Chemical Free High


Remember Steve Martin's bit on how to be a millionaire? "FIrst get a million dollars." So how do you get a chemical free high? I would say "first, get chemical free," but that would be absurd. You are chemicals. These chemicals are connected to emotions. Likewise the motor reflexes are connected to intention. If you intend to stand up, for example, the muscles have to organize at a micro level, first, to accomplish the macro movement. So imagination is connected to muscle organization and body chemistry.

So you more accurately learn how to affect your own chemistry from deep trance. It's free of externally introduced chemicals.

The trance state is comparatively empty, which means there are very few events processed simultaneously. This provides an experience of expanded time, which has often been described as feeling "one with everything." If there is no time then there is no separation between events, so obviously they all occupy the same point. This may be what is described as Nirvana, I guess.

You not only get the health benefits of hypnosis, you also get to be a Psychic Master of Time and Space. There are not a lot of job openings for that particular position but you will shine as a blackjack dealer in Las Vegas. This is the opposite of the time space relativity in which time appears to move across a static background of space. So in a place where only one event is being processed at a time, you have the Zen Master.

"When you cut the bread, cut the bread."

"You are a slice."

So here is one way to begin to stop the internal dialogue, and visit the realm of quiet mind:

First, you have to find a period of time each day when you can be completely alone and undisturbed. This is only necessary when you begin. Later on you can clear your mind even when the alarm is going off, and lose whatever menial day job you have managed to secure, so that the casino night job will become sensible.

The process of going inside is one of learning to relax, first. The reason you have to do this is that you cannot stop the patterns in your muscles. You can however shift from an older pattern to a newer one, but only when you come to a stop, from which the transition can be made. This was the great discovery of F.M. Alexander, whose Alexander method derived from his problems with breathing correctly as an actor.

He found that there are unconscious patterns in the musculature which can be changed, but that to change, one has to stop the old pattern first. The new one can't just be an overlay. I'm not trained in the Alexander method, though I'd like to be. Much of my training comes from my own practice, which began with quieting the internal dialogue.

A good first step for stopping internal dialogue is learning to identify with the part of your mind that hears, as well as the part that speaks. It may help to think of these two things as yin and yang. The speaking part is active and penetrating. The part that listens is passive and receptive. It is in the balance between these two forces that one becomes a Chinese sage. Again, if you check Craig's List, there's not a single help wanted opening for a Chinese sage, but you'll look cool doing Oolong tea and almond cookies with your Asian friends.

I just came back home from having coffee with Jim, and he was mentioning how difficult it is to know how to behave with Chinese people, when they are speaking a language so foreign you can't even guess what they're talking about. "I leaned that the key is being quietly respectful," he said. "And when they see that you are respectful with the old, and the poor, and mentally challenged people who come to the center, then they are the most open and generous people you ever want to meet."

I have found the same thing with Asian people. They are traditionally respectful of each other as a matter of pride. If they behave in a disrespectful way they bring shame not just on themselves, but on their family and associates.

The nature of respect is that there are always two spaces you keep in yourself. One is yang. It is the guest others make space for.

The other is yin. It is where you make room for the guest. Make too much room and there is the discomfort of imbalance. Don't make enough room and there is likewise the discomfort of imbalance. This is the basis of Chinese medicine, and the balancing of the energy channels. All healers I have known balance energy. I'm sure there are some very reputable healers who do it by shaking your bones and driving out the devil but I don't know those people.

The first step in the relaxation meditation is to have a center from which you explore and to which you return should you find yourself moving out of balance. The heart chakra is a good place to center, because it is objective. It seeks balance between the spirits, above, and the organic realm below. This chakra is in the center of the top of the chest.

The objective nature of the heart chakra allows the heart meditation to be centered in an organic pump, as opposed to, say, a scene from a romance story.

The collective unconscious eventually reveals itself to be patterns built over mathematical structures, and all of the major patterns can be found in Shakespeare, according to Brugh Joy. The major patterns underly all important fiction. When they are not the foundation you get what James Joyce calls pornography.

So meditation and Shakespeare are probably as good as any other path of personal development. Just to be safe you might include some Francis Bacon and Jim Thompson.

The actual entry into meditation, once the mind has been prepared for the exercise, is of course the breath. The breath can move and touch the way your hands do. By learning to travel along the breath and use it as a sense organ, you explore the entire body. So begin with something that engages your attention, such as breathing in through the bottoms of the feet, drawing the breath up the body on the inhale, and releasing out the upper back and neck, down to the sacrum, on the exhale.

