Floating - Sensory Deprivation

Nara and I went to Blue Light Floatation today to float for an hour in a sensory deprivation (float) tank. This is a large, bath tub like pool of water housed in a completely dark enclosure. The water is heated to skin temperature and has 1,000 pounds of epsom salt dissolved in it. The effect is that you float, free from touching anything other than the water, which, because of the temperature, is hard to distinguish from your skin. Your ears rest just below the water and the room is silent. It is pitch black, so there was literally no difference if my eyes were open or closed. There is nothing to smell other than a bit of ozone in the room and assuming my mouth is clean and closed, not much to taste either. They haven't come up with a way to deprive the idea sensing organ (brain) quite yet.

Upon entering this quite nice facility (actually owner Sam Zeiger's home) we were sat down and given a brief orientation to the facility and how to use it. Before entering the tank we showered and immediately upon exiting we showered again. Other than that, and how to turn off the light once in the tank, there wasn't much to learn. The tank is nice in that it has very high ceilings. From what I can tell most tanks require you to climb through a door into a box about 4 feet high. This was very spacious.

Once in the room with the tank I got naked, entered the tank and laid down.......and floated, for one hour. It is an interesting feeling to be free from the senses, to feel the body relax, or not relax, as it attempts to maintain tension or posture when it is so obviously not needed. Much of my time was spent feeling and hearing my body. I could hear/feel my heart beating in my ears. I followed my breath as it moved in through my mouth, down my throat and filled up different areas of my lungs; stomach, chest, back etc.

--------Edited per Nigel's comments to include what is below-----

The weird thing was about 10-15 minutes into the float I suddenly knew that Sam (owner/operator) knew Sylvia, the woman who ran the ayahuasca retreat in Brazil where Nara and I met. It wasn't an idea, or a hunch, it was a knowing. When I came out of the the tank (which was virtually sound proof I remind you) Nara said "Sam knows Sylvia!". I responded something along the lines of 'I know, where you guys talking about it about ten minutes after I went in?' They had been. It turns out that Sam's shelves were full of books about consciousness expansion and psychedelics. Nara had quickly gravitated towards a book about Sekhmet, an egyptian warrior goddess whose presences she had felt while in Brazil.

What is it about drug users noticing more synchronicity in life? Terrence McKenna talks about psychedelics (and marijuana's) ability to break down barriers that we have constructed in our mind. The idea being that we divide reality into neat little categories, subjects and objects, us and them, and assume that there is nothing arbitrary about these divisions. We assume that the dividing lines are 'real'. That they are absolute and that there is a need to then find connections between things. The truth may be closer to the mystic idea that all is one and any attempt to create connections assumes boundaries that are simply constructs of the perspective we choose to take on a given situation.

Sure the boundaries serve us, make the world easier to navigate and understand. I wouldn't be typing this to you without them. But should we allow room for the paradox that they also confine us? Confuse us?

Perhaps Rupert Sheldrake is on to something when he talks about morphic resonance and morphogentic fields and describes the brain as more of a radio than anything with it's own content or shows to transmit. He postulates that information, memory, exists in a field that our body/minds can attune themselves to and we are thus informed. This fits nicely with the Buddhist notion of the brain as another sensory organ, one that senses ideas. I mentioned a meditation experience earlier where I was able to take my awareness and tune, or not tune, into the brain and it's neurotic ramblings. Obviously (to me) awareness, consciousness, is something other than the thinking mind. It is something that is aware of the thinking mind. Is it so odd to think that there are other, more subtle means of transmitting information that consciousness is also aware of if/when we relax the artificial boundaries that we have created between what is a valid means of knowing and what is 'metaphysical nonsense'?

Or have I just done too many drugs?

If that explanation is more comfortable to you then by all means stay closed to other possibilities, but if you are aware of information entering your awareness through means other than rational understanding of the five senses, then perhaps we should start developing other senses as well. Do you know why you are attracted to someone? Why you fall in love? Their ideas? Pheromones? Scent? (is there a difference?) Is there some other transmission of information that happens here? You can explore quantum entanglement if that's your bent. I'd recommend mixing such things with some open minded explorations of your direct experience.

rant over.

Ayahuasca 5

Todays news changed everything.

If you make it all the way through this you may understand a little better.

I'm reeling in disbelief at the moment.

I imagine I will cry about it later.

