Superconsciousness

I prepared by playing music in my tambo for a while; setting my timer for 35 minutes. I found a nice melody, singing along. When I repeat the same pattern with my hands on the handpan, I can allow my voice to become the part that changes, and this creates a nice resonance. But even when I was playing without singing, there was something a little emotional about the song, thinking about goodbyes, this being my last ceremony of the three month diet.

After playing and singing, I had a few minutes to stretch. Before playing the handpan, I sang for a while, just letting go and playing with the vibrato in my voice, which I’m getting better at. It seems to come more naturally, and I can control the rate with flexibility. After doing this for a while, I started feeling very good in my body. Definitely this was bringing in joy, just letting go, and not specifically singing with a medicinal purpose, as in to clean or strengthen or do work or whatever; just singing was itself the joy.

I finished getting ready, gathered my stuff, and went to the maloka. Decided I would try smoking my new pipe before ceremony, which was easier than I’d imagined. Some things aren’t as hard as I make them out to be in my mind. Particularly here, in the jungle. There’s something simple, physical, straightforward. Put the tobacco in, and smoke it. I found the right way to suck at the pipe without making much noise. Later I found that I needed to pack the tobacco more tightly. There’s a nice mouth feel to smoking the pipe, and a different taste (compared with rolled mapacho). Maybe like how drinking from a can of soda tastes different from drinking out of a glass. Maybe the material affects the taste of the soda in a very subtle way, too. It was the same with the pipe. But also, smoking it is like sipping; one continually sips because otherwise the tobacco threatens to go out.

When it was my turn to come up to receive the medicine, I drank a full dose, specified and pronounced clearly in Spanish, and the amount looked good. Drank it down with no nausea. Back at my mat, I relished the spicyness of the aftertaste, though it was strong. Over time, it’s become easier to drink. The maloka was pretty quiet. I chatted with my friend to my left for just a little bit before, and he asked me about my pipe. I gave him a literal answer, more technical, rather than talking about the taste or how it felt.

As I sat with the slowly amplifying onset of the medicine effect, I started paying attention to the images in my imaginal mind. There was that image of the woman from the painting “The Scream” again, and many of them; a vortex. They seemed endless, illuminated by a projector bulb of consciousness at the center, and mind was spinning a wrapped two dimensional grid of endless repetitions of the image. Should I just sit with this, observing it in my inner imaginal stage? Nothing seemed to be changing. I used my inner voice to find a thread of narrative guidance, but also felt stuck with the unyielding images here. Placing consciousness steadily on some area usually results in its changing or moving, but that wasn’t happening in this case. What to do with this film in my mind, which was perhaps a visual communication or reflection of unprocessed emotion (disconnected from a bodily feeling), when no tools seemed to be working? I eventually stopped watching that screen and started paying attention to something else. I talked to myself with my inner voice for a while until my medicine effect was underway.

I saw dark clouds which resolved into rapidly spinning yellow fabric fireworks. I had visions of the type where there is something I see distinctly, and then a cough elsewhere in the room jolted my brain into spinning at a frequency an order of magnitude higher, and the distinct object from before moved so fast that it was now one point of light tracing rapid paths like the electron beam in a CRT or a laser-painted picture, creating a new type of vision. The bright, lemony yellow stuff was still the intense, significant part of the pattern.

There was a point where my tinnitus surged in volume, but at its maximum this was quiet compared to the way I’d heard the damaged frequency scream as if an electrified wire in earlier ceremonies. In this final ceremony of a three month retreat where my primary intention had been to heal this hearing trauma, I felt reassured: if this is how I hear it now even under the magnifying glass of a strong effect, there has been a lot of improvement. As I journal this, the day after my thirty-second ceremony of this retreat, I still hear the faint high whistle when I plug my ears, but can’t notice it with the masking sounds of the rainforest chatter around me.