This gives you both consciousness of the entire body on the inhale, and deepening back down into trance while moving awareness into the brain stem and sacrum. You want to get those connected and be able to run energy between them with some efficiency to have the full experience of being a snake. It might seem inconsequential at first glance but think about why white people can't dance. They're afraid of their snake, having been warned that it, like Snow White's mother, is peddling poison apples.

The inhale is always yang, or charge, the exhale discharge, or deepening. To deepen is to release the muscles, the way you do when you go to sleep. Except you don't lose awareness. With practice you can move in and out of the collective unconscious with some facility, and take whatever you need, as it's mostly what has been left unattended and unclaimed.

This carries no promise of reward, and may be a lot like the artists who pick up trash on the street to make into artwork. As with any art, you are welcome to what you find in it, but you still have to earn a crust, pay your taxes and die.

So as you follow the breath, you want to begin to pay attention to the part of you which speaks, or the internal dialogue. The first thing you notice about it is that it skips around. It is thinking about one thing and then another thought comes by and it follows it off in a different direction. This is because it can only pay attention for a limited time. So this mind needs to be focused if it is going to cooperate in deepening the trance.

The way to focus it is to remind it of your intention, which is to relax all the muscles in order to stop the process of unconscious patterns. To do this you employ a simple but effective device, which is repeating over and over again what you are doing. This doesn't allow the mind to wander away.

For example, you are going to begin with the relaxation of the right arm. You begin to repeat to yourself, "My right arm is heavy." You use "heavy" because it has a literal meaning, and the trance depends on your moving to absolute literal meaning. After all, you want to move down into the body, which is materialized, not back up into the abstracted realm in which you normally exist.

You will begin to notice the tendency of the mind to be distracted by passing thoughts, when you have decided to focus it into the body. For example, "Did I leave the oven on?" or, "This is bullshit. People in India do this and they're impoverished. Maybe that's why." Pretty soon you have drifted off into thought. One thought led to to the next.

When thinking is not connected to the rhythms of the body, and moves thought to thought, it is very fast. It also gathers neurosis very quickly. When there is time enough, the body should always be included, and in the long run it saves time by developing intuition. While somebody else is running the whole logical program you just collect the answer you need. The computation runs so much faster in the unconscious it seems to be instantaneous, as with savant skills.

"Forty-two."

But back to the trance entrance.

You move from, "My right arm is heavy," to, perhaps, "my right arm is very heavy, or, heavy as lead." Then to the left arm, with the proviso that the right arm continues to grow heavier, then to the right and left legs, and finally generalize the heaviness into the entire body with a phrase such as, "Heavy as lead," or, "Heavier with every breath." The amount of time it takes for each arm or leg depends on your experience and practice. At first it probably takes between a half hour and an hour to reach a state of full relaxation.

Mastering this self-relaxation technique is the opening for more extensive exploration in the realm of nature. I forgot to mention that the jaw muscle is generally very unconscious, as are the muscles in the pelvic basin. It's a good idea to take conscious control of them and relax them at the start, and check back in with them with every shift of phrase, to prevent unconscious contractions from going unnoticed.

The other variable which can affect the depth and healing power of the trance is the emotional content of the inner voice. "Heavier with every breath" is a phrase and it can be repeated without much emphasis, or it can be infused by the imagination with heaviness. The sensation of heaviness is extensor dominant. Any contraction and you move toward lightness. This is why a dead man is hard to lift.

When using inner direction, such as, "I am getting heavier with every breath," the more space and emphasis you have in the phrase, the more focus it takes to do it. The focus on one thing eliminates the chatter, because you will begin to notice that the chatter, or what is sometimes called the monkey mind, depends entirely on your generosity. It cries and you feed it, like Eraserhead's baby.

When you refuse to identify with it, it has no substance. Not all parasites feed on blood, but they all feed on energy. So when the inner chatter starts, shift the identification away from what is speaking, to what is hearing. Then introduce consciousness into the speaking part, by insisting on the importance of pacing and emotional aesthetic as a gesture of respect toward the host, or space that hears.

In this way, the balance between yin and yang force can be explored. The voice is always a guest, and the silence always a host. They are equally respected.

Once the ability to enter the trance has been achieved, you can make your own meditations. One example, of a meditation I have used with clients, is of a pastoral painting. The only instruction is that the painting contain a dwelling around which there is cultivated land, balanced within a setting of wild nature. The elements of the top down organization of the cultivated section are brought into harmonious balance with the bottom up ecological intelligence of Nature.

In the cultivation of this balance, there are several external disciplines that can be employed, from the green tea ceremony to Tai Chi, from calligraphy to aikido.

The benefits of oriental balance go well beyond increased health and vitality. Just as one example, religious extremists become oxymorons instead of just run of the mill morons.

Posted: Tue - October 9, 2007 at 02:05 PM