are realms beyond, that what we see is not all there is. And as my main teacher, Father Bede Griffiths used to point out that the center of all religious & spiritual culture is a direct experience of our minds, our consciousness, being a part of something vastly greater than ourselves. And as he pointed out, all religions start from that experience. It’s not a dogma, it’s an experience – a central experience of unity, and then it’s interpreted in different cultures, in different traditions, different languages, different interpretations of this primary unitive experience. This sense of ultimate unity which are interpreted in all these different cultural ways. But that is the central foundation of all these religious traditions.
    And as far as we know, this intuition that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is very ancient. All these cave paintings from 20, 30, 40 thousand years ago, the practice of burying the dead, dealing with the dead in a ritual way, and so on, all these things suggest that this has been part of human consciousness for a very, very long time. No doubt the forms have changed, and the development of the great religions has put a more unifying aspect on these insights, but it seems to me that it’s been foundational to human life throughout almost all human history, with the brief anomaly of Western Europe & parts of North America, in the last 150 years.”
    Dr Iain McGilchrist & Dr Rupert Sheldrake - Intersection of Consciousness and Matter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAvwy2LTLMM

 

Rumi quote - artist: Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com

Beyond Fear

    Most of us like to have some control over our lives - some freedom. To actually exercise this freedom, we need courage. Fear can block all of this. Fear can keep us stuck as if in quicksand - for lengthy periods, even for life. 

    Caution is entirely reasonable. Climbing into a shopping cart on a city street, on top of a steep hill, then riding it down to see what happens is guaranteed to result in severe injury, pain or death.
    Extreme sports are far less ridiculous, yet offer transcendence: Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” 2008. My blogs quoting this SUPERB book: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Coffey

    Mercifully, deep spiritual practices eg deep meditation, are the safest, most tried-and-true paths by which seekers have, for thousands of years, attained transcendence - gone beyond ordinary limitations. ... a spiritual or religious state or condition of moving beyond physical needs & realities.
    The height of spiritual transcendence is described as a state of continuous, unshakable peace, joy, love & oneness that is independent of external circumstances - BEYOND FEAR!
    Again mercifully, regular meditation practice gradually brings about progressive felt improvements in our life reassuring us that we are indeed making progress along this well-trodden path.

    “The voice of the intelligence is drowned out by the roar of fear. It is ignored by the voice of desire. It is contradicted by the voice of shame. It is biased by hate and extinguished by anger. Most of all it is silenced by ignorance. Karl A. Menninger MD, psychiatrist

    The advice to 'be curious,' and instead of avoiding, to 'lean into challenges' cannot be overemphasized.
    The process of facing fears is called exposure. Exposure therapy involves gradually & repeatedly exposing patients to feared situations until they feel less anxious. After a while, anxiety naturally lessens.
    Meditation is a form of exposure therapy. Our basic fear is honestly meeting & being intimate with ‘the other’ - our Self, people, animals, environment, life itself. We use gentle mindfulness practices to slowly ease ourselves back into intimacy with ourselves & others. 

    “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” Helen Keller

    All of life is exposure therapy - if we allow it. It is well-known that people who suffer from anxiety are most anxious about being anxious; those who suffer from depression, are depressed about being depressed. Can we be less afraid of our fear? Can we take all of our neuroses far less seriously, less personally?

     “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

    “Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.” Thich Nhat Hanh

    “Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.” W. Clement Stone

    “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.” Louisa May Alcott

    With loving awareness we do what is appropriate, which is always nurturing whoever & whatever is around us, so that we may all flourish. We must FIRST learn to let go of fearfully obsessing over 'me, myself & I.'
    This is a far more profound step than can be accomplished by a guilt-tripping sermon to stop being so selfish & self-centered. It requires a qualitative shift in consciousness: Dr. Jeffery A. Martin. “The Finders.” Integration Press, 2019. My blog on this PROFOUND book : http://www.johnlovas.com/2024/01/seriously.html .

