night terrors

I have been awaking at night, usually in the early hours of the morning, having had a dream with some unsavoury end, or sometimes its not unsavoury but still strikes me with a resonance of a kind – like seeing a future time, or having connected with another person (whose identity i can’t always fix) in an intimate and powerful way. I’ve talked before on here in a rambling way how i think we do experience the future, or possible futures, or nearly related present moments, in our dreams and meditations. If we let go of the idea that “I am my body” then we are free to wander in dreams and this earthly existence becomes just one facet of a larger, longer life which we are engaged in, one which we are living in multiple directions at once, connecting with many people, connecting and reconnecting, in part of one big adventure or battle which is perhaps in the future but its seeds are now, we are creating it now with our deeds and thoughts. We are packing the contents of the shrödringer’s boxes right now, charging the possibilities, to be unpacked later, elsewhere.

When my mental activity becomes too frantic and particularly when it dwells on various crises around the world that are happening or might still happen, I use meditation techniques to draw myself together. I return in my mind to Arunachala, the Ramana Ashram there, and i am sitting on a pink granitic rock meditating in the presence of the Shiva, the ultimate, and everything calms down. I focus on ‘I’, the very sensation of existence, sometimes with a vague sense of my heart chakra (i used to mediate in a way that focused energy on my third eye and it became a bit kind of destabilising after a while to do that). I do this lying in bed on my back, sometimes with my legs crossed in half lotus. It doesn’t matter what position you are in too much, because the meditation soon makes the body seem like a transparent shell that can be thrown off. It does take a lot of effort to return to ‘I’ again and again, after each new thought train takes off. I find myself chuckling at the absurdity of the exercise, but slowly the efforts settle in and a deeper connexion is made. Everything is occurring as it should be. We are not in control, but are merely witnessing, playing the roles that our bodies have been born to play. This is the rock at which i arrive after a short while, and it is good.