Let’s talk a little more about experiences along the way. I want to reiterate that my orientation, my relationship to both the experiences and to sharing these experiences, is with the understanding that they can help inform our dialogue with reality, our relationship to ultimate reality.
If we give ourselves permission to extrapolate, to follow to the ultimate consequence an experience that we have - before, during, or late in the spiritual path - it is important work to do insofar as it can change the way you see and understand.
I’m sharing my own experiences with an eye toward allowing you to recognize in your own experience certain moments that may have been outside of the normal current. These moments, if acknowledged and given the proper status in your array of information, can get you closer to understanding things as they are.
This is part two - you can look for Mapping Experience Part One to begin at the beginning.
Direct Intuitive Knowing
When we left off, I was describing my experience of time as space. Now I want to turn to an experience I had especially in my teenage years - really all of my teenage years - and then maybe it was integrated in such a way that it became less surprising to my own understanding.
That was a direct, intuitive knowing of specific details about a person - about their past, about their preferences like a favorite color, or details about the person they were in a relationship with, or details about their childhood.
I ended up rationalizing this to myself as a processing of data that I was unaware of taking in - as intuition, a pattern recognition. People who looked this way or walked this way or wore this thing, or had a certain gesture or facial expression or something subtle, would have a strong pattern overlap with a person whom I had known well in the past. And if I transposed the details, it would turn out that much of that was right.
I think that was, on the one hand, accurate. But on the other hand it was an outside-of-time-and-space direct knowing that has implications for what time is and what space is and what individuals are.
I think this is actually a relatively common experience. It’s along the same lines as a déjà vu experience, but one which is maybe more common and harder to write off - you know these details, and when you test your theory, it turns out to be accurate.
So that’s just a window into one of these things.
Visionary Poetry and Channeling
Another category was a visionary type poetry in which I would get images, or I would often let the rhyme guide me to what words came next. I found various surprising things. One would be using words that I had never heard or read, but that would turn out to fit well in the context as if I had, and often point to a surprising insight. This was a kind of unintentional channeling.
But then, more concerning from the perspective of the time, was foreshadowing things that would later happen. I don’t suggest a causal relationship, but merely an outside-of-time-and-space perception. This is easy to understand in a way, once we are shuttling to and from this timeless, stateless state that includes all time and all space and the detailed perception from this node of being that we call the individual.
In terms of channeling, I think I will return to it later because it becomes a little bit more explicit in my internal experience later on.
I once had the rather strange confusion of seeing a blockbuster movie that was psychological in its nature, and then having the very clear feeling as if I had written it. Of course, this had no basis in reality. But there was some kind of merging of identity. It could have just been a sleepless delusion, I don’t know. But it feels to me like it fits in this conversation.
Again, I mean to bring up categories of experience in which you might recognize your own experience and then have the opportunity to follow them to their consequence.
Painting as Fields of Being
In college, I became a painter. My mode of painting was to paint these fields of being. It was a mode arrived at intuitively, but most likely influenced by reading Heidegger and “fields of being” was part of his lexicon.
Given how much it resonates with how I now understand and experience the world - from having made some progress on the spiritual path, and in this long arc alchemical project of integrating recognition and following it through to its consequences, or allowing it to mature and ripen to consume all of my perceptual experience - seeing things as fields of coherent moments, particles of energy... in retrospect, that feels like a spiritual insight.
How might you translate that into your own experience? Here is one possibility: any category in which you’re engaged in creative production, especially one in which you successfully feel like you’re getting out of the way - you’re “in the zone” in modern language - you feel like something’s coming through. We can relate to those almost as if somebody else created them, and like it’s a teaching we can respect and integrate in a different way.
Discovering Daoist Internal Alchemy
As a painter, as my painting developed beyond college... I have a first-principles orientation to whatever I do. So I was returning to the oldest manuscripts about painting and materials and mediums. In this context, I encountered an overlap of painting history and medicinal and alchemical orientation to materials - how they might transform from base mineral to luminosity based on specific treatments.
This was the direction of my research when I first encountered Daoist Internal Alchemy. It was not an obvious thread to pull on at the time. I encountered it via this magenta website with text written in all caps - not something I was inclined to take seriously. Still, it was the initial surfacing of this idea that would become central to how I practiced and experienced.
So that is a category of experience in which we can learn to listen to the things that seem out of place that arise in our view, in our screen, in our surface experience. These things are worth teasing out, with the understanding that we are incubating a future understanding.
Encountering the DaoDe Jing
Around that time I first encountered, at least in a serious way, the DaoDe Jing. Reading it, I had a feeling of remembrance and recognition and total synchronicity - an overlapping of pattern with the worldview, the philosophical view that I had developed through poetry and painting.
This included fields of being, and the inability to state something with clarity and certainty without the acknowledgment that it was a temporary functional statement, not one that held or conveyed the meaning itself - because that was elusive and disappeared when bound by a word or a mark on a canvas.
I used to call them “bridge fictions.” That is to say, something that I will state now in order to get from here to there, but with the understanding that it can never be all of what is meant. To draw meaning is a form of elision - it operates by virtue of leaving out. So it can never be the whole picture, fundamentally.
The next video in this series will start to encompass the experiences that I had while practicing intensively for the first five years of my serious spiritual practice, in which I was doing active energetic practice for six or eight hours a day. That led to a lot of mind-altering experiences. But even then I didn’t fully integrate those experiences as much as I could have.
To reiterate the purpose of these videos: to give you the opportunity to reflect on experiences you’ve had and see them as windows into the real.
See you next time.