This post was written in the preceding week

_______

Ceremony #3 – 130ml

Intention – Purpose

When I was living in Raleigh, North Carolina I became very close friends with Antoinette. Antoinette led a meditation group that I was a part of. She is a healer. She currently makes her living through massage and reiki, but is in the process of becoming a midwife. I spoke to her on the phone before leaving for Brazil and she offered to be available during the ceremonies if I wanted to reach out to her in some way. I said something stupid about how I’d tell her what she was wearing when I saw her. She said that if I wanted to meet up on an astral plane than that could be fun, but that she was hoping to meet up somewhere higher. I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by higher, but I agreed and left it at that. I then forgot about it and never told her exactly when the ceremonies would be.

This ceremony is the hardest to relate by far. It was an exceptionally personal manifestation of the transpersonal and is also just fucking weird. The back story is just personal, though not just my person. I will do my best to set up the experience without saying too much.

I fell in love when I was about 13. We were neighbors and used to sneak out of the house at night and look at the stars. She always had a boyfriend and I never told her how I felt. Many years of intermittent friendship and silence followed before our paths crossed in NYC. We spent beautiful, drunken nights kissing in the rain and declaring our love. We moved in together shortly there after. Less than a year later I asked her to move out to take care of herself. We maintained something long distance for a few months leading up to a party at a friends house.

Many young couples were there; many of them with their children. I knew that this was what I wanted, a family of my own, but the events of the evening showed me that she was not yet ready. I told her that I did not want to see her until she had three months of health (I'm being vague cause it's only partially my story).

Some months later it was new years, I was in Boston writing music with David and I needed to go pick up my cat, Agape, from her apartment. She calls me the night before and tells me that she is 4 months pregnant. It is not mine. We had not been together in about six. She looks pregnant when I see her.

We still talk a little and are friends. I will always love her in many ways, but our lives do not seem to be aligned. She is in a tough situation with the unplanned, but wonderful gift of pregnancy and I want to be supportive of her as a friend. That was about how far I had considered the situation and it was not my (conscious) intention to dig much deeper. I had my own selfish work to do. This ceremony was to be about my purpose.

I decided to attempt to keep my eyes closed this time. In the previous two ceremonies I very much decided to keep myself in the room. I kept my eyes open and called for all hallucinations to work with that which was already present. This time I invited any and all visions to come as they choose. I started this process by closing my eyes and attempting to envision a door directly in front of my third eye. This alone was very difficult to hold at first.

I did not work with any type of mantra or other words. If anything, this night I was attempting to access emptiness as a means of creation more than any other. Other than the door, I worked to free myself from any and all thoughts as they arose in my awareness. I began to cultivate a stillness as I sat in my meditative posture.

I laid down much quicker this night than the others; well before the one hour mark. This is where the discomfort began and it became extreme.

My ex-girlfriend came into my awareness. It became clear to me that I had not dealt with her impending baby. She was then about 7 ½ months pregnant. I am aware and at peace with this as a fact, but had not in any real way dealt with this new person as a person.

As I lay on my back it started to become clear that this is what I was doing. For some reason this unborn child was firmly planted in my awareness at this moment. To say I chose this wouldn't quite make sense. I started to feel a pull to curl up into a fetal position. As in meditation, I simply noticed this and then did my best to remain still with it as we had been instructed by Sylvia. When meditating I have often been informed that when impulses to act arise it is best to notice them and let them pass. If I am sitting on the cushion and I think ‘Oh shit, I need to call the vet!’ it is best to recognize this, create a space for this to be necessary, but to recognize that it does not have to happen now. If the thought arises again, then the same noticing, labeling, letting go is used. If the thought arises 4, 5, 6 times, then quite possibly you should get up off the mat and go call the fucking vet. Meditation is not to be used as an escape from our responsibilities to the world. If something is important, than by all means give it your attention. Much in this way it became important for me to curl up on my right side facing Cida, Nara's mother. What followed is quite difficult to explain and was amazingly hard to experience. I will do my best.

What I eventually began attempting to do was to bring her unborn child into the room with me. I can't explain why, but it seemed like something I needed to go through, something I was afraid to confront, or just something that was happening that I needed to be present with. The explanation that I am offering from here on in should sound impossible in many ways. What I experienced felt true and in many ways is always possible and happening, but it is the result of a either a vastly increased or strongly altered perception of reality. In many ways time, space and the boundaries of self/other become incredibly transparent. I experienced many things at once that it is my normal tendency to believe must exist separately. I'm not claiming some sort of power nor am I claiming to have lost touch with reality. I will simply explain my subjective experience as I experienced it. This is one form of truth, let's call it truthfulness.

I began by simply attempting to visualize or visually hold this unborn child in the room. She did not come easily. Luckily when she did come it was with the womb, as this might have otherwise been fairly messy. What I experienced in my attempts to hold her there was in many ways the process of becoming her. I must be clear that I was not interested in picturing her in my mind. I was attempting to share something much more profound with her. It felt as if she was reaching out to me in this moment and it was less of a choice and more of a realization that what I needed to do was share this moment with her. I needed to hold her here with me.

