Clearhat

First, a brief summary. This morning during meditation I was deep in my heart, listening, when I found myself arriving into a rare condition of clarity. It seemed to me as though I had entered a holy place within my soul, where the veil between heaven and earth is fading. My attention was in a state I call "abeyance": highly sensitive yet not attached to anything. It takes weeks or months of mundane daily meditation to arrive at a place like this, each smaller meditation incrementally approaching the mountain top of greater ones like this. In this abeyance, I encountered a series of thoughts about the nature of good & evil and it seemed as though my thoughts were in the form of angels having a casual conversation about how love can transform evil back into its original form, good.

Within this metaphor, it seemed as though the language was ancient and beyond words, the language of the heart, where Being what is communicated is more important than Speaking it. It is primarily a language of action, where words are secondary because they lack power in comparison to being. As I have been studying Wittgenstein lately^[1], I understand this intellectually, but in the meditation I gained a new sense of how it works.

For example, as part of the language of Being, I discovered silence is an invisible robe worn by the Holy Ghost. The stillness is part of the communication. It's not just a nice quiet place to communicate, it is the communication.

This is really beyond words, but these words will suffice. As the experience unfolded I saw how humility is needed during deeper meditations because, like the touch of a finger to a floating soap bubble, the wave function of certain truths can collapse at the lightest perturbation from the ego, leaving but a memory of beauty, along with fragments of slowly decohering insight. The insight remains as but a memory of the coherence which was being lived in that moment.

Among the insights that perambulated through the air, the one most memorable was the experience of "Awaken the deep." Here is a little closer look at the whole experience with emphasis on that aspect:

Giving words to the wordless deep

I was seeing with my heart, as my outer eyes were closed. I wanted to remember and later write about what I was experiencing, but I was in a place where words are less important than images.

As awareness reached out toward the language center of my brain, the words "awaken the deep" formed, not thundering and lightning from the mountain like Moses talking to the Father, nor even casually walking among the people like Jesus, but in a quiet, powerful way there was an abiding stillness of the Holy Ghost present. As the words came through my awareness, I saw with my heart the deep, like a dark ocean beneath me which must be akin to what is described in Genesis 1:2: "Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

I somehow knew this deep was "sleeping," and it had been dormant for a very long time, awaiting the day when it could be safely awakened.

The deep is the origin of all power, I could sense. This deep is inexorable, meaning there is no way to stop it once awakened. Therefore, the deep is pure and raw power which flows only after a way is prepared, for its inexorable motion would destroy everything otherwise. Its power moves upward like a volcano, but steadily, like a train.

The deep knows its strength and patiently waits until everything is in order before moving. I have no idea what made it sleep long ago, but it felt as though the deep said "prepare me a way before I awaken" as its final words before sleeping. The great power of the deep comes from the unification of Being and Speaking -- when the deep speaks, it becomes, not with words, but with action. Words cannot contain the deep -- only something more powerful, like action, movement, is required. It is like a fire that burns any container until it is placed within a container that can handle its energy.

There is a long-awaited cry which changes everything: "Awaken the deep."

Not a voice like a trumpet on top of the mountain. That is the way being prepared. Once that preliminary cry from the mountaintop has gone forth and filled the whole earth -- so that Mercy has her way before Justice divides Good from Evil^[2] -- then, and only then, the deep can be awakened safely. Apparently, that preparation concluded just before my meditation, because I got to see the beginning of the awakening, as part of a storyline within my soul that had obviously been underway for weeks, months, even years in some ways. I could sense these different-aged threads of awareness weaving together to make a single narrative experience.

Moving like the low-frequency sounds of an earthquake which are felt by animals before we finally see the earth rolling and splitting open, those deep rhythms which are the origin of all power began to rumble, or let me say it like this: r u m b l e, deep within the deep as The Deep slowly and gradually awakened.

For hours after the meditation concluded, I felt that power flowing through my awareness, and had to re-write the beginning of this article several times because the words were more on the Being side than the Speaking, and thus did not make sense when I came back later to edit them.

Profundity interrupted by a meaningless pun

While I was considering this scene, some poorly-trained fragment of my mind spoke a phrase which was completely out of context. What this corner of my mind said was trivial, one of those cute little puns which stick in your mind for a few days as some part of yourself tries to figure out what it means and keeps blindly injecting it into other thought patterns, in hopes that it will match something meaningful.

