We talk to ourselves constantly – at least I do.   In meditation, it’s quite easy to put your mind up to a bit of a higher level.  I think of this level as the “Watcher” and the Watcher can watch this dialogue running along quickly on its own track.  It can jump thousands of miles and thousand of years in an instant.  But it’s noise, a frequency of noise that never stops.   But the Watcher can disconnect from it, place just above it, just outside it as it really has nothing to say.

There are folks who claim they have learned after many years (5 to 7 mostly), to stop this dialogue at will and accomplishing this trick will happen quite suddenly and will open up a new road.  Your mind will be open to other voices, higher voices, or voices from other beings living in other unseen and inorganic dimensions, dimensions made of only energy.   I’ve read it happens quite suddenly when you get to it after years of practicing in meditation.  This ability is very useful for the occultist and equally for the eastern oriented meditator.

I have an interesting ability to auralize music.  In fact I am much better at that I am at visualization.  It’s something I discovered when I was very young, maybe 9 or 10 on an airplane from Toronto to Geneva.  I was getting very bored and I remember curling up in a seat and listening to SGT Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band” in my head.  I remember feeling that I was actually hearing it, the auralization was so strong.   Many, many years later, as I was sliding into an MRI tube for 45 minutes and not realizing that I suffered somewhat from claustrophobia, I played Joni Mitchell’s HEJIRA as it was the only album I could think of that is exactly 45 minutes long and a record knew well enough to hear.  The MRI technician did a very poor job of communicating with me while I was in this tube.  I would have appreciated a call 3 or4 times to tell me how much longer I had but he was totally silent.  I wondered if he’d left the trailer to go and get lunch. I felt as if I had been left alone stuck in this very noise metal tube unable to turn or sit up.  What would happen if there had been an earthquake?, I thought.

I had tried to meditate through the experience as best I could.  There were a few moments I felt like I was starting to panic but I pulled my mind away from that and back to the song that was “playing.”   At the end, an extraordinary thing happened, just as the last part of the last song “The Refuge Of The Road” was ending, I heard voice of the technician saying we were finished as  the tube opened and I was out.

Even though my mind had wandered off the songs many times, it somehow continued to play in my head, keeping the time correctly!  The layers of thought all sat on top of this recording, rising and falling and disappearing but didn’t interfere with my auralizing as if it were background music I had put on while doing something else.   When I turned my mind back to the song, I picked up the song at the right spot as if my distraction had not paused it or mistimed how long I’d been in the MRI tube.

This may not be earth-shattering, but I find this to be rather extraordinary and I was very surprised that it had worked since I was so worried that it wasn’t and I was miscalculating how long I had to be stuck in there.  But 45 minutes had passed, the song had ended and I was out of the tube.

Today, it seems so clear that understanding this naturally acquired skill would make such a huge difference on whatever path I’m on.

I do believe there are non-physical beings around made of  energy and so appear in whatever way I want them to appear or in a way that they understand would make the most impact on me personally.   Whether they are higher parts of my own self or actual separate sentient beings doesn’t really matter to me right now.  The real problem is how can I know when they are telling me something.  How can I tell the difference between the chattering dialogue- a continuous stream of imagination – or the spirit trying to tell me something.

I’ve been working with some new consumer technology devices available to anyone.  I use the MUSE S (v2) and the Neorhythm .  The Muse records by brain waves (alpha, beta, gamma, theta, etc.) and can be used as a biofeedback device while meditating.  For me, this makes a big difference, I can tell when I’m doing it “right”, generating alpha waves as well a the depth of the waves waves I may be generating.  The Neorhythm is a bit more experimental, using pulsed electromagnetic fields to stimulate certain brain waves.  They also can reduce skeletal pain from injuries.  I’ve used it to support lucid dreaming, clarity and focus and sleep.

I can’t say I’ve had a definitive experience with these devices but something in me is in the process of change.  Besides that, I have had some strange experiences that happen so quickly and so suddenly, they would be easy to overlook (why I’m writing them down here).

I had a very definite sensation while lying in bed, going to sleep that something like a round pillow or beach ball in my mind was unzipped allowing all the air to come out, leaving an opening in my brain.  I’ve read about this in eastern philosophies but I can’t remember what the space is called or the significance but the experience was very real and strange.

Another experience that I think many people have had was the feeling of dropping hard and fast into the body and waking up with a start quite suddenly as if the body had disconnected while I had fallen asleep but then pushed it’s way back in violently causing me to wake up from the nap with some confusion as if someone had just hit me.  Some proof to me that the astral body exists though I have had many lucid dreams in the my life which is another way to become conscious while the astral body is disconnected.

But this article was about stopping the internal dialogue.  After watching this never-ending stream of words, ideas, bits of songs, I like, I don’t like and realizing that this noise merrily rolling along is in the way of something else that I want to listen to, something that is not necessarily me either but a non-physical spirit or a higher self.   And I walk everyday trying to stop this dialogue.  But how can I tell where the thought is coming from?  It’s coming from nowhere and it’s existence is very temporary.

I did have an experience recently where a voice gave me the answer in my head and it wasn’t me.  When I heard it, a second later I realized that I had been contacted.  The voice told me that the way is in the wind.  Just be aware when I was out walking of the wind touching my face and hands softly or a wind strong enough to push me down the street,  My mind should stay with the sensation of this moving across my skin.  It is also said there are no shadows in dreams and there is no wind to feel.  Perhaps I’ll become lucid when I try to feel even breath of a breeze and there is none, it will trigger me to realize that I am dreaming,  Thank you, spirit.  This is a very excellent exercise for a few reasons.

Try it sometime when you’re walking and notice that there are times when you shut up and if you don’t feel any air moving, you may be in a dream 🙂

I ran across an article that was a very powerful read offering a lot of insight called “Why Should I Appreciate Life?” which I changed for myself in a small but very significant way to “Why Should I Appreciate My Own Life?”

The author begins by pointing out Mezumi Roshi response to the author’s feeling of his missed opportunities and poor choices by saying simply “Please encourage yourself” and Nietzsche challenged us in the very same way.  Regardless of the painful difficulties, the losses, the failed endeavors we should still wake up every morning, loving our life just the way it is.  The task is to take the whole of life, own it, embrace it, include it and finally appreciate it – what Nietzsche called “knowledge acquired through suffering.”

The Zen Master Maezumi Roshi wrote that the capacity to tolerate the truth about oneself and the world and to set aside all the self soothing delusions, to see things as they really are, to love it all- the good along with the bad-is the road to real freedom.

I find it too hard to love all the stupid mistakes I made, the laziness, the fear of rejection, or being ignored, all the things that caused me to hide my light under a bushel, to turn and run home for the night.  I grew tried of all the advice about “networking’, meeting the right people.  I remember at one point, listening to someone give this same advice and feeling a deep exhaustion clouding over me, pulling me down into silent lethargy, zapping my energy.

Nietzsche of course had a very difficult, disappointing life with many hardships.  And yet he understood what must be done.  Like all composer, he loved music and he found a perfect description of his insight through music.  In the Gay Science he wrote “One must learn to love.”  He talks about our love of music believing it was innate but was cultivated through the many, many hours listening.  That music soon becomes a part of us like my experience in the MRI Tube where I “played” Joni Mitchell’s Heijira in my head because I knew it was about 45 minutes.  Even when my mind strayed or got panicky, the songs played in another layer of my mind and kept time.  As the last song ended, so did my ordeal in the tube.  This is the way love is acquired, loving through patience and discipline.   As we learn to love to this way, new space opens inside us for love to move into, take up residence.  Even then the love and appreciation of just who we are becomes possible.  “Let that be my love from now on,” he writes.  “Someday I want to be a Yes-sayer.”

Proust lived in Paris, alone in small house with a few servants.   He was asthmatic and generally treated like weak and sickly person from childhood into adulthood.  He was also gay which resulted in many difficulties including a duel where thankfully no one was injured.

One day the maid brings him lime tea and some madeleines (cookies) and like a spark that turns the tinder into flame, he wrote “Memories Of Things Passed” for several years sparked by this single event.  Though there were stops and starts near the beginning as well as confusion for him, eventually he learned that same love of life by honestly following the path that had been opened and by loving all parts without judgment bringing back one of the greatest novels ever written,

As they say “Love the truth and the truth will set you free.”   I might add “Learn to love the truth and the truth will set you free.”