While being "empty headed" I got the impression that my awareness was moving from internal to external. It is rather difficult to explain but the first analogy that comes to mind is eating. The action of picking something off the plate and moving to the lips is external. Putting it in the mouth and chewing is a transition to an internal operation. The diner moves from an external focus (the plate) to an internal focus (the mouth). But this analogy doesn't really convey what I want to communicate.
Perhaps a better analogy is a pitch black room with two pictures on the wall. An observer in the room has a flash light with a focused beam. By directing the beam he can view one picture or the other but not both at the same time. The beam is too narrowly focused for that. By waving the flash light back and forth he can shift his attention (awareness) from one picture to the other.
While in my meditative state I felt my consciousness moving from one place to another. In one place, it was familiar in that my awareness contained the familiar feelings of my senses and my body. In the other, the familiar feelings disappeared and different set of feelings were encountered. And the transition from one state to the other felt cyclic and as regular as a clock ticking.
Because I had widened the focus of my "flash light" beam, I could for the briefest of time see parts of both pictures simultaneously as well as the area in between. That is, I could simultaneously sense the material and feel the immaterial for a fraction of a second. And what I mean by the "immaterial" is some realm beyond my five senses. While completely on the immaterial side I lost the inputs from my five senses but gained the "immaterial" feelings and vice verse.
I got the impression that my awareness was being swung from one "picture" to the other like the pendulum of a clock. Moreover, I got the impression that whatever was swinging the "flash light" was the real observer. The beam of light falling on the pictures is my awareness but the real observer is the person holding and moving the flash light. While the light beam and the pictures are on the wall, the observer is not. It is somewhat removed and not coincident with the plane of observation.
Further, I also got the feeling that the observer was doing some kind of consistency check. That is checking to make sure that on the physical plane everything was still fitting together.
This is extremely difficult to explain and the best analogy that I can come up with is a puzzle where the shapes of the pieces are constantly changing but the overall image and shape stay the same. So although the pieces are changing shape they have to do so in a coordinated manner because they still have to fit together.
On the physical plane my body was a piece of the puzzle and whatever snap-shot physical state it was in had to fit into the snap-shot of the universal puzzle. That makes sense since my body is constantly exchanging energy and virtual particles with the environment. Whatever is added or subtracted needs to be accounted for in the cosmic bookkeeping. In the really big picture of the universe nothing can be added or subtracted because it is a closed system.
Another feeling that I had was that the "real" observer was not local but a field. And rather than my body containing the field the field not only contained my body but the material physical world too. I and the physical world existed only because the awareness of the observer-field had focused on them. Moreover, my sense of time and space were artifacts of the swinging awareness. However, I don't think the "real" observer's awareness swung. It seemed to be the pivot point of the swing and extremely stable.
It felt to me that my experience of time and space might be due to a change in my state of awareness. To explain by analogy, my awareness was like a flashlight casting a beam on a physical object and thereby casting a shadow. Where the shadow appears depends on what direction the flashlight beam is coming from. By moving the flashlight it is possible to move the shadow. But the physical object does not move only the shadow. Similarly the objects casting the shadows of our day-to-day experiences do not move in time or space. The appear to move to us because our state of awareness is changing state. Again we are back to the problem or describing a change without invoking time since time feels like it is an artifact of changing awareness.
If you hear cracking ice now is because I am on extremely thin area. How to you discuss a change with out bringing time into the picture? And what do you do when time itself may be the artifact of changes?
Hang on here comes another analogy: a camera that is set to take an image periodically. As the camera is moved around it snaps an image. The passage of time could be inferred by the number of stored images. But this analogy fails to come up with how the number of stored images could generate the passage of time. My swinging awareness was like this automated camera. As it swung it took a snap shot at the extremes of the swing -- all the way to one side or the other. My sense of time was perhaps related to my awareness snap shots.
Similarly our sense of space comes from the direction that the camera is pointed. By snapping enough images and arranging them one can make a panorama which gives a spatial relationship. But if the images are just stacked on top of one another the spatial relationship changes so it is an artifact of the arrangement. And it is not unique. There is no one arrangement. The interpretation of space is dependent on how the images are stacked. So our interpretation of space is also dependent on how we stack the awareness snap shots.
This lead to my first insight into the nature of reality and "emptiness". I had started meditating to deal with stress but once that was accomplished I seemed to be following a path that others had walked before.
Next blog, I will continue with "... Plenty of Nothing..."
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