In my attempts to do so, in my attempts to be with her, despite the necessary ‘breaking of the rules’ of time and space that this implies, I was not able to only break the rules in the ways which might make this easy for me, they were simply disappearing all together.

What the hell am I talking about?

With each glimpse, with each moment of her entering my awareness came a flood of other information. In my attempts to be with her here and now the enormity of the ever present eternity that is now came rushing in. It was intensely painful, joyful, uncomfortable and overwhelming. I honestly felt that it was destroying me and that there was no way that I could do it myself, if it was possible at all. It felt like way to much information for me to handle. I was writhing on my mat, letting out gasps and sighing as I swallowed the enormity of so much truth. I felt shattered and alive, awake and overwhelmed. I was instantly experiencing her throughout many different, perhaps all moments in her life. I met new people, went different places at different times in her life. And in each and every moment I was feeling things, places and people through her….as her. This remained incredibly uncomfortable for quite some time. I can not accurately describe the sensations. There were far too many of them all at once.

At some point though it seemed to begin to be possible to be with her here and now. I wasn’t sure how, but something had changed. Later, when things had calmed and I was able to be more aware of some of my other senses I would realize that there was someone behind me, a warm mothering presence that was helping me to hold Addison here and now. Antoinette had come to help bring this child into my world. I didn't have to look, but I knew that she was there.

Part of an unborn child's experience, the most stable part at this moment, is being in the womb. This obviously involves an almost constant in and out of fluids; a feeding and dumping cycle that is incredibly fluid in the most literal of ways. With increasing doses of ayahuasca one thing that seems to be present for people is purging…..puke. I have theories about why this is, but haven’t had much direct experience to confirm/deny these theories with. I have a relatively solid stomach and other than the fleeting awareness of the possibility and the momentary sensations that accompany this I have not seriously considered doing so…until now. Something about sharing this experience, how ever real this was or seemed, made the possibility of purging incredibly real and present. I maintained, kept that part of my insides internal. But it was a very real sensation of being in such a vulnerable and formative state. And something else did come up.

What became apparent, through a wall of tears and sighs, of pain and smiling, deep breaths and long moments without any, was exactly what was happening here in this mess of time and space, as self and other were falling away. I was falling in love with my ex-girlfriends unborn child. It is a strange realization that I don’t expect to completely make sense to you. In many ways it does not matter if this child is a part of my day to day life or if I never actually meet her. I already love her. Always will. Perhaps always have…not really sure how that one works. I don’t mean this is any superficial or easy going sense. The implications of this were huge and difficult to digest; such a sense of what can be lost and what gained. I felt overwhelmed, grateful, scared and absolutely full of love. The impact of this realization is enormously powerful to me still.

In relation to my initial intent in this ceremony, to explore purpose, I now felt the weight of my creative potential in a whole new way. The enormity of creating a child carries a whole new weight. The question of what I am doing, right now, to make life easier for this and every other child in the world is present in a new way. The many ways that we are each connected (ultimately have never been apart to be connected) holds a bit more weight in my mind than it ever has before.

Many have long recognized that dreams contain symbols, metaphors, archetypes. Dreams allow us to not only see, but experience situations that in many ways can be symbolic of greater truths. What I experienced with this child was a connection to the unborn, to the life that is to come and also to the process of life as it is now coming, being, suffering and rejoicing. It was an intensely personal experience, but the implications of it were so far beyond me and her, my life and hers. The whole experience was simultaneously an individual realization of potency and smallness, of responsibility and of insignificance. It compels me to witness and to embrace, to provide for and to appreciate. I'm rambling on because words suck at relating such an experience. I think I'l

It would be mistaken to view my transpersonal interpretation of this personal experience as being a distancing from the personal aspect. It is intensely personal, all the more so because of the universal truths that it symbolizes.

_______

I just got off the phone with my ex-girlfriend.

The ceremony described above happened on the night of April 6th leading into the morning of April 7th.

At 3:27am on the morning of April 7th, while I was in the ceremony space, her child was born.
She was 10 weeks premature.
She died 4 days later.

I will never meet her.

.....now I'm crying

Ayahuasca 4

Ceremony #2 – 100ml

Intention = Emptiness

Emptiness is none other than form. Form is none other than emptiness.

Why Dream?

