And The Risks Involved

I’ve had some interesting experiences lately. The effects of them are kind of indescribable. But I think I can describe how I came to the brink of them, and perhaps other people can use or build on the basic techniques and discover something meaningful for themselves.

This happened on two different nights, a few days apart. On both nights I started in a deeply meditative state and then went from there. In general, I have noticed lately that my mind seems to be operating more efficiently on some kind of symbolic level. It’s hard to describe exactly what I mean by that. But I will get into places where I am no longer thinking in words necessarily. And I wouldn’t even say I am thinking in pictures, although it sometimes includes both. It might be described as “thinking in symbols.” Instead of stringing together words into sentences, it’s almost like I am stringing together instances of symbols into threads, or into narratives. They are drawn from all over: from myths, pop culture, events of my personal life, and so on. They seem to interlock and flow one to the next, and this recombination of symbolic instances reveal all kinds of insights and seems to unlock energy for me.

If you know what I’m talking about and have or regularly do experience this state, then good. If not, it may not matter. I’m not totally sure. You may be able to derive something from the exercises I’m about to describe regardless. But I feel like it’s important to convey the sort of non-linguistic mental state I was in at the time.

So here goes: the first night I struck upon the notion of imagining all the people immediately important to me in my daily life, friends, family members, romantic partners, etc. Basically the point is just to run through anyone and everyone who means something to you in your life right now. And with each one, what I did was simply to ask how each of these people see me. I don’t know who or what I was asking (my subconscious maybe?), but I started getting very strong responses. I would be able to see myself through the other person’s eyes. What I saw was almost a shape or an energy pattern of how this person experiences me. And based on how they experienced me, I was able to immediately sift through various problems, conflicts or just elements of our respective relationships.

I could see, for example, that for certain people in my life they saw only parts of me and they were extremely exaggerated or “pointy” whereas other people saw much greater swaths of who I “really am” and were consequently more accepting. They experienced me almost as though I were standing in front of a door with a breeze blowing in from behind me. It’s difficult to nail down what I mean by that, but it’s one of the images that sticks out for me and I offer it as an example of what to possibly look for in experimenting with this technique.

From this first phase of the experience, I realized a few things. One was obviously the source of interpersonal conflicts, etc. But I also realized how much we let ourselves be bound by how other people see us. We become how others see us. Sometimes intentionally, but most often not. We don’t do it to restrict one another, but it often comes out that way in the end. I also realized that with the image that each person had of me, I could retract that into myself. I could dissolve it and subsume it into the greater “me” (whatever that means).

Lastly, I realized that the way I see each of these other people in my life is fraught with the same problems and misunderstandings as the way they see me. And the reasons we have these misunderstandings and conflicts in the first place is not simply because I am not perceiving them inaccurately. But because the things I am perceiving in them are elements of myself that I have overlaid on them because something about them matches a particular pattern of my own being. And it works in reverse as well: they see the things in me that match the things in them. And the things that do not match tend to remain inscrutable to them at best, or confusing and sometimes hurtful at worst.

It’s obviously a large tangled web to unravel. But it was extremely helpful for me to reclaim and dissolve the way each of these people saw me. It enabled me to let go of all kinds of baggage, although I’m not going to lie and say that it has made me somehow perfect at relationships of all kinds. But it has helped me to take another step in the right direction and hopefully see a little more clearly.

The second phase of this experiment occurred a few nights later when I achieved a similar internal state of meditative contemplation. I realized that during my whole experiment where I envisioned how all these different people see me, I never asked the all-important question: how do I see myself? Because I realized that just as other people had mistaken or incomplete interpretations of me, and that this caused problems, I myself was also misinterpreting “me” and that this was a much much deeper source of problems in my life.

So I asked simply: how do I see myself? Projected into the space in front of me (in my mind’s eye), I saw myself as though in a mirror, wearing the same clothes, same haircut, etc. And I could see that I was happy and comfortable with not only the physical image I have of myself, but with the underlying emotional and inner picture I had of me as well. But I realized suddenly what I was looking at was fake. It was very literally a projection. So I asked where was the “true” image of me? Where was the “me that I see myself as”, not this externalized representation I could call up from my mind?

And I realized suddenly that I was it. My actual body. My actual mind. My actual emotions. Not this externalized mirror image projection I had concocted, but the actual “me” that I tend to take as simply literal (and mostly unchangeable) fact.

And this is where you can potentially enter into an incredibly slippery slope of thinking. Because you start seeing the possibility that the body and personality which you have always taken very literally (”This is me”) may actually be something different altogether. I don’t know what exactly. I can’t put it into words. But it was the brink of an understanding that part of me balked at and would go no further. Although it arose thoughts within my mind I would consider dangerous. Basically extrapolate outward from my recent magical experiment of smashing my cell phone, and apply that to my body and personality directly. I never took the thoughts seriously and recognized them for what they are: some kind of trap laid in my path, foreign to “me” altogether. But I let the thoughts unwind and watched them expend their energy. I could easily see how someone could reach this place and become utterly obsessed with them and how someone could come to believe that literal suicide would be the ultimate magick trick.

I realize this has gotten suddenly very heavy. But hey - that’s life. It suddenly sneaks up on you while you’re lounging in the bathtub daydreaming. All I can say is I want to portray as accurate as possible a picture of the place my recent line of inquiry has lead to. And encourage others to be forewarned that danger lays ahead. You simply can’t seek your own dissolution on some metaphysical level without at some point facing the fact that hey, you’re a biological being and you gotta respect that for being the beautiful and amazing miracle it is. No point in racing to the end of that particular finish line without spending a whole lot of time stopping and smelling the flowers and feeling the cool breeze along the way.

In any event, strong warnings to the weak of heart and honest assurances of my own personal mental health aside, I’m tempted to be able to draw some kind of conclusion as to my own experiences with the experiments I described above. Was I able to withdraw or dissolve the way I ultimately see myself - my body, and all the rest? I’m not sure that I was, because honestly I didn’t know where to withdraw it to nor could I conceive of how that might work. The thing that stands out in my mind right now has to do with Moses in Exodus 3 where he encounters the burning bush. He asks God whom to tell the children of Israel spoke to him. And God says, “I AM THAT I AM.” At the risk of tainting that story with my own interpretation, it seems that perhaps the ultimate source which one must ultimately withdraw oneself and one’s projection of oneself to is that same thing - the “am which am” (life?) which underlies all things and from which all things ultimately spring.

That, anyway, is my best guess. Though when I peeked into that doorway just a crack, my mind and whole being balked and began throwing up dangerous mirages to block the way. So be careful those who venture off the edges of the map. Here be dragons.