I can sing or chant, to channel the medicine, but didn’t do that very much. I got to thinking, instead. I found it healthy to just allow my body to be in whatever position it found comfortable. Although intentionally adopting a position, posture, or even gesture is a technique for cultivating a particular feeling (there’s a TED talk about this), it is also worthwhile to notice how I find myself positioned without seeking to move or adjust anything. In this case I found myself with my arms wrapped around my body, and my feet entwined over each other. I felt very narrow in width, cozy and comfortable this way, not taking up much space. I did some great thinking in this position, letting my mind wander. I’ve noticed that it’s actually hard or rare to just think. Usually my mind is choppy, waves of self-reflection frequently interrupting and seeking to readjust the thought stream.

I thought about past clients, the feel of the work I’d done, a couple office environments where software I’d written was being used, and the potential for checking up on these clients and doing future work upon my return. There was something that almost made me want to purge thinking about an old database project. I would get this sensation, and then decide, ok, the purge is not coming quite yet. The sequence happened several times. A thought arose: am I going to keep putting off the purge forever, then? In an agile act of lateral thinking, my ego tapped into a very general sort of “worry about fear of commitment” and said, “maybe I’m always ‘not quite ready’?” Respecting the purge which wanted to come, I remembered the need to trust the medicine, relaxed, and it eventually arrived. Afterwards, as always, I felt better.

After a while, I arrived at a hall-of-mirrors type of inner perception, seeing into my mind as a reflection of itself. I thought about how I’d been drawn to reflections within reflections, when I was younger, dabbling in raytraced 3-D computer graphics in college, where I could position a virtual camera so that it zoomed way in on a metal sphere which was itself a reflection in the surface of another metal sphere, and so on. A phrase popped into my head, something perfect to send to a good friend. I committed it to memory, or so I thought, but then realized I’d forgotten it already. I wondered, how can I remember such things better when they arrive and I have no writing capability? Can I learn to use my visual memory for such things, as in techniques I’ve heard about? I let go of this thread of thought, reassuring myself that the phrase would come back to me when I needed it, if it were important enough. The act of letting go, perhaps, led to pondering or meditating on freedom, connected in this case with the freedom from worry which arises from self-trust: trusting my own mind, for example, to remember or surface whatever is important at the appropriate time. Dwelling on freedom was when this episode of superconsciousness happened.

Suddenly I was free, in the atmosphere of consciousness, perceiving everything in my reality, including my feelings, as if it were a videogame, and I was flying above it. There was a wonderful feeling of separation, of healing energy coming in through the gap in perception. I concentrated on maintaining and balancing the sensation, repeating slowly, like a mantra, to maintain the connection to this space: “freedom… complete freedom…” The thought: so this is what enlightenment is like! I was thinking about Yogananda’s book (Autobiography of a Yogi) and the idea discussed when his guru is dying: that even when enlightened, when the mind is beyond birth and death, there is residual stuff in the body, which still experiences resistance to physical death. I wondered whether this sort of resistance in me was what exerted the gravitational pull towards areas of unconsciousness where my mind would gravitate back towards familiar orbital energy. Various “stuff,” like space junk, would float into view: clouds of doubt, which I could see. I found that I needed to not engage with these, and with one larger cloud in particular. I needed to kind of not quite look at it, to note that it was there but kind of move my eyes around to avoid it, because if I looked at it directly, it would come closer; avoiding it, I could remain in this superconscious space.

Meanwhile, people were purging in the maloka around me, suffering and uncomfortable and healing, and I pondered the nature of all experience as a choice of free beingness. In other words, with complete freedom, we must always be free to choose whether to experience pain or to suffer, and now within this wonderful airy surrounding conscious space I was choosing not to. If I thought about the importance of having empathy (the question: is it somehow wrong or a fault to feel so free while others are suffering; is that disconnected or un-empathetic?), I started to coalesce back into ordinary consciousness. I focused on piloting towards having compassion, lightly, while there would still be sufficient space to remain in this wonderful expanded zone.

