This initiates a series in which I talk about my own experience and how I’ve come to understand that experience. My goal is to give you the opportunity to recognize episodes of your own experience in terms of the development of consciousness — the dissolution of delusion — and to suggest that there is a right relationship to experience in which one is neither making too much nor too little of one’s own experience, and in which one allows the experience to change their perception and understanding.
Life as Cultivation
I want to reflect first on some experiences before arriving at Daoist cultivation or any formal cultivation. There is a sense in which simply living life is a form of cultivation. Maturation, if embraced, is a form of cultivation. We put lines around it and it becomes a sharper tool when we follow a particular path, but it is something that we do if we’re paying attention, and sometimes even if we’re not.
The Volleyball Experience
I may get some of these out of order, but some experiences that I had growing up that I would later come to think of as relevant in this development of consciousness include a moment when I was playing volleyball on a team in high school.
There was nothing special about the moment externally. I wasn’t under-slept or over-slept. There was vigorous exercise in a stimulation-filled environment - a loud reverberating gymnasium, squeaking shoes, dripping with sweat. At the moment in question we were gathered around the coach between games.
Suddenly, my optical perception shifted to a sparkling granular field. This was before the movie “The Matrix” came out, but it was quite a lot like streams of binary information and a dissolution of distinctions, so that it was really just... it was a little bit like those black and white or grayscale apparent static images where if you focus just right in the middle distance you see a form. It was like that, but without needing a particular focus - the bodies of my teammates and the space around them became this relief of granular form.
Then it passed. I think it passed sufficiently quickly that there was no obstacle to functioning in that context, but it was a very clear perceptual change that made an impression and stuck with me.
Rock Climbing and Cessation
Some other moments in adolescence include moments of which I experienced repeated iterations. In one case, while rock climbing — I was focused on rock climbing between the ages of 15 and 25, and more sporadically after that — I had this recurring experience: when I began to climb, I would have a disconnect or a dissolution. I only came to know this experience in retrospect. That is to say, after climbing a full pitch, I would try to recall - in order to communicate to my partner down below where I’d gone, what choices I’d made, what they might need to know - and I couldn’t recall anything that had happened from the moment I started climbing to the moment I got to the top of the pitch.
There was this full absorption, union, lack of time and space. It happened regularly, almost every time when I was climbing a lot and climbing well. I think it was amplified by being high off the ground. I would have a gap in memory, in continuity of self, between the beginning of a pitch and the end of a pitch. A pitch is a section of climbing - might take ten minutes, might take an hour - and I would experience this absence, or as I came to understand it, full absorption.
The first experience, the volleyball experience, is a perceptual change that can happen as a result of prolonged deep meditation. Prolonged in a single session, but more likely - at least in my 30s and 40s - continuous many days of whole-day focus on the practice can result in this sort of perceptual change in which everything is vibrating and alive, and even the air is viscous in its way, has form, and things are merely a variation of density and vibration.
I’ll circle back to that, because during my life as a practitioner, there are other instances that may be of interest. But this cessation of experience during rock climbing, in retrospect, is very interesting. Had I had context and understanding to allow that experience - maybe a cessation and restart of the perceptual world - I think it could have had the alchemical transformative impact that it later would when I encountered the same experience during meditation.
Seeing Time as Space
I’ll add one more thing to this section: a visionary experience, which is to say an experience that was different than before and after, in which I saw time as space.
In this case, I did reflect on it a lot. It was maybe my mid-twenties, and I was trying to understand the implications if one were to take this perception to be real and true. As it has come to fit the way I see things later in my life, I see it in retrospect as an accurate perception.
I came to see time as space. I was looking out across time in relief, like a landscape. Oddly, it was a little bit more like a cityscape than a mountains-and-rivers landscape. But the physicality of time and the fixedness of time as I looked forward or back can have real implications on how we understand our experience of the world. I later read a book on “block time” and felt this articulated a model that fit my experience.
Making Sense of Outlier Experiences
I don’t want these videos to get too long, but I want to introduce those pre-practice, pre-cultivation experiences in order to give you the opportunity to make sense of your own experience - even if you are in this phase before committed practice - in terms of the development of consciousness and the potential of these outlier experiences to change the way you understand reality.
I’ll continue to add installments in this narrative of experiential development, in order to map my own experience in a way that I hope is useful for you, and to map a progression of experience within cultivation. It’s often productive to locate yourself within that territory.
That’s it for now.