Have you ever looked out of your eyes from a place so deep inside, it’s clear you aren’t your body, nor the room around you, nor the litany of stuff you’ve collected throughout your short life?
I have, only twice in fact, despite many years of meditation trying to ‘escape’ the clutches of the physical world.
This week, most recently, and a number of years ago. The first time freaked me out, completely. I remember it well. Night time, bedroom, dark flat, clatter of Southwest trains rumbling by.
I’d woken up feeling instantly like I was inside a one person cell, looking out. Knowing I would be unable to explain the experience to anyone. Feeling trapped and frightened. Afraid that I had somehow left my body and didn’t know what to do.
No alcohol, no drugs, no illness, no precipitating circumstances. That’s what made it so frightening. I did manage to fall asleep after a while, upon which I commuted into the city the next morning without much backward thought.
The occurrence this week was much different. Hard week, hard day, physically tired. Lying there on the sofa, blanket pulled up, watching the setting sun outside the patio doors. Then it happened. That sense of watching from deep inside my body, while feeling I’m not my body.
Yet this time, it was just so peaceful. A deep sense of calm, of knowing that everything around me was unfolding as it should, that despite the hardships still to come, and the hardships going on in the rest of the world, I would survive. Thrive even.
An internal awareness completely separate to my body, not dependent on my body, not subject to my body. An awareness that could not be harmed, that would go on.
Many years have now past since I last formally mediated, and yet here it was, the thing the Buddhists used to talk about. Peace beyond the throes of this physical world. A world characterised by life, death and suffering. It was deep, meaningful, and I enjoyed it while it lasted.
Later, I turned on Celebrity Traitors, allowing ‘real life’ to descend once again.
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