Having widened my lens beyond the typical view in which “ordinary reality” fills almost the entire area of awareness, I was now shown a flyover perspective of “ayahuasca-cleaning-world,” the world of visions within myself that shamans also see while they are working and cleaning obscure energies. I observed a garden plot of slimy sluglike stuff reaching up, from a slight distance, at an angle below me. Floating over it, I chose not to engage with it and try to clean it, as I ordinarily would, because I saw it as just a surface, not my whole reality. I’d had the intuition that choosing to fight or clean it would catalyze going back into the game (losing my unattached state), and I was playing with staying out of it. The sluglike stuff stayed where it was and the whole garden plot retreated.

I wanted to learn to enter the game but not get attached to it, to be able to leave when I wanted (that is, to be able to willfully move my mind into this superconscious space with which I’d been graced). To create a marking on the map, to be able again to find the secret doorway.

I now entered a mode where I was still mostly superconscious, but my mind was half-occupied by reasoning and thought. The idea of “new programming” came to me, and I reflected on a task completed at my last work project, where I’d implemented a PageRank algorithm in Javascript late one night. I felt the pleasure of the purely rational thought-mode behind that work. I felt that I could apply the same feeling to update and reprogram my own mind. Meditating on the idea of “new programming,” I was working out how to change my wiring. Beyond the “ordinary” brain rewiring the medicine does, via neuroplasticity, I wanted to again fully exit the game of life (as I had done before) and change my programming from the outside, because inside of the game, its own rules are in effect, and this makes it a lot slower and stickier to change things. Even within the Matrix there are ways out, as I’d found, but with all kinds of help and guidance from within the Matrix itself. I believe one of the goals of the life-game or Matrix is for us to eventually “graduate” from it, and that it helps us to get there; it will help us more in partnership with our desire to awaken. I suspect there are many types of awakening, or glimpses, we can have, and that the experience I was having was just one flavor.

I thought of the old Wolfenstein 3-D computer game, and its prompt when choosing the “Exit” option from the menu: “Are you sure you want to exit? For guts and glory, press ’N’. For work and worry, press ‘Y’.” I reflected: As a kid, that totally conditions our view of the world outside the computer game. The game itself captures the player with that fear: Who wants work and worry? Maybe exiting the game of life is analogous. For guts and glory (stay here, attached), press ’N’. What do we fear towards pressing ‘Y’? The Wolfenstein 3-D prompt was an analogy for unknown fear towards the nature of the world outside the Matrix. But now, new programming! Let’s change that.

A detour, in this stream of expanded contemplation, as I thought about my body. It’s a beloved vehicle, like those mech suits at the beginning of the Final Fantasy III videogame, the feeling of belovedness connecting with my feeling towards that old classic game itself and my life context when I played it. Care for the mech suit (my body). Who cares for the suit? I care for it, but in the game maybe other people can help take care of it? From the “complete freedom” perspective, there’s an attachment-idea that “I” need to take care of my body, and that it’s not good to outsource or neglect it. But in life, we hire trainers, and so on. A thought flashed by of being in the gym in my superconscious state, without the need to distract or feed my ordinary mind with podcasts or reading material. Essentially, I was contemplating, metaphorically, the nature of consciousness when it is identified with the body and mind within the physical perspective (i.e., the normal waking state), seen into from a larger window where a gap surrounds the central picture. Meditation or self-observation creates this gap, but it takes focus, and the gap is narrow; in my state it took little effort and the gap was very wide.

I then received a series of tests or lessons. First: My body is next to a canyon and like a sports car that needs polishing; kind of a short corvette in the image, which is dirty and needs to be washed, waxed, etc. That seemed like something that could pull me into identification with the game, though, so I was a little suspicious. If I were to start polishing this car (healing my body, cleaning off obscuring energies), I would be drawn back into the game (ordinary consciousness) and out of superconsciousness. I reasoned: I can come back and do this any time; why does it need to be done now? So I resisted the tug of the desire for going into this vision and cleaning/polishing my body/car within the life-perspective, feeling the lure and yet some guilt about resisting it. It was more of a gentle pulling-away which I willed, a declining to do this right now. The scene changed.

