Recently I’ve been waking up around 3-4 am to spend some time meditating, with the intention of achieving a deep state of inner stillness to see how deep I can go, and what happens.
Honestly, almost every time I just fall back asleep and have vivid dreams.
But there have been some interesting experiences en route to said dreams, and I wanted to write about one of them I had about a week ago. Maybe it was three weeks ago. Time has been strange lately.
I set up a comfy folding beach/lawn chair in my room, and after going to the bathroom and just moving around a bit to wake my body and mind up so I wouldn’t immediately fall back asleep, I sat in the chair with a warm soft blanket in complete darkness and silence and just focused on achieving the deepest state of inner stillness I could. In the early morning when you’re drowsy, getting into a deep state of stillness is much easier than at any other time. Ultimately my goal is to dwell in a deep state of stillness even as I go through my waking life, even if I’m actively engaged in taxing physical activities. In time that may be possible, but for now, I’m relegated to the wee hours of the morning while my household, my world sleeps.
Within a few minutes of sitting in my chair in the darkness and focusing on stillness, my consciousness began to flit back and forth right on the border of sleep. It takes an incredible amount of discipline for me to fight off the urge to sleep (I can go to sleep at any time of day in any environment within 5 minutes or so even if I’m not tired). I was trying my very hardest to remain conscious and awake while my body was quickly falling asleep. Most of the time I fail and drift off into various dream realities. On the morning in question, this happened, but then I zoomed back into my body with a VWOOOOOM. That’s the only way I can describe it. Robert Monroe described the same thing in his experience as “clicking” in and out, back and forth, but for me it’s more like a VWOOM versus a click.
I VWOOMed back to my waking consciousness; however, it was this incredible state of hyper awareness. Ever since the experience I’ve tried to come up with the words to describe it and have utterly failed. Still, I will try (and fail again) here to describe it. Nothing was happening, I wasn’t seeing light or having visions, I didn’t even have any thoughts other than my focus on my state of awareness. It wasn’t an expanded state of awareness, it was like a hyper focus on awareness itself. Like inspecting my awareness with my awareness under a powerful microscope. I was in the blackness, I was myself, Chaki, but I had superhuman awareness. I’ll put it this way: I’ve never been that AWAKE before. It made me feel like my normal daily level of awareness was that of a numbed, foggy drunkard, or something like that.
It probably only lasted less than a minute, but for that time I was deeply, profoundly aware of being aware. It was like the enhanced consciousness you can experience in lucid dreams or out-of-body states, but experienced within the physical body, in this physical reality…but with no perceptions or senses to judge or think about. I was only in blackness. I knew I was in my body but I couldn’t sense it or feel it. I was just hyper aware.
It wasn’t an ecstatic spiritual state of bliss, of joy, of happiness. It was very neutral. If there was any emotion to the experience, it was just “wow”. But not “this is awesome, this is fun, I’m enjoying this” just simply “wow” or “whoa”.
I am now trying to figure out how to achieve that state of awareness, or something remotely close to it, in my waking life. But I don’t know what to do, if anything. Maybe it’s something that will take years of meditative practice, maybe it’s not in the cards for me in this life, maybe this reality was designed to prevent inhabitants from maintaining such a level of awareness, or maybe I’ll have a meditative experience that will “break” my mind so that I’ll constantly dwell in that hyper aware state, and then I’ll hate it but there will be nothing I can do about it.
See, that last paragraph is how my human mind typically operates. It goes off on infinite tangents forever until I rein it in and tell it to stop fucking around. Bad mind! Naughty! Get over here and SIT! Stay!
In that experience of hyper-hyper-hyper awareness, nothing existed other than my awareness, and it gazed upon itself in awe of itself. Fuckin’ awesome.
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