Dissolve

I am sitting at the Rocking Frog, knowing that I should sit here and write yet desirous (after listening again to the Tai Chi interview) of moving my body throughout the world, just to experience the connection with my motions and explore my awareness of them on various levels. Also, however, I begin to realize, to have dawn upon me, the importance of sitting still. When motionless, your body has less to focus on, and the movements of your mind become more accessible to you. The tendrils of thought, reaching out and feeling/filtering the world and your experience of it. I say not that static is necessary for attainment of mind-presence, but that meditative thought can be a tool to help you acknowledge which directions your mind gravitates towards, and how forcefully or stubbornly it travels. This can also be the state for slight adjustments, using your presence within this usually-shrouded process to tweak your own neural pathways and reactions.

Additionally, this helps me to grasp something which I have had some curiosity about for some time now, which is ritual motions and sounds. Beta waves, caressing the brain; tribal chants, unlocking depths of perception; walking and running meditations, pacing your thoughts differently than they might have drummed upon you before. These are all....unusual...for lack of a better. They, like drugs, remove you from the stagnant tar-pits of routine into which we all sink for majorities of our time. Challenging the mind...taking it out of expectation – from solid ground to quicksand. When you are displaced, you must think on your feet....and what better way to prepare for any possible future than displacing yourself as much as possible, adapting to all terrains?

Something about a tribal chant...removing the individual from himself, removing accountability and identity, unshackling from the body and expanding into the far-reaching pulses of sound, and beyond them even the silent world. When one's self is already dissolved into sound, you see, a significant portion of the bridge between self and nothingness has already been traversed. Can you imagine what that is like? What a liberating, frightening experience that must be?

Hopefully we all experience something so liberating, by degrees, in our own lifetimes. But with society as fractured as it currently is, I find it hard to believe that we could experience it with the same authenticity as a tribe might have. Being a part of that movement, of that sound-generation, in which the barriers between individuals completely dissipate and you become a singular unity...I can't for the life of me imagine what that would be like. I want to.