How to Enjoy Swimming In The Ocean Of Thoughts, Emotions, And Sensations

I really have no idea what is going on here and I doubt most people who say they do. My best guess and hope is that we are amazingly Beautiful Beings, who chose to incarnated on this planet in a material body to have a incredible experience. I believe that the journey is so beautiful and complex and overwhelming that we lost our sense of who and what and where we are. Because we have become disoriented and confused we, more often then not, have a very difficult and confused and painful experience while in the body on this planet. So what can be done to make this journey more beautiful and less painful? I have asked myself that for decades.
I have seen, when working with people in healing situations, that most pain and suffering comes from confusion and ignorance about how to understand the many situations and experiences they find themselves having to confront. I have found that true for myself personally.
Our choices in all kinds of situations are, more often then not, made in highly charged emotional environments and based on inadequate or wrong understanding. The results are all to often not what we hoped for or what we enjoy after they are acted on.

So what can we do to clear up some of this confusion and ignorance and suffering we find ourselves immersed in?

My recommendation is to first look at ourselves individually and as a species for awhile. Look without trying to understand anything. Just look and not only with our eyes. Look long and deep and try to put aside your past ideas and understandings. Put aside for awhile what religion or science or the politician or the teacher or your family has told you about what is going on around and inside you.

My first Sufi teacher Fazil Inayat Khan once gave a talk about what we need to do to begin to understand more about our situation in the body/mind. He said if you want to have a hint of what and where we are just wait for a warm, moonless night. Waite for a time when there will be few or no clouds in the sky.

Go somewhere alone, away from other people and away from cities or towns. Go into the woods or by the sea or other bodies of water. Find a place where you feel relatively comfortable and secure from other people and creatures.

Take off all your cloths. Stand naked or sit naked. Look around. Let your eyes get use to the dark. Look around. Listen. Feel your body and it's relationship with the environment. Notice, no people. No artificial light. No social masks to deal with or to distract you. Civilisations artificial shelter gone. This is how it was before we constructed a social world over many millenniums. It was just us and the other wild and untamed creatures and this planet and the Universe that surrounds it. That is how it is now, when we step away from the group shelter or womb or illusion or whatever you want to label it.

Standing or sitting naked in the warm night is incredible. Look around. Look up at the star filled sky. Look at the woods or water or both. Feel the beauty and the immensity of being naked in the night.

When you have experienced the newness of the night and your nakedness in it for long enough to settle into it you are ready for the next step. You are now in your real environment free of artificial distracting social reality. This is you and natural existence.

Now do nothing. Do not look around. Do nothing. Just stand there or sit there. Let some time pass.

Now, begin to let yourself consciously notice the thoughts and emotions and sensations that you are experiencing.

You have never stopped having thoughts and emotions and sensations. They were with you as you stripped off your cloths. They were there when you stood or sat naked in the night. They were there when you looked around and heard and felt during your previous experience on this new naked night journey. It is just that now is the time to pay attention to them and to them alone. It does not matter now that you are in the warm night, naked and alone. Just pay attention to the thoughts and emotions and sensations that sweep through your awareness.

It does not matter if the thoughts are fear based or full of appreciation or mundane or about the past or future. It does not matter if they keep changing, jumping from one thought to another. Just be aware that you are having thoughts and watch them without judging their worth. Try not to continue any of the thoughts you are having consciously. Just let it be. Let it go on as long or as short as it will. Do this for as long as you can within a reasonable time period.

Next observe the emotions that sweep through you as well as the thoughts. Notice if they are fearful or joyful or whatever their nature. Notice how one thought and one emotion gives way to another or intermixes with another. Notice the relationships between the various thoughts and emotions.

Now, add to your conscious awareness, the physical sensations you are experiencing to the mix of the thoughts and emotions that are sweeping through you.

Where are you in all this? Are you the thoughts that you are having? Are you the emotions that you are experiencing? Are you the sensations that you feel?

What are you?

Who are you?

If you do not know where you are or what you are or who you are, how can you expect to make important and intelligent and meaningful decisions in your life? I say you cannot. What do you think?

Fazil told me that if I wanted to get the full worth of the night journey, I would have to commit to doing it until the sun rose the next day. I would have to be prepared to experience an entire night and let what happens happen. He suggested I use the Buddhist technique of identifying myself as pure awareness separate from thoughts, emotions and sensations that I would experience. I had studied and practiced Buddhist meditation at a Thia Buddhist temple in London so I knew how to do it. I have experienced what Fazil talked about several times during my life.

