Speaker 1: 0:53

I have a question about my personal experience with Ayahuasca. I feel like I haven't had a deep meditation for years and it feels like I'm not questioning that, but my meditations. I feel that it was short but I hadn't found depth and kind of transcending my mind, jumping into kind of the thoughts I looked at the last moment that happened. So these days my meditations feel like my body is very happily still and I kind of feel like I transcend the physical body very easily. The hands disappear, the body kind of, like you know, but I feel like the mind and the thoughts are just don't want to shut up. They're constantly present and I definitely feel like I can hold it might run as much more and the thoughts are part of everything I'm holding when I'm meditating. But I feel like I don't want to use the word stuck because I don't do it stuck, but I'm kind of. Yeah, I'm wondering why I don't feel the deeper, transcendent and why the thoughts are all the time present.

Speaker 2: 2:17

Great question with a great answer to it. The simple reason is that you are now in oceanic consciousness. Prior to learning to meditate, you were in surface level of the ocean consciousness, where you were mostly identified with the rising and falling of waves that made up the drama and the circumstances that preoccupied your mind and where you drew meaning and a sense of yourself. Drew meaning and a sense of yourself mostly identified with the relative temporal fluctuations of the gross material world. When you first learned to meditate, there was a stark contrast in experience. When you started to transcend into these deeper, more abstract awareness states and the moving beyond what you were used to as your gross level of awareness, into these subtler states, felt like you were going really deep and, relatively speaking, you were Relative to what you were used to. You were going profoundly deep and then, over time, through the repetition, going deep and then coming out. Going deep, coming out, what's occurring is the reestablishment of awareness or the remembering of your being, of what you are. Beyond your ideas, beyond the constructs of reality, you are having the direct experience of yourself and that is to say reality in the truest sense, and that becomes increasingly more familiar and, as a result, stabilized in your awareness, and the byproduct of that is a profound shift in your eyes-open state. You would have noticed, within the first three to six months, all kinds of interesting changes that were just there spontaneously, no sort of premeditated effort, such as adapting to change more easily, recovering from unmet expectations more easily, less reactive to things you otherwise would be reactive. More insightful, spontaneously, about the nature of things, specifically yourself and why you do things or why you avoid things. More insight, patience and compassion for others, less judgmental more insight, patience and compassion for others, less judgmental all these kinds of things. More creative, a more accurate and efficient way of processing emotions and conflict and challenges. You would have noticed that right across the board these changes, and then them incrementally amplifying, but the increments can be so subtle that you don't notice the creep of expansion. If you were, however, to jump back into the body of yourself two years ago, you would feel like you are in a very, very cramped, uncomfortable container, and yet two years ago you may have felt as expansive as you've ever been.

Speaker 2: 6:07

With all of that said, what's happening in your meditation is that there isn't really anywhere to go. You've transcended enough to have established depth. You've reclaimed the vertical space in your mind. In order to have done that, you would. You, you had to have gone from shallow into deep and then back out. And you can say, oh, I went deep, how do I know? Because I lost awareness of where I was. And then I came back out and I noticed myself coming out of great depth into a more sort of surface level experience. And so there's more sort of surface level experience, and so there's that sort of relative perspective that's there to reference. And then over time, you've noticed that the depth of your meditation isn't as obvious, and that is simply because you are established at the depth of yourself and at the surface of yourself.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Oceanic consciousness. You're not just the surface, you're not just beneath the surface, you're not just the layers within the ocean or just that sort of transcendental bed of being of the ocean. You are all of it simultaneously. And if you are all of it simultaneously, then there is nowhere necessarily for you to go. You just are wherever you are.

Speaker 2: 7:46

And what you notice in your meditation is that you close your eyes, the body moves into a great rest, is that you close your eyes, the body moves into a great rest pretty quickly, and yet nothing seems to change in the mind. Fascinating. If you were to have you connected up to an EEG machine, a catheter and a bunch of other biometric instruments, what it would reveal is that you're in a profound state of rest Deep, deep rest the whole system's yet you remain alert and active. This is a profound thing To get into those kinds of states. For the average person they need to be comatose.

Speaker 2: 8:37

You're doing, you know, checking off your shopping list In rest, you know, some would argue three to five times deeper than the deepest rest in a good night's sleep. So we always revert back to one of our main mottos we're not meditating for an eyes-closed experience, we're meditating for an eyes-open experience. We don't really mind what happens with our eyes closed, it's what's happening with our eyes open. And you qualified your statement by saying now you know my meditation's is awesome. It's not gratifying like it used to be, but I know it's doing good because my eyes open experience is awesome. I'm evolving, I'm changing, my sensitivity is increasing, I'm advancing, but I'm just not going deep.