I found myself in a giant room, like a laboratory or the part of The Matrix where Neo wakes up in a pod, but not with that same sense of vastness; it was just one chamber. Inside was a big fuzzy fellow, like a huge cute muppet, but a bit blurry and indistinct. The muppet was actually a child, and was holding on to a giant bottle, many times bigger than itself, which I understood to be a sort of energy battery. I recognized this fuzzy child as a part of myself, and being young, he wasn’t being coaxed away from the security of this battery / food source. I knew I couldn’t pull him away from it forcefully, because that would traumatize him, and that he had to come willingly. If I were to try pulling, he would just cling all the more tightly. (Metaphorically, you understand, this vision was showing me an attachment of part of myself to some form of visual or symbolic space.) I thought, ok, I might just need to leave him here, this part of me. But then the being started to get curious: What is the larger part of itself (me) doing? Sensing a subtle joy coming from its larger consciousness, it tentatively moved away from the giant bottle/battery. The answer here had been an appeal to curiosity. I had just needed to not worry, and to stay in the clear space. I reflected, here, on what I’d heard Ram Dass mention: Awakening is an irreversible process. I can’t truly “lose” what I have found. However, I was also working within my verbal space to pilot the ship, and I kept repeating with a gentle concentration (so that I could think and experience at the same time), “complete freedom…” as my mantra, feeling the energy of the words invoking the feeling of the space. I felt a little bit of worry that the word “complete” was an overstatement and because it itself contained worry, the use of this word would maintain that worry and thus act in a slight way to draw me back into the game, in which worry is a parameter.

So, I’m working on “new programming,” thinking of the feeling of writing code, and how does programming work, out here, in this more subtle zone? Do I just concentrate using my will, and how does it feel? I.e., how exactly is the programming getting done? That was something to ponder. As a general principle, it seemed that building the feeling of something would cause it to be the way such that the feeling would arise. In other words, the feeling is first, and the supporting cast in consciousness constructs the needed reality which yields it. And then I came to this: With my own experience of writing code (in the real world), there is one parameter in particular, which is a form of fearlessness. I thought of my friend here, a software testing manager: “Fearless Testing” could be a cool brand name for her, were she to ever start a company. The fact that testing itself is done from a position of fear (that there are bugs or problems in the code) can create a general feeling of fear associated with coding or testing itself. So “fearless testing” is the change to a mindset of absolute rationality and lack of fear. I thought of her extremely proficient teammate, and how one of his inner “settings,” as I imagined it, was that he seemed extremely fearless in writing code. Myself, I wrote code with a lot of fear, testing frequently after adding small chunks. Then the question arose, considering the conscious programs that we are: How does the program itself feel while it is being changed? (A vision of blocks crumbling away, rearranging.) As the programmer is changing his own self’s code, if the code has fear in it, then it will make the process harder and there will be resistance. My first task then: change the code/program so that the code itself doesn’t fear being changed, and allows doing so easily. At this point, because I have fear in my program, I reasoned, I’ve got to just grit my teeth, sit with it, and make that initial modification. The program’s going to feel pretty uncomfortable as it’s changed. So I sat through a bit of this. This may have been where I started coming back down into the more focused or identified lens of normal perception, thankful and in awe at having had this glimpse, while accepting the familiar reality around me.

