I hadn’t drunk again since the ceremony on the 3rd as I was very much still processing and integrating the experience – a giant evolutionary leap. In the mean time, I had started to learn about the fundamentals of Buddhism and Zen. I decided with Javier that my intention of that ceremony was to die. I was dressed in my white pants, white top and bright orange poncho for the occasion.
To die was to shed everything I could whilst still being physically alive. To shed all resistance and attachment.
I was still in the expanded state that I’d been in since my last ceremony and once I was well under the effects of the medicine, I decided it was time to bring about my death. I lay flat on my back, one hand on my heart and the other on my stomach, and felt what came up around the idea of death. I could see my mind in the distance, “I’m ready to die,” “No I’m not, just one more touch, one more sip of water, one more breath of fresh air.” “I don’t want to die.” I could see that the attachments were deep and powerful. I felt no fear, but immense loneliness and the clinging to attachments. I understood my path and the next chapter of my work.
I realized just how subtle attachments and resistances can be. As I walked around the garden barefoot, I came to a particularly sludgy bit of mud behind the house which the sun doesn’t reach. I found myself hurrying over it as I didn’t enjoy the sensation on my feet – more accurately, my mind told me that I didn’t enjoy the sensation on my feet.
Next two hummingbirds flew past together, and I stretched my neck to follow them past my field of vision – an attachment. I was understanding what the middle path referred to.
A thought came and broke the silence, “this is too much” – a limiting thought from the mind to shape and quantify the possible bounds of the experience.
As soon as the mind comes to know anything, it’s been reduced. There is no good nor bad experience, because these are just descriptions of the mind, which then trigger the body and energy field into the physical sensations that follow.
I look at one of the orange flowers and realize that a flower is not a flower. To say that is to reduce it to nothing more than a flower.
In the next visions, I was riding the “energetic” wave, then I was the wave being ridden, next I was the observer in the overall scene, then the scene and the observer together, the layers were peeling back further and further and it was great. The deeper I go into this process, the more I find that words can no longer be used to describe it, only point at it. Words are used at lower levels of consciousness and awareness.
The guilt and shame from the past are the hard shell of the mind – now its soft and supple. Still tricky and requires a masterful battle to overcome. I guess I’ll keep chipping away at it bit by bit with as much love and compassion as I can summon.
The rest of the ceremony passed as a blissful emptiness as had become common in the second part of ceremonies.