    “What is fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity & spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.” Maya Angelou

“See how we are called to not run from the discomfort,
and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage
or even fear.
If we can be fearless to be with our pain, it turns.
It doesn’t stay.
It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it.
When we look at it, when we take it in our hands,
when we can just be with it,
when we keep breathing, then it turns.
It turns to reveal its other face.
And the other face of our pain for the world
is our love for the world.
Our absolutely inseparable connectedness
with all life.”
Joanna Macy 

    “Love cures people – both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” Karl A. Menninger MD, psychiatrist

    “… one of the experiences people have on (meditation) retreats is a very intimate experience with the breath, with the body, with emotions, because there’s no separation. That’s kind of the essence of intimacy: nonseparation. It’s just oneself getting out of the way. The Chinese poet Li Po ended a poem with these words: ‘We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.’ So that’s kind of meditative. When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything. To me, that is the definition of intimacy.” Joseph Goldstein

Artist: Molly Hahn buddhadoodles.com/new-gallery/

Technologies of the Sacred

“The mystery, the essence of all life
is not separate from the silent openness
of simple listening.”

Toni Packer

    "Awe gives you this big picture, it makes you open up, it makes you creative, it makes you think outside of the box — everything we need in doing good work." Dacher Keltner PhD

     "Fear, suffering, and focus … enable adventurers to release hidden powers and access other realms of experiences. … extreme adventure is not only a spiritual search, but also a spiritual tool. And it is the same for all of us, adventurers or not. The hardest, most challenging experiences of our lives can enrich our existence, revealing our true identity, awakening us to a greater awareness of our own potential, and opening us to the infinite beauty of the universe.”
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008.

    “The importance of non-ordinary states of consciousness for ancient and aboriginal cultures is reflected in the amount of time and energy that the members of these human groups dedicated to the development of technologies of the sacred, various procedures capable of inducing them for ritual and spiritual purposes. These methods combine in various ways drumming and other forms of percussion, music, chanting, rhythmic dancing, changes of breathing, and cultivation of special forms of awareness. Extended social and sensory isolation, such as a stay in a cave, desert, arctic ice, or in high mountains, also play an important role as means of inducing this category of non-ordinary states. Extreme physiological interventions used for this purpose include fasting, sleep deprivation, dehydration, use of powerful laxatives and purgatives, and even infliction of severe pain, body mutilation, and massive bloodletting. By far the most effective tool for inducing healing and transformative non-ordinary states has been ritual use of psychedelic plants.
    Mainstream psychiatrists initially dismissed and even ridiculed native ritual events as products of primitive superstition based on ignorance and magical thinking. They relegated non-ordinary states of consciousness of any kind into the domain of psychopathology. This situation gradually changed in the course of the twentieth century, particularly in its second half, when Western scientists actually made some major contributions to the armamentarium of the technologies of the sacred. Clinical and experimental psychiatrists and psychologists had the opportunity to acquire firsthand experience with chemically pure psychedelic substances and with a variety of laboratory mind-altering procedures from sensory deprivation to biofeedback. They also witnessed the effect of non-ordinary states of consciousness in various forms of experiential therapeutic techniques using breathwork and bodywork, such as neo-Reichian approaches, Rebirthing, and Holotropic Breathwork. Those open-minded enough to take on the challenge of these revolutionary tools thus had a chance to discover their power and their great therapeutic potential.
    When we recognized the unique nature of this category of non-ordinary states of consciousness, we found it difficult to believe that contemporary psychiatry does not have a specific category and term for these theoretically and practically important experiences. Because we felt strongly that they deserve to be distinguished from altered states of consciousness and not be seen as manifestations of serious mental diseases, we started referring to them as holotropic. This composite word means literally ‘oriented toward wholeness’ or ‘moving toward wholeness.’
    The name holotropic suggests something that might come as a surprise to an average Westerner – that in our everyday state of consciousness we identify with only a small fraction of who we really are and do not experience the full extent of our being. Holotropic states of consciousness have the potential to help us recognize that we are not ‘skin-encapsulated egos’ – as British philosopher and writer Alan Watts called it – and that, in the last analysis, we are commensurate with the cosmic creative principle itself. Or that – using the statement by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French paleontologist and philosopher – ‘we are not human beings having a spiritual experiences, we are spiritual beings having human experiences.’
    This astonishing idea is not new. In the ancient Indian Upanishads, the answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ is ‘Tat tvam asi.’ This succinct Sanskrit sentence means literally: ‘Thou art That,’ or ‘You are Godhead.’ It suggests that we are not namarupa – name and form (body/ego), but that our deepest identity is with a divine spark in our innermost being (Atman) that is ultimately identical with the supreme universal principle (Brahman). And Hinduism is not the only religion that has made this discovery. The revelation concerning the identity of the individual with the divine is the ultimate secret that lies at the mystical core of all great spiritual traditions. The name for this principle could thus be the Tao, Buddha, Cosmic Christ, Allah, Great Spirit, Sila, and many others. Holotropic experiences have the potential to help us discover our true identity and our cosmic status.”
    Stanislav Grof, Christina Grof. “Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy.” State University of New York Press, 2010. 