At the peak of the experience of superconsciousness, I felt extremely grateful for the gratuitous grace of having arranged my life experience such that I could see this, and marveled at what felt to be a direct connection to what is called source energy. I had a vision that, in the game, I am, myself, connected to a tall, luminous tube of light, from which this source energy is emanating. But I was suspicious of even that. The choice was: (A) I can be in the game connected to this light and charging from its strong glow and healing warmth, or (B) I can have exited the game where no thing or symbol in reality is needed and the light is not channeled in through any particular sensory apparatus of my body or mind: rather it is everywhere and “beneath” my entire nervous system. So while being simultaneously grateful for the source-light tube, I also was choosing to select something less constrained than even that. There was a blending of energy between the symbolic duality-perception of familiar (after all these ceremonies) visionary consciousness, and the complete freedom perspective, which I yet think is different from what is meant by nonduality. But I also focused on the tremendous gratitude and love through which, as Story Waters puts it, “I am the choice of myself,” and the deep thankfulness for the parameters of my reality which had lined up to allow me to come to this experience. I intuited that I might be thanking myself as higher consciousness, which is yet me, for setting myself up with these gifts: a healthy body and mind, the right life experiences, guidance, and desire to do this healing work, and the right medicine, such that I was able to arrive at this place. In other words, to what degree do “I” get the credit? In nonduality it is not “me” doing anything anyway, so there is a paradox in the binding, in what thought can think. The phrase “gratuitous grace” came to mind, and I felt a little closer to understanding what it meant.

[I reasoned that certain concepts keep us from waking up, for example the idea that it is lucky, or arbitrary, i.e., “gratuitous,” in the sense of being “random”. How can one work towards it if so?]

So then I thought, earlier I think, I’ve been concentrating on this idea of complete freedom in choosing my experience. And likewise, other people have complete freedom in choosing theirs. As a token of this brief wondrous window, I could create an app and put it in the iOS store. It would be called the “Complete Freedom” app. My app would consist of just a blank sky blue or light teal screen (and perhaps the words “Complete Freedom” in a certain font in the center), and I was thinking, I could have it in the App Store and charge $1 for it. Then I realized, wait a second, my “complete freedom” app would cost a dollar? This struck me as so hilarious that I sat up and grasped my knees laughing silently to myself. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend, next to me, about this after ceremony! There was another moment of humor, when I reflected on the nature of jokes. If I rehearse the joke in my head and imagine the funniness of it, does that take away from its power? Am I popping the popcorn kernel and thus depleting the humor? But I speculated, no, it should be funny each time, because it’s an individual telling in participation with the audience. It’s fine to extract all the personal humor out of something, because I incorporate that into my being and can have it while even telling the joke, which helps to make it funnier. That energy of the joke-teller is what’s contagious; some people are just funny and we laugh at their simplest observations. Ultimately when I did tell the experience to my friend, though, it wasn’t that funny any more; we weren’t in a funny mood, perhaps. I had to say, in the telling, “it struck me as so funny…” and when that happens it’s not really a joke any more, it’s just a story about something. Someday I’ll make that app, though, and I really will charge $1 for it.

—

It’s Saturday night and I don’t have much energy for writing. I’m thankful that I finished writing up this ceremony. The most important part, which I expressed in the morning, concerned the consciousness change. I continue to integrate the lessons from that. I got a lesson in the lounge, when the friend I mentioned above wanted to play me something. It was the recitation of a beautiful poem which had a strong heart resonance. About being here, about this world, about the purpose, the reason we bind ourselves into it. I see this world as a vehicle for developing the heart. There is wisdom gained through this aperture of having decided to play the game, or to enroll in Earth School, perhaps. It’s indeed a grace to have been able to step outside, and to modify the programming, if indeed I succeeded at that. But the work of getting here involved opening the heart, because that’s how we are connected together as one between our separate dreams and projected realities. In other words, every person has their own matrix, and there are tunnels between them where our hearts intersect in the no-space. Perhaps there is another level beyond the superconsciousness of personal reality. I think it is the consciousness of the realities of multiple individuals simultaneously, where we are one, all dreaming our own dreams, connected through our hearts and other resonance points. Maybe this is a space where one mind’s construction isn’t that substantial, like looking out one facet of a crystal, from an interior which is all there is.