shifted

It feels like something might have shifted again last night during my dream. There is a chance I had a cessation event; the blip after my grandad plunged me into the estuary and we sank down into the darkness before he let go and I started to swim upward before appearing on the shore. The blip after following the buddhaheads to find the trapped sorceress.

“A wire, not a lantern.”

I am sat here on this ferry and I feel even less suffering and stickiness than before. The liberation of the initial nibbana encounter was explosive but this has a different flavour to it.

Over the last month or so I have noticed myself being re-containerised as I sleep; when I woke I would have reintegrated the habit of self, and my mind would have felt somewhat congealed.

This morning I have woken and I do not feel that way. My mind and my consciousness feel fluid and free. I am aware of the consciousness, as opposed to ‘being’ the consciousness. I can feel it extending out somewhat from the sides and back of my head, like a flow of gentle warm water.

This is reminiscent of the echoes of nibbana the first time round, but without the overpowering intensity. First time it was like someone had opened a river of galactic awareness through my skull and the entirety of reality was flowing through me unfiltered, washing away the formation of self.

This time it feels like… there is warm water being poured over my mind from all sides and my brain is receptive to it. Like a warm bath over sore muscles making those muscles relax, so too does this feel like a warm massage for the rear parts of my brain; the back-and-lower half of my mind.

I do not feel resistance or struggle. Even less than before. I woke and sat and my brain was not sticky despite it being the first meditation of the day. I did 15 minutes letting my attention go where it would, and I did not struggle. 

A few thoughts appeared and they were just another object for consciousness to envelop and then release, and a tannoy announcement came on for breakfast and I was not bothered; there wasn’t even a micro-irritation about having whatever state I was in damaged, because it did not damage the state I was in; the consciousness moved and enveloped that announcement, instead. 

The morning sit did not have the clarity of the one last night but it had more ease. It was like the work had been done and the wood dislodged and my only job was to see how things were flowing.

I went for breakfast and it was all effortless. Choosing the food. Looking at people. It just felt like I was part of the water, and the water was me.

I am trying to tear this apart a little to see if there is anything untrustworthy about it but I cannot find it. A man has just come to sit next to me in this previously empty saloon at the front of the ship and I feel no aversion or irritation. He is just there and I am just here and this is how things were always going to be.

This text is writing itself. I am not writing it. I did not plan to write this piece and I will be back to documenting how to do cycle tours for meditation soon I am sure. But for now, this is the raw feeling of the morning and this raw feeling is new.

Where the previous encounter felt chemical and explosive, this one feels… liquid and massaging. It feels like releasing into the flow; like when you are in the ocean and you put your head under and let yourself go slack, so that the waves gently bob you around like an amorphous blob of seaweed. 

I am speaking like I encountered nibbana again in my sleep, I just realised. This is not intentional either. And if I did encounter it, the encounter was very very different to the first time. I do not know, is the simple answer; let’s see if there is a lasting change.

It was my dead grandad launching me off the pier of consciousness, gleeful and full of youth, our sailing though the air and then plunging into an eternally deep and ever-moving body of water, where the river meets the sea and where all things come to one.

I feel like the sorceress was maybe the dhamma, and the two buddhaheads in the eternal field of curry-rice were the teachings in our consumerist times. Maybe. Again this is writing itself; I am just opening my mind to the flow that is coming in / out / whatever.

It all feels so gentle and peaceful, but nothing has changed in me on a chemical level this time round, I am fairly sure. This time it is an opening to the external; the flow that winds its way through all of us and all of spacetime. This is flowing through me and I do not feel like a tightened rapid or a meandering corridor; instead I feel like a tranquil pool of swirling current.

How did I live my entire life not knowing that this existed? 

This is the 理 (ri) I was talking about when I said 理に流れ、宇宙や人へ、善き波紋. The universal flow to which you surrender, and by surrendering to which you create positive ripples in the universe itself.

What is consciousness? It is not me. It is not-not me. It is yet another flow, just like the material elements that make up our bodies.

Where does this all come from?

How have we been convinced we are alone?

/jb202509290902