Upon drinking the ayahuasca I again return to my mat to sit cross legged and focus on my intention while I wait for the effects of the drug to begin. After about 35-40 minutes I begin to feel the ayahuasca coursing through my body as an intense energy. This, once again, is the uncomfortable part. I am looking to die tonight. I am offering up all that I associate as me for the taking.

I am very familiar with the mystical ideas of emptiness and nondual realization. I have a rational understanding of these concepts and am well aware of the notion that this is an inherent knowledge that we all have. There is nothing to learn, nothing to be gained, only the confusion that we have a separate self that must be released. I am aware of this, and in many ways I feel as if any attempts to chase this are futile. None the less I am seeking an experience of emptiness, of oneness with no two. It is often said that such an experience can be painful. I want to be beaten over the head with the death of my ego. I am ready for agony and what ever discomfort that comes is a gift when it is to this end.

As I sit on my cushion and the ayahuasca begins to move throughout my body it comes in many ways. It is incredibly uncomfortable. I am crying, burping, farting, and I want to smile. I create a space for each of these things, witness them without indulging them and watch as they pass. I sense that I am becoming more intimately in tune with my subconscious mind and in some way this feels wrong. I am not usually awake to this. The urge to throw up strikes me as an attempt to correct this, to get it out of my system. I allow this urge to surface, feel it in my throat and my stomach, but do not indulge it. It too passes. Intense visualizations come to me, but I do not indulge these either. They are there and they are fine, but without my desire to get lost in my senses they too fall away. A strong urge to sleep accompanied by deep yawns follows. I notice this and it too passes. I will not sleep through this. Perhaps this too is my bodies attempt to disconnect my conscious awareness from my subconscious mind.

I feel someone come up behind me and wrap their arm around my neck and begin to choke me. This too is ok, and once it is accepted it passes.

At the one hour mark Sylvia walks around the room and checks in with each of us by simply looking at us and saying ‘one hour’. Shortly after this point I feel as if the initial discomfort is out of the way. I have sat with it and now I can lie down and await my death. I am ready, eager even for pain. I am offering my body as a sacrifice to the divine. It’s all quite melodramatic. I, of course, get what I need and not what I want.

What comes to me is a gentle, motherly pat on the shoulder and a wonderfully compassionate, somewhat mocking voice that says

“it’s ok.

You get it.

So what?”

It strikes me as funny, and I feel an immediate release of my grasping self. Yes, this is, and always has been true and I have always known that emptiness is none other than form. The ‘so what’ is immediately apparent to me as the vast creative potential that emptiness is. The realization is only as important as what I do with it. It is nothing unto itself, but it is also all of creation. That is what emptiness is to me, creative potential. I feel amazingly potent; ready for the world, and eager to contribute.

I fall in love with each piece of music that is played. Again I realize that what ever I do in life, music must be an integrated piece. Sylvia is playing wonderful tribal, electronic, chanting, percussive, shifting soundscapes. She plays ‘slate’, ‘pantry’, and ‘Entwine’, three pieces of mine that were made a few years ago in my studio with some friends. Hearing these in this state is amazing; a gift.

I have visions of filling the ceremony space with the people in my life and using ayahuasca and playing music as a therapeutic experience. I work out the whole situation in amazing detail with the boundaries that would be established, the rules of engagement for each musician and even what Sylvia and her partner Zoey’s roles will be as facilitators. They will still man the ipod with their music and probably some extended rhythm tracks that I have created for the occasion. They will fill silence as needed, interrupt noise as desired and provide a launching pad for exploration if desired. Each participant will choose an instrument before the ceremony and this will be their means of communication with the world. If someone does not want an instrument than they will simply say the words ‘I accept that my instrument is my voice.’ Each participant will make a commitment to their speech that says ‘I commit to not use a word unless I am to use it deeply or often’. The idea being that we not fill the space with anything other than pure sound. If someone truly needs to chant the word love 1,000 times than there will be a space for this, but the idea is to be non-verbal when possible.

Each person will be confined to their mat, as we are in Sylvia’s ceremony, and we will be discouraged from dancing or even looking at other participants. This idea being that if you wish to express your self you do your best to channel this through your instrument. There will have to be a mix of skilled and unskilled musicians. Ideally there would be far more unskilled. I am not interested in complexity or technique. I am interested in truth of expression. This requires intention, not technique, but having some skill in the room will help.

I would probably record the whole mess, with some players being mic’d individually and the room being miked as well. I would then be able to chop the whole thing up into many pieces and assemble songs pulling from these sounds. I would make this available on iTunes and to Sylvia to use during ceremonies. Perhaps the backing tracks that I gave to Sylvia would be used at times as our tempo’s would probably be locked to this anyways. I indulge this idea for a while bringing different friends and instruments into the room. Many of the people I love have roles to play here as well.

