Contemplations on Meditation and the Cunning Fennec Fox

Contemplations on Meditation . . .

I used to leave my body when I was a youngster.

As I lay on my back in the dark, I would very slowly still my mind. Difficult at first, I relaxed my body starting at my toes and wiggle-working my way up, until my scalp tingled, then did not.

As I thought of each part, I visualized the its name and main function before I moved on to the next.  I never hovered over one part too long.

At the top of my head was, and still is, a tiny door.  The . . . Astra . . . were the only ones beside myself that had a key.

They, or perhaps only one of them, would crack the door open and beckon me, how I am not certain, and a starry, silvery me would pour out like licorice through an extruder at the candy factory.

The first time I experienced Astral Me, I was not afraid.  I was exhilarated, flying without fear or pain of any kind.  Soaring without the sensation of wind, and I could feel my heart pounding with pleasure.

I met my brother up there a few times.  He's the one who taught me how to do that.  Three thousand miles apart and still we could meet somewhere over the Rocky Mountains and fly about like the spirits we were.

I would look down at my ankle and see the slender, silvery, gossamer thread that stretched across the vast distance and time at the other end of which I lay, surely wearing a smile on my face in the dark.

The world I visited, this New Universe, was so much better than the world of my waking hours. The world where, on top of the terrors within it, I was encumbered by a body that was already turning on me.

I did not dream these moments.  My brother and I would reminisce of these jaunts we took together via the letters we wrote to each other, each expounding on the visuals and feelings we both experienced.  These were not Imagine If letters; they were Remember When letters.

As I became a man and put away childish things (as some old book instructs), I stopped projecting in this fashion.

This is the way most lives become cluttered and jumbled, interfering with the way our energies wish to manifest, and I have been a sadder adult from this loss; an unfilled vacuum, seeking.

The Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.”

I began meditating in my mid to late teenage years.  It was the cheapest way to leave a home life where the price extracted was far too dear.

As I stretched and moved about in those days when my injuries from sports and life were fresh, where I and my body would have full-on arguments, exchanging barbs at one another, trying to hurt each other as if we were lovers.

Over the years, as I tried to still the bear in my heart, the one of which my father warned me, I learned to listen to the stories my knees told me; the songs my back sang; the music within my cracked mind.  The shoulders’ whispered secrets . . .  

I tried and still try to be the cunning fox my mother knew I could be.

So I meditated a few times this last week, partly to better understand what it was that I was going to put to the warp and weft of this paper, and as I conversed with my body, I felt the lock turn on its rusty tumblers to the door in my crown, and I was startled back to the Me not made of silver and stars.

What, I wondered, would I find now, thirty years later up in the heavens?  How much changes in the immutable yet constantly transforming IS?  How much have I changed, and would SHE recognize me, he who is no longer lithe and strong and young?

Would The IS be forgiving of my tardiness, or saddened by my cynicism- no longer the boy full of the knowledge of pain and the burning desire to overcome it?

Would SHE recognize my heart, no longer full of love but only with that which life leaves you as you moan and cry out on the battlefield?

Would SHE see the promise of the Bodhisattva of Wisdom I was told I could be is just a silly fool?  That the Bodhisattva of Compassion feels only disdain at the humanity that has no humanity?  That I abandoned a society that needs me now more than ever, and that I don't care?

So I aroused from my Awakened State and put away the Plane Key for the time being. The thought of visiting the place where I am tethered to the wheel of life only by a slender, silvery, gossamer thread is one I find too daunting and too full of hope.

I began this journey, and I intend to finish it, whatever the cost, whatever the price of pain I fear may still be so dear.

Just not today. Not yet. The fox is weary and needs to rest before the Hounds begin to hunt yet again.