Profound potential exists within the dense fog of confusion that occurs when we don’t confront a stroke. The fog signifies we are hitting a foundational layer of the filter between mind and body—a separation that attempts to split life into our own arbitrary categories. However, reality isn’t divisible; it is the ignorance of this that undergirds the repulsion and the grasping, along with our attempt to devise a pain-free, “pleasure-full” reality. Any charge that fails to be filtered through rejection or attraction has a final safety net where the encoded instruction is simply, “Ignore.” A thick layer of confusion and unknowing collects. The instruments of sentience and perception become clouded, and we become dense. It’s hard to track this tendency because, when we’re in denial, we cannot know what we fail to sense.
The instruction here is to focus on the fog, using our attention like sunlight. A stroke will happen, and instead of the clarifying wave and wringing-out sensation that come with resonance, there is a deadness as it falls, like a thud. Lock into what an “on” stroke feels like. The ambient attention can always keep this in the background as a running comparison. This prevents us from inhabiting the fog and doing its bidding, which is to go off into rejection and attraction. The ambient attention to an “on” stroke also communicates to our deeper sense what’s possible; it sets a due north.
Dense fields require more powered attention than thin ones. Due to their difficulty, they carry an implicit suggestion that we look away, avoid, or even collapse our attention into hopelessness. Instead, we must simply continue to watch the fog. This is where steady, non-hovering, and noncoercive attention is vital, since the opposite characteristics increase the fog. We hold and observe.
We will then notice something miraculous. Densely concentrated thoughts, feelings, and emotions (everything we avoided in the past) will arise from the fog, as if an entire life that had been concealed all along is emerging. What we might have considered numb or checked-out was in fact densely packed material that had not been digested. As this numbness begins to come alive, we may want to follow the threads. Instead we must continue to watch. We are waking up a spot. It’s as if we are melting snow, and life-forms buried beneath are coming back to life.
But we are not done yet. Another layer is beneath this. As we continue to hold our attention, we find a ground underneath: a location beneath what we know as ourselves. We may feel like we fell through a trapdoor and our identity got stuck up top. Devoid of the structures that hold the ideas which make up who we consider ourselves to be, is only a pure sensing—a sense of liberation from a prison, a sense of no longer being bound by a set of arbitrary laws. This is optionality.
Further beneath this lie the jewels. We may sense this layer as something familiar, yet something we have never known, like a voice that has bled through the walls, sometimes clear, sometimes muffled. It occurs as a force, but a force so familiar it brings with it a sense of unimaginable safety, a sense of knowing beyond what we have understood knowing to be. We sense that seeing itself can be inhabited. We see from source into source. It is impersonal while simultaneously deeply personal. It is unassailable, a knowing that, when integrated into consciousness, has us understand the benevolent reason for every interior instruction ever received.
The rejection, the grasping, and the ignoring all fall away—not because they are bad or even because they cause pain, but because they simply dissolve into this force. In OM, this state is called apotheosis. Apotheosis is what climax seeks to be, what climax tries to achieve by going up and over and crashing into the body—a place where what would have been climax going out inverts and brings us down. The nervous system locks, and the momentum acts as a ballast against which the tumescent mind lacks the power to resist.
In and through the body, we are brought to the “down” we have avoided our whole lives. But sometimes consciousness from this place is too exhausted from the fall to receive the wisdom. In this case, the body serves more as a hospital in which to recover than the ground from which everything issues. This moment is when we have allowed consciousness to descend far enough into the body that it can connect to the gifts that come from below—gifts that can only be known in the act of offering.
We offer ourselves for this state of possession, in which we are held beyond what we can look away from. Our seeing now heals the wounds created from previously not seeing. Our knowing now heals the wounds from acts previously done in ignorance. We are meeting our Erotic self, the force that will guide us into the totality of being beyond good and evil.
