Today the priest talked about how much of religion and humanity places more importance on the external of how something looks, many times neglecting the inner space of the heart and soul. I also had to chuckle about the uproar of the New England Patriots using sensory deprivation tanks and being accused of some special trickery. Sensory deprivation tanks have been around a while. We were going to build some in the ’90s until we realize how much salt you needed to create the weightless buoyancy. We used to have a bunch of dr john Lilly's people at the house in Sausalito, where I just sat there keeping my mouth shut and sucking in the knowledge
Going back into the 80’s we were playing with all sorts of technologies to get the mind and body to recovery or figure a hack to getting more out of what your body was designed to do. I forget how many times I dosed myself with the LED light frequencies on the road because, in 20 minutes, you did feel like you took a 4-hour nap. I am not sure if my path into meditation, stillness, brainwave manipulation, and optimization was done for survival with the job, or I really had some deep seeded feeling or question that there was much more than walking around in the normal secular world
The first challenge was trying to meditate, I could get to a place where the body wanted to shut down, but there was some sort of barrier that held me back that I was not able to overcome with any technology or technique. Early in my life, I asked “why?” a thousand times about the idea of the holy spirit. I never got answers from peoples heart and experiences, somewhat, the regurgitated rote that one was taught.
It was in nature, alone, far from the noise of any human where the most terrifying and most fantastic experience in breaking through that membrane I was writing about earlier happened. It is terrifying, in that you have to face everything inside yourself. If you are honest, you will realize you are simply another little human struggling to walk out your time on this planet. At the same time, you understand there is something so fantastic love you with unconditional love.
Maybe that is the first step of inner workings, and fitness…you have to let go of the stuff and your external to get to it. While you can ingest psychotropics, wire your mind to chips, blast yourself with light or sound therapy….even sit in a sensory deprivation tank (the first time was a bit freaky.) All cab potentially help you step forward to another place and space in what you knew.
I don’t know of any simpler or straightforward way to spirituality than having to stare inside your heart. Get honest with yourself. And let something pull you up when you are done trying to rationalize or kid yourself that you are somehow a good person all by yourself.
Trying to learn beyond secular or conditional love….probably will take the rest of my life to even get a slight clue how to do it. But I am going to keep trying. In the meantime, we are going to develop products and services for people to take a step beyond what they knew or know. All that is required is people wanting to change, as that is the beauty of choice in life. We all get the choice to grow, or merely live in stagnation.