“Vipassana”

The Books of Fae 2013-9-10 – “Vipassana” “My consciousness was deeply in a mess. I couldn’t focus, could barely manage my energies. It felt as though things were crumbling all the time. In this hour of confusion, Amy Leipert comes to my aid, a thing for which I was most grateful, alongside another warrior-bard in their current incarnation.”

My consciousness was deeply in a mess.   I couldn’t focus, could barely manage my energies.  It felt as though things were crumbling all the time.  In this hour of confusion, Amy Leipert comes to my aid, a thing for which I was most grateful, alongside another warrior-bard in their current incarnation.

Upon Amy’s suggestion, I make my way to the Vipassana meditation, willing to try whatever I must to change the terrible conditions of my consciousness.

What followed was magnificently beautiful, affirming the nature of my sacred journey in a way perfectly suited to my Story ….

The idea of Aka had come to me after , where I encountered the idea of ‘sanskara’. Of patterns that existed longer than a single incarnation. It was a significant moment on the quest, the first time i’d encountered a name for something that I could feel in the field of my awareness yet had not anchored into the world. There, I had a structure for the patterns of energy i’d scented in the field regarding the peoples of faerie and the reasons why we kept encountering each other on the strings of synchronicity.

…

During that retreat, I felt things come into alignment. A sense of clarity came to me from the intense meditations, the form of the practice and it’s various terminologies helping me to ground out the perceptions I had been having of my path and it’s repetitions. There, the idea that I was experiencing a deeply aware viewpoint of the Creation, comparable to that of the highest of meditators and was navigating my way through my own range and intensity, came into deep clarity.

…

Once again I had that sense of straddling a line, where I was struggling to make sense of the vastness of vibrations that were going through my consciousness.

So when I was in Vipassana for the first and only time I had a bit of fire liquid (LSD) that I buried beneath a tree.  During the whole