Although the content of the small pun was trivial, its structure was not, and for that reason the beautiful scene unfolding in deep meditation kept being interrupted with this short, trivial, phrase. Structurally, there were three parts to the pun, and this tripartite structure became important to the meditation, teaching me something important about the nature of Good and Evil and precisely how to transform the latter back into the former.

The first part of the pun was nearly meaningless. The last part also. In the middle was a pivot which made all three pieces fit together nicely.

Embedded in the pivot was what made it funny^[3]: a lightly condescending insult about a certain class of people who normally carry authority and power within our culture. This was the attraction of the pun: it allows the listener to laugh momentarily at the follies of the powerful, to feel better than them for a brief moment, released in a socially-acceptible way called laughter. However appropriate the pun was when I heard it on a radio show the day before, in this inner environment it was out of context, a triviality of ego interrupting a profundity of soul.

I drifted the pun away, in a manner known to anyone who meditates often, and let my attention turn again to the insights arising from the conversation between angels. After a pause, the pun returned. I knew then I needed to briefly focus on dismantling it or it would keep returning. So I turned my attention to the pun and allowed my mind to pull it apart analytically. This is when I saw the tripartite structure, and began focusing on the central portion, where the insult lived.

On dismissing a recurring thought

I learned long ago that when you have a repeating thought or song in your mind, it's because your subconscious is trying to understand some riddle within it and keeps bringing it to the surface in different contexts, in hopes that differing contexts will reveal something that "solves" the riddle. Therefore, I learned, you can dismiss such thoughts by solving the riddle.

For example, there is a children's song called "This is the song that never ends" which has a few silly verses and then repeats. If this is stuck in your mind, simply "end the song" by adding a verse like: "until one day, the song ended, and that was that."

You may have to repeat the ending a couple times -- work within its internal context -- but once you get used to the technique, often a single time is enough: The subconscious sees that the riddle is solved, sighs with relief, and moves on to processing other things.

So I looked more closely at the central element, and saw where ego was embedded in it. Ego is often well-hidden (this aspect is at the core of its nature), but in this environment, where Grace and Love were flowing in delicate silence, the embedded insult was obvious: It was out of place, even moreso than the silly pun.

So I rewrote it.

I changed the insult portion into it opposite -- something loving -- and glued the beginning and ending back on. Then I let the improved pun drift away and... it worked! It never returned, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the profound experience without further interruption.

The meaningless becomes meaningful

Two things came of this seeming detour. They showed that the pun-rewrite was not a detour at all, but an essential aspect of a more profound experience -- in fact, a key which unlocked all the meaning of the moment:

In the process of solving the riddle, I had engaged an analytical language center of my brain and an "opposite-seeking" region as well. These two would often be dormant during a deep meditation like this, but there they were, looking for something to do as I returned awareness to the underlying "awaken the deep" experience. Thanks to the awakened language center, I began realizing that my attention should send a message upward to higher layers of consciousness, in order to write about everything, as I am now.

I searched for an opposite within my awareness so I could gather more context^[4]. This is a technique I've learned for putting words around something beyond words. Answering the query for "What is the opposite of 'awaken the deep'?" my mind promptly found Isaiah's "Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet."^[5] This passage from Isaiah is a voice from atop a mountain. A mountain is the opposite of a deep. As soon as I found this, the language center connected to the poetic nature of Isaiah's writing, and from that point forward, fragments of unwritten poetry ambled through my mind while I quieted myself in order to listen better to the silence.

A touch of heaven in the heart of a writer

As a writer, I can say there are few more sublime joys than what I was experiencing at that moment: in an aether where profound fragments of poetry were floating around with a deep connection to the prophet Isaiah, and a mysterious deep-awakening which needed to be communicated to the world, while angels named Grace and Love continued to casually reveal secrets of creation, all happening in a place where ego had been silenced and holiness reigned in its proper place.

In the manner of gracefully concluding engagement with the language center, on the way back into silence, being and speaking became one in a way I never knew before. I found myself speechless yet desiring to speak enough such that something intermingling Being and Speaking came forth from the heart to the mind.