The first time I did it was in the New Forest in southern England on a warm August night in 1972 or 73. I forget the year now.

I found a secluded safe place. I set up camp and stripped naked when it got very dark. I stood for a long time. I sat down for a long time and I lay down at times. I did as my teacher told me to do. I experienced so much that I realize it is impossible and pointless to try to describe it. I would say to you if you want to know what it is like, just do it yourself. I will say that the experience was life changing. It made me a lot less dependent on what I experience socially to define my idea of who and what I am. It also showed me that in fact I am not the thoughts and emotions and sensations that I experience. I knew this before from past mediation practices but being alone in the woods at night, all night, really drove it home for me.

I was determined to be in a meditative state for as much of the experience as possible. I know that when you meditate you let any and all thoughts, emotions and sensations come and go through your awareness. You forget to let them come and go and you soon get involved with them. Then you notice you are involved and you let them go. This letting thoughts, emotions, and sensations come and go and forgetting to let them come and go, and instead, getting involved, and realizing you are involved, and letting them go, occurs all through any meditations. (that was a long sentence) (smile)You have to remember that this is meditating. You are not only meditating when you are not identifying with thoughts and emotions and sensations. Meditation is the entire experience.

I felt fear. I felt excitement. I felt awe. I felt so many emotions and sensations. I experienced innumerable thoughts, emotions and sensations that night. Some thoughts and emotions were cosmic and amazing. Others were scary and others, in fact most, were very mundane. Many were so contradictory and confusing that I soon felt completely overwhelmed. I also had to deal with the thoughts and emotions of boredom and restlessness. I had intense and repetitive thoughts and emotions that I wanted the experience to end or that it has ended. It was an amazing and difficult night.


So where is all this going? It is back to how do we understand who, what and where we are? And, how can we make better choices then we have when confronted with difficult situations and experiences?

Let me take you on a trance trip. Let yourself suspend any judgments. Let your thoughts and emotions come and go and just continue to read these words.

Imagine you are a radiating energy Being. You are not material in any sense we can understand.

Now imagine you have decided to take a journey into the material world. You decide to create a physical body. You surround yourself with an energy field to create a material structure to inhabit while in the material world. Imagine a picture of that process is the one above this writing. Look at it.


Now, imagine the egg like force field parts and you are suddenly in the material world. It is thick and all encompassing like an Ocean. You are now naked and exposed and graping for air.

You remember who you are and what you came to do at first. Then you are overwhelmed with sensations and you begin to forget as all your energies are focused on surviving your experience. Relating to numberless amounts of sensations gives birth to a whole series of emotions.
Soon all awareness of who you are and where you came from are gone. There is just the sensations and your emotional reactions to them.

Then you notice that you are not alone. You are in relationship with other material beings, human and other kinds. You begin to learn how to communicate with others like yourself and others not like yourself. The humans teach you how to communicate using gestures and sounds. Soon theses sounds become more meaningful and you are introduced to something they call language. At first you use it outside yourself to communicate with others. Then it becomes a way of communicating with yourself. You are now a social human being and that is all you think you are. Just a material body and a series on emotions and thoughts.You learn the rules that you need to know to get along in your new social world. You learn about proper relationships within the family and with non-family people. You learn about religion and politics and art and science. You are an integrated part of humanity. You made it.

But things do not seem quiet right. Something is missing. Life is not working out the way you were taught it should. People disappoint you. You disappoint them. God is difficult to believe in or relate too. Politics suck. You cannot make enough money. Your lover leaves or you do. The kids are a pain. You get sick and cannot pay the bills or get well. Someone you know and love gets hurt and dies. You get old. You are dying. (sigh) Life is a disappointment. Oh well.

You know you are dying. You have nothing to lose or gain now. So you look at your life. You try to understand what happened and why. You decide to strip yourself down and start from the beginning. You do not know where you came from but you do know that who you thought you were and who others thought you were was not true or real.

The only thing you know for sure is that you are a physical body. You have five senses and they help you explore and relate to your external environment. So we are back to being naked in the night. We are back to looking and sensing and trying not to understand but to explore. To examine our situation internally and externally long enough and deep enough to begin to be more aware of what we are NOT. It is by knowing what we are NOT that leads to a different understanding of ourselves and our situation.

So that is where we will leave this until my next entry. Stay tuned fellow Beings. The story continues, inshAllah. (laugh)