    Psychiatrist Stan Grof (above) spent 50 years doing pioneering research on the use of entheogenic plant medicines (ayahuasca, psilocybin, peyote, etc.) and Holotropic Breathwork. Holotropic Breathwork, which uses circular breathing, music & bodywork, harnesses the intrinsic healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. Grof's book explores the healing, transformative, & evolutionary potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness accessed through Holotropic Breathwork, and their great value as a source of new revolutionary data about consciousness, the human psyche, and the nature of reality. 

    One-day, experiential courses : https://holotropic.ca/events/

 

Gold in Dark Places

    Our survival instinct helps us reflexively avoid life-threatening danger - "the dark." Add some 'negativity bias' & 'harm avoidance,' and we end up with a very narrow 'learning zone,' immediately beyond which lurks DANGER - KEEP OUT!
    So, instead of being curious & motivated to learn from the vast reality beyond our tiny comfort & learning zones, most of us timidly ignore, discount, dismiss & even ridicule others,' & even our own direct experiences IF these are BEYOND safe, suitable-for-dinner-party, small-talk.
    BUT some intentionally 'take a walk on the wild side' not just once, but repeatedly! WHY?
    Let's briefly gather a bit of courage & curiosity to just consider more adventurous peoples' experiences, that as a DIRECT RESULT of their COURAGE & CURIOSITY, are OUTSIDE our tiny box of assumptions about what can & must not be 'real'!

    "... the most important work you can possibly do is to have a healthy, loving relationship with fear. It simply changes everything." Kristen Ulmer, former world champion extreme skier

    "It is often the hardest, most challenging experiences of our lives that crack us open. For some people, these experiences are chosen, or accepted as a consequence of risk-taking. For others – for most of us – they come without warning. Unlikely gifts that rip away our layers of insulation, allowing us glimpses of the mysterious, the ineffable – the infinite realms of human consciousness.”
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008. FASCINATING & WELL-WRITTEN

    “We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This in the end is the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to find the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that in this sense, people have been cowardly, has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called ‘apparitions,’ the whole so-called ‘spirit’ have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

    “(Meditation) practice is not a matter of learning more & more and studying more & more … It’s a matter of emptying out, peeling off layer after layer to empty out … We need to start peeling off all our opinions, all our ideas, and all our cleverness and just remain very naked, in the moment, just seeing things as they are, like a small child.” Tenzin Palmo
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite." see above for full details

    After Amoda Maa experienced numerous major traumas from early childhood on into her 20s, “something started to reveal itself, and that was the abyss. The abyss was experienced as a very barren landscape, like a dark night of the soul where there is no God, there is no life, there is no meaning, there is nothing, it’s devoid. It really is devoid. And yet, my external life at the time was reasonably good – I was teaching a certain method of movement & meditation, and I had a lot of different interactions, it was creative, it was flowing – so it wasn’t to do with the circumstances, it was an inner experience.
    It’s in that, that a deeper surrender happened. In some ways, everything had been a surrender, but this was a conscious surrender. (Before,) the surrender had happened through loss & all these different circumstances that kept changing, but this was a different level of surrender. It was met consciously. I consciously surrendered to the desolation of nonexistence. And that’s when something changed. That’s when something changed.

