After I had a moment beyond dissociation within deep stillness…A question formed: What am I? It was very interesting and I still think about it. We have all these words to describe the process of ego, relating our ‘reality’ with truth as our being experiences it. And even if we recognize something bigger afoot it is either rationalized as either science having the answers or some explanation through religion. Two experiences after this question shaped my disillusionment of perfect answers.

The first was a moment of stillness, emptiness that allowed me to know where I came from and where I will go. I discovered in a moment my connection to my parents and the patterns I’ve either consciously, unconsciously, or genetically inherited. My mind literally expanded beyond the universe and contracted to sub-atomic particles in about 5 seconds because I wondered what it would be like. But I’ve wondered since then, what is my reach, my potential as a self-realized human. Am I really reaching my full potential as a human? Is this temporary form a celebration or a vehicle to something better? It must get better than this?! The awesomeness of human experience is very drawing but it is so tiring. The dramatic unending cycles of fear and suffering have got to stop. I’ve got to stop giving in to this pretentious lie that what we are experiencing is actual reality, and that it is in fact an interpretation. I asked all of this because of a moment which seemed like a lifetime.

The second experience was because the first happened, a natural succession. The second was an ecstatic state. In shamanism, and it should be noted that shamanism is differentiated from traditional medicine by its focus on the ecstatic states aka trances, which is something that cannot be learned but achieved. At the point of this experience I had no idea about shamanism and what depths it could work at, and even now, I’m not capable of what I’ve been told by my teachers as possible. I’m not someone that lets go of events easily partly because I’m curious to explore the depth they can manipulate me; and tied into this I very grounded which adds to the near impossibility of letting the mind go. Interestingly enough, ‘I’ disappeared, completely. ‘I’ don’t know where ‘I’ went, how long ‘I’ was there or exactly what happened, but when ‘I’ came to, my body was paralyzed, but my conscious mind was beginning to ‘boot up’ again as I sit there in my bedroom.

My first thought, “Breathe.” I discovered my mouth, but it wouldn’t move/open. I go up, find my nostrils, “Air.” I go up further, discovering my brain, “Information.” I follow the flows of information, first finding different functions then waking up the muscles slowly and finally my right leg. After I get up my ears hear this very loud stuff coming from the computer and I turn the speakers off. I see a mirror, I wave, ‘I’ call my name, perplexed ‘I’ ask, “What am I?” I recognized myself as myself but the body, it was as if I forgot what form I was in and what a human was.

I’m not sure how to put this more clearly, but from that day on, I’ve always been an admirer of the simplicity of direct experience. We can talk all we like about spirituality. We can go to all the weekend workshops and ‘healings’ we can afford, but really what we need is time in stillness. Nobody can do that for us. Gurus put us on a path, they are not our salvation, we are. The next great business Yoga, is that there’s no business Yoga, there’s actual practice of spirituality not in a class, but at home, at the office, within and without. The great thing business Yoga is doing is providing a stepping stone, but the physical and energy are not all that is there. In the stillness of the mind, we find emptiness, or rather the fullness of emptiness. The terrible wall that is being put up is that Yoga has become business, that it is a physical exercise, that it is a sub-culture to be exploited materialistically. Great, first the body, then the mind, but where is your mind? It’s not going to magically develop from stretching with coordinated breathing, and angels aren’t going to come from the sky presenting you with a golden certificate of enlightenment. These delusions of grandeur need to cease and desist like a bad case of Nigerian spam.

Where are we going depends on what we are doing right now. All the bad habits, decisions, and garbage in the mind can be changed by disciplining yourself to doing something that will engage in self-awareness. The moment you can start paying attention to yourself is the moment you start changing everything. The brain automatically rewires itself during every thought, so we are not hardwired with predispositions; we are in fact taught that we are so that we are prevented from thinking we can change. Some things are harder to change because we don’t have conscious access, but the more we become aware of our self, the more we are able to change and become our own master. It all starts from a stillness, a focus on one thing, forgetting about the outside world, to open the doors to the inside world. In Taoism, and probably any other ideology that is set up for developing human potential, it is vital to understand the small universe, self, before trying to understand anything else.

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