A little later I wrote an article called Hiding that I am now trying to get published. I wrote about 1400 words that evening as I lay on my mat. When I went to my computer the next morning it was mostly just a case of typing it out.

This emptiness that I am feels amazingly potent. The creative potential is unbounded. I spent a great deal of time lying on the mat feeling capable and ready; awake and eager, inspired and divinely alive. I am still feeling energized by this right now. It is not as if anything new was necessarily known, more that barriers previously believed to be in place have fallen away. Hell fucking yeah.

Meditation can now hold a much different space in my day (when I actually do it). It is no longer a yearning, a striving, a practice for something. It is more of a celebration, a repose, a rejuvenation. Where before I felt a constant need for something to happen, for the process to move forward, as if there was completion to be had somewhere in the future, now I am simply sitting and allowing myself to be energized and inspired by what I already am.

Dreaming took on a new meaning to me during this ceremony as well. If emptiness is the causal ground of all being, the ever present formless and also the place into which we dip in deep dreamless sleep; herein lies creativity. I would then see the waking, walking world as that of form, of the manifest. This is karma as it arises in all four quadrants. If we then look at the sleep cycle we will see that the dream world, the world where subtle energies play free, lies directly between waking and deep sleep, between form and formless for a reason. It is here that we play with possibilities. Dreams can be a testing ground, an opportunity to mix all that is already with all that can possibly ever be. For sure there will be form that arises when we are awake that we have seen in dreams, for we may have planned it or intuited it there. It is in dreams that we tap into and create that which can and will become manifest in the relative world of form. It is also where we assimilate and grapple with the days events. We metabolize our experiences and churn them back into the formless. For it is from here that all arises and is ever present.

In many ways ayahuasca feels like a way to witness, to bring waking awareness and therefore a different level of interaction or control to this process of play with subtle energies.

I don't mind

In my efforts to sit still in meditation and let go I find myself reaching, grasping, for an experience of release. Perhaps you recognize the futility in this.

A couple of years ago I started having an experience while meditating in a group at Antoinette’s house. The experience has deepened as it has occasionally been repeated since then, but I still find it to be rather elusive. Recently, I found myself in this state spontaneously while sitting at my desk. I had sat down to meditate and then allowed myself to be distracted by work, and a little while later I found my self taken over by my Self.

The first time I experienced this state it was largely a physical sensation. At the time I had no words for it, but some told me that it sounded like ‘expansion’. Basically, I would feel my awareness of my gross (yucky) physical body begin to expand. At first I would feel the sensation of being above myself. Later I realized that I was simultaneously feeling below myself. Eventually I came to realize that I could direct my attention and ‘feel’ my 'subtle' body in all directions. The more I allowed this to happen the broader my reach.

I dare say I was not contained by the room at times.

So.......this was neat. But, there was something else, a bit of a breakthrough me thinks.

Most of the time. I had the idea that in order to meditate properly I should stop my thinking. This is not quite easy and not quite true. I was always looking for a ‘quite place’, a peacefulness, a calm. A place where my neurotic grasping mind was not in control of Me.

Sometimes I would find myself in what seemed to be such a state. Often times it would be fleeting, sometimes a few seconds, sometimes minutes, often times time is not really applicable (I have no fucking clue how long it has been).

The breakthrough for me was realizing that the thinking had not stopped. My attachment to it had. The sensation was similar to that of looking to my left and seeing my brain, cranking away, fully engaged in the plotting, scheming, planning, analyzing, worrying, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah (there were 5 blahs). In much the same way that I could direct my attention to my hand resting on my leg and feel what my hand was feeling I could direct my attention to my mind and check in with what my brain was thinking.

The implications of this are not to be ignored. What exactly is my awareness is if it is not centered in my mind? What am I? Deluded? I think not.

Upon sitting satsang with Loch Kelly, a guru type in NYC, I heard him speak of the Buddhist idea that the mind is often considered to be another one of the senses. The sixth sense if you will. This immediately resonated with me and my experience. That was exactly what went down. I finally got a little perspective on this sense. I finally separated myself from it. Not disassociation, but differentiation, which can lead to integration.

Yippee.

Only now I find myself chasing this always already present state as if I am not already there. It is not something that became true when I became attuned to it. It was always the truth. I simply stopped confusing myself otherwise for a bit. The experience has returned, and I have this constant cognitive awareness of it, but the ability to tap into this state, to relax into this state, this is what I find to be elusive. My association with my thinking mind is so strong that even when made glaringly aware of it I still find myself immersed in it experientially.

Tony, Meg, and Me on the roofdeck in Queens: