A Moment Before Time Moves

Last week’s thought experiment and response to “AI 2027” took a lot of my energy. I’m somewhat surprised by that. It definitely threw me off a little bit, but I also couldn’t effectively meditate until I wrote it all out, so… it had to be done. The main indicator that I’m off balance has been my hesitation to decide what to focus on during my practice. Essentially I feel momentarily lost. Nevertheless, I shut my inner monologue up and picked up where I left off before.

Freeflow Focus 21

Fact is, while I do go back and listen to select tapes from previous Waves now and again, I primarily don’t have much interest in most of the earlier stuff. At this point I feel stuck at higher levels like F21 and beyond. During my long run this Friday morning I was churning thoughts in my head about where my block might be coming from, or rather where my perceived shortcomings are. Logically, I understand that limiting beliefs are real, and just like fears, they can be insidious and very difficult to diagnose or get rid of.

Earlier this week I dipped back into parts of Wave VI to see if there were any deficits I could spot. I’m basically working my way back from where I am, debugging my progress, so to speak. I couldn’t identify much. If anything, I did those various tapes from Wave VI better than I’ve done in the past. Okay, building blocks aren’t the issue here. So I went back to knocking on F21.

Entry into the F21 Freeflow tape went without incident. What I’m doing now, more than anything, and it’s proving to be very difficult, is voiding my mind of any and all expectations before starting. That means I don’t think about the prep process. I let it happen naturally, because after all I’ve spent a lot of time training to not think about it. This is actually easier than it sounds. I’ve done the prep for all these tapes so many times that I don’t even think about it. It’s autopilot at this point, whether I like it or not. The most difficult part is not thinking about the particular session at all. You know what you’re doing, but you also don’t think about what you’ll be doing, so you don’t introduce expectations or limiting beliefs.

Example: if a session is all about connecting with your guide, then you’re more than likely going to think…

I wonder what the guide is like.” “What will they look like?” “Will I even see them?” “I usually have a hard time seeing anything, so I probably won’t see anything.” “I hope this time I’ll hear something because usually I don’t.” “I haven’t had much luck connecting with the guide. Hope this works.”

All of these are expectations that feed into limiting beliefs. So what you’re doing to yourself here is setting up expectations just by thinking about the exercise. Then those expectations start morphing into limiting beliefs. “I hope this time I’ll hear something” is an expectation followed by “because usually I don’t,” which is the limiting belief. It can go the other way too: “I usually have a hard time seeing anything” is the limiting belief followed by “so I probably won’t see anything,” which becomes the expectation.

Here’s my favorite part about all of this: even if you truly conquer these, there is absolutely no guarantee that now, all of a sudden, you’ll have “upgraded” experiences. What’s more likely is that you’ll have a very typical session like you normally do, feel defeated, begin overanalyzing your process (another problem introduced into the mix), and fall right back into the expectations and limiting belief trap. How do I know? I’m a recovering process over-analyzer, expectation setter, and limiting belief addict… just like you.

Okay, back to the action. I entered F10 in a snap, expanded in F12, and then I was instructed to look for the “white glow” of my energy body and relax into it. What do you know, there was a white glow and I relaxed into it. Then you’re guided into traveling through this white glow to F21. At this point it’s “warm white glow of Focus 21.” Yep, all of that happened and was new to me because I surrendered to the experience instead of recalling my past ones.

Once in F21, the struggle to walk the razor’s edge of falling asleep while keeping my awareness was tough, but that’s just part of it. And as I mentioned before, I do not expect it to happen, so I’m prepared to deal with it if and when it does. Interestingly, this mindset is one of the core values the Stoics hammer on, and I literally just made that connection.

Nothing of note transpired during this session. If anything, I feel like things started to go somewhere right before I was interrupted to exit. From this point on, I’m going to do strictly unguided F21 sessions with longer duration.

Lucid(ish) Dream

Before initiating a lucid dream I did another, albeit short, round of meditation. I primarily do this to reinforce the “mind awake, body asleep” state with a temporary reprogramming of what happens when I say or count “one” while exiting the meditation from F10. This has helped a lot with being able to strongly set my intention to have a lucid dream.

This time I had some interesting pre-dream states, but nothing to write about. The dream itself was a weak one and not really anything special. Honestly, most of them these days are pretty mundane. I’m going to experiment with “site and setting” in my intention-building for future sessions.

Upon exit, I was delighted to be greeted with the usual weirdness, but this time it was something new:

I saw a white and red geometric mushroom morph out of a red and white triangle when exiting a very brief lucid dream. It had an awkward smile… like it noticed me when I wasn’t supposed to see it.

As I finish writing this entry, my automatic analysis of events is telling me that I might be experiencing these little visions in the “in-between” states of consciousness. Essentially, there’s a space between altered states and the “working” state of consciousness (waking life). Since I’ve been expending so much energy focusing on this in-between state, I’ve probably affected the time it takes for the transition to complete. I’m not saying I’m willing time to slow, but I’m also saying I’m willing time to slow in that moment as an observer.

In Chapter 4, “An Experiment With Time”, from Stalking the Wild Pendulum, Bentov speaks essentially of this very phenomenon. I won’t go into detail, as I feel like it’ll cheapen the brilliance of the book, but to put it very crudely: sit in front of an analog watch or a clock, maintain your gaze on the watch or clock while engaging in the most immersive daydreaming you’ve ever done. Notice how long it takes for the second hand to move.

Long before reading about this in the book, I used to do that very experiment as a very bored and easily distracted student during grade school. I thought it was pretty neat. But now that I understand it much better… woah.

🍄