    ... my discovery was that life is the guru. Life is constantly calling you, like the beloved, into its arms, inviting you, not just to have a blissful experience, but through the darkness, through the difficulties, through the challenges, through the darkest places (it doesn’t have to be terrible on the external), but through the places that we hide from ourselves within ourselves, to surrender to that because everything is love – in the darkest places is light. And somehow that was the wisdom I gained from my own direct experience. ... And that’s what changed everything – it was unexpected.”
    Amoda Maa Talks About Her Life Before Awakening : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4sn-jz-QA0

    We instinctively keep trying to escape even those challenging experiences that are positively transformative - such as 'ego death':

    Amoda Maa experienced a “dark night of the soul, which had nothing to do with my external circumstances. Nothing bad was happening, in fact there was a lot of peace and joy in my life. But it revealed an existential aloneness, an existential abyss, and this went on for several months. ... I'm a practiced meditator, so I’m familiar with that inner landscape if you like, but I noticed a very subtle movement of mind – the subtle movement of mind that pulled me away from being with that existential abyss. And it was so subtle, that it could easily be overlooked. But in seeing it, I felt and sensed that this was a pattern – the archaic pattern of ego-self that is always moving away or moving towards something, never resting fully in presence, because the present is death to the ego. And again I didn’t know this intellectually. I just felt it. It’s like whole lifetimes of practice, and insight, and searching all came to a moment of realization. And so I kept still in my mind, and it was effortless, but it also caused me to meet such an existential terror of annihilation.
    I could easily have just got up and picked a book off the bookshelf. I like to read, and my books were very inspirational at the time. And that was a way of moving away from death – the death of ego-self. Because the book would inspire me, then I feel good. Or it may be as simple as making myself a cup of tea – a very English thing to do. It’s very nourishing, and soothing, and so on. But I just noticed how that was an obstruction to falling into the abyss of emptiness, where there is an end of the self.
    And so I just faced it. And in facing it, I didn’t expect anything. I just knew that was the right thing to do. But in doing that … the sensation was of dying. It was a death, of me, as a separate entity. Because as I met the existential abyss, I also felt the terror of aloneness. Not an aloneness of the personhood, but an existential aloneness – that there’s a me here, and a vast universe of existence, the whole of existence that is spread over time & space. The me is a separate me. It’s a tiny, insignificant and also separate me, in this vastness of existence. And as I sort of died into that, it was like a death, and it did remind me of the attempts of suicide, at least on a psychological level. And this time, I surrendered into it, knowing obviously that there was no physical death in it. But it was a profound psychological death. But the amazing thing was that the sensation, the energetic visceral sensation was of merging into the totality of existence, rather than disappearing into the totality of existence – well it was that, but it was also a merging into it, so I became the totality of existence. So I called it merging into God."
    Amoda Maa - Falling Open in a World Falling Apart : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAqQ6hrj-iE

    “Heaven is this moment.
     Hell is longing for this moment to be different.
     It's that simple.” Jeff Foster

“Emptiness is two things at once:
the absence of self
and the presence of the Divine.
Thus as self decreases,
the Divine increases.”             Bernadette Roberts

    “Life uses us and does not care how we feel about it. It lives through us, as us. We object & resist, or concur & are pleased – it makes no difference either way.
    Only when we surrender our will, and along with it our notions of identity, can we touch our real life, and enter it, and taste, at least a little more intimately, what it is to be alive. As so many masters said on their awakening: ‘Now I am like a person who drinks water and knows for themself whether it is warm or cold.’”
    Henry Shukman https://www.mountaincloud.org/message-from-henry-surrender/

    “All that is necessary to awaken to yourself as the radiant emptiness of spirit is to stop seeking something more or better or different, and to turn your attention inward to the awake silence that you are.” Adyashanti