I learned something important as this unfolded:

Speaking with nuance -- and especially articulate nuance -- this is a gift of the mind with its towers of ego, able to see far but unable to feel (analagous to the difference between thunder and lightning^[6]). Perceiving like the opposite of a blind man, the mind clearly sees the simple oneness of Being and Speaking which comes from the heart. The heart thinks in pictures and actions, with almost no words.

The mind perceives the heart saying something simple like me want, and divides it into a more eloquent "I would like thus-and-such." And then divides again, and again, each division defining the thus-and-such and the desire, creating more articulate language out of simple desires, but also losing the heart's unity between speaking and being.

When what you speak is who you are, fewer words are spoken. When what you speak is separated from who you are, many words are spoken.

How oneness divides: A division which is not a division

The mind does division differently than the heart. The mind is fundamentally divided; division is its bicameral^[7] nature. The heart is fundamentally a singularity; unification is its nature, which is why it is the origin of love.

Thus the heart divides, or analyzes, more like the Holy Ghost which operates entirely within spirit: A division of spirit is simultaneously the most absolute and the least absolute kind of division because Love encompasses all in all, meaning that the underlying unity of all is never broken. In other words, a division within The Absolute cannot itself be absolute -- doing so would create two absolutes, which never happens -- but it can get close.

In other words, spirit divides spirit like water divides water, without the lonely degrees of isolated separation common in mortality. Spirit never loses sight of the middle which divides temporarily but is always also the All, and thus there is no "excluded middle" in heaven. The logic of heaven is non-binary.

Note this is the kind of paradoxical framing which make better sense to the heart than the mind. The heart encounters "spirit divides spirit like water divides water" and creates an image within itself of a clear river of water flowing within a clear sea of water. The underlying oneness is obvious, although the division is already dissipating as it appears, but that happens with everything in the heart. There is no unchanging boundary between the two waters. Makes sense to the heart. Meanwhile, the mind encounters these words and remains baffled, asking itself "how can water divide water?"

The underlying unity is not in the mind. But the mind has access to the heart, and thus the ternity of the bicameral mind with the singular heart abides^[8].

After awhile, the moment was complete, and I concluded the meditation. The message I sent from deep in the depths arrived to my conscious awareness, and I came to the computer so I could write about the experience. As I mentioned earlier, the first paragraphs I wrote were so entangled with the language of the heart they were nearly incoherent. I ended up re-writing the whole first section a couple times.

Having written thus far, I am saddened by the loss of so much that was beautiful and precious this morning before dawn. It is gone from my memory. I had so much more to write, such poetry and power. But alas, all I can remember now is what I have already written. I do not fully understand what I have written. Perhaps there will be another experience that makes more sense of this one. This is enough for now.

[Update: Two months later I had another equally profound meditation and wrote a private journal entry which can only be described as the sequel to this adventure. Themes like "awaken the deep" and "part of a storyline within my soul that had been underway for weeks, months, even years" were repeated, which I discovered only as I came back to read this because it seemed related. Unfortunately it was written in that raw, half-coherent language like what happened at the beginning of this present narrative and it hasn't been edited. To summarize briefly: I saw the beginning of the universe, which began in darkness, and the period of time at 380,000 years after the Big Bang when the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation shows that photons first became 'visible.' In its raw state, I'm not publishing the journal entry online, but as these things always come in threes, I'm already looking forward to what I experience along these lines in mid-January of 2024. Perhaps that one will be one I can share here. (written November 18, 2023)]

[Update: "These things come in threes," and, we're up to nine so far at this point. Clarifying: I had a powerful meditation experience a few days before the one just described which at first did not seem related, but then another a few days after (making three within a week). The last of the three I did publish online. It happened Thanksgiving Day 2023. Then December 16, another powerful "Awaken the deep" meditation came, which I also published online. The article for that is quite long. It took several weeks to write, during which time several smaller meditations came, each one refining what I was writing. Clearly this present entry from September 15 was the beginning of a large-scale and fascinating adventure which is still ongoing as of mid-January 2024. With a current total of nine meditations involved, I expect more will come, as I continue to meditate daily. (written January 16, 2024)]