Glimpses Beyond the Veil

    We label "fanatics" others who are enthusiastic about experiences we've never enjoyed. We can't imagine ourselves ever doing certain things like them eg climbing Everest, assume we'll never get to experience whatever lures them to extreme adventures, and quickly dismiss it as "madness."
    Early in her fascinating book, Maria Coffey wonders, “Was it possible … that as these adventurers tune into the natural world, they unwittingly open channels to hidden powers and realms of experience that we call mystical and paranormal? That these channels lie dormant in us all, shut down beneath layers of insulation? And that the process of risk-taking strips away that insulation, opening the way to spiritual transcendence?
    … I became increasingly convinced that extreme adventurers break the boundaries of what is deemed physically possible by pushing beyond human consciousness into another realm.
    … reaching a spiritual state of being is the principal lure of extreme adventure …"
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008.

    There are of course many other, more direct, more efficient & infinitely safer ways ("to the top of the mountain") of reaching spiritual states of being than via extreme sports. One of the wildest danger addicts, Kristen Ulmer - for 12 years was the best female big mountain extreme skier in the world; voted by the outdoor industry as the most extreme 'fearless' woman athlete in North America - finally realized that it didn't make sense to continuously risk her life for something better achieved through well-established spiritual practices, which for her happens to be Zen meditation.

    Kristen Ulmer. “The Art of Fear: Why Conquering Fear Won’t Work and What to Do Instead.” Harper Wave, 2018.

    Nevertheless, Coffey's book is inspiring & insightful, filled with heroic yearning & striving often required to pull oneself out from the powerful gravitational pull of comfort & conformity. With apologies to Star Trek, let us boldly read about where few men & women have gone before!:

    “In 1993, Marshall Ulrich was running the Badwater course ("for ultra-marathoners, the toughest race of all"), trying to break his own record. He set out at six pm, watched the sun go down, and carried on running into the night. At some point, around the forty-mile mark, he felt himself leave his body. Suddenly the effort of running was gone – from above, he watched his lone figure pounding along the road, he could hear his footfall and see his support team waiting at certain stages with food and water. He saw himself eating and drinking as he ran.
    ‘It was like watching myself on a movie screen,’ he says. ‘I lost all sense of time. It could have been only ten minutes that had passed, but then I realized that dawn was coming, the sun was about to rise. I knew it was time to go back into my body.’
    He was reluctant to tell anyone about this, particularly other runners. ‘I was sure they’d think I was nutty.’ Then he met Yiannis Kouros, the legendary, world-record-breaking Greek ultramarathoner, who now lives in Australia. Kouros is unabashed about the spiritual component to his running.
    ‘It is not easy,’ he writes, ‘to grasp what is taking place in the mind and the soul, in the senses and beyond the senses of a runner due to the refusal of the body. Only if the runner achieves his transcendence, and especially in the metaphysical level, he is then able to continue.’
    When he heard Ulrich’s story, he fully understood. And he told him how to get back to that place.
    ‘He said I have to break myself down until there’s nothing left – until I transcend the limits of my physical body and enter a new realm of existence.’

    “We must live in the free fall of infinity. Standing at the edge, the heart opens." Thomas Moore

    It is often the hardest, most challenging experiences of our lives that crack us open. For some people, these experiences are chosen, or accepted as a consequence of risk-taking. For others – for most of us – they come without warning. Unlikely gifts that rip away our layers of insulation, allowing us glimpses of the mysterious, the ineffable – the infinite realms of human consciousness.”

    Then for the finale, Coffey recounts her own dramatic near-death experience (NDE) - her own glimpse 'beyond the veil' past our consentual, mundane, physical reality to the transcendent, helping her grok the insights of extreme adventurers & many, many others.
    Maria Coffey. “Explorers of the Infinite. The Secret Spiritual Lives of Extreme Athletes – and What They Reveal About Near-Death Experiences, Psychic Communications, and Touching the Beyond.” Jeremy P. Tarcher / Penguin, 2008.

 Short (8min) Oscar-nominated Canadian film "The Flying Sailor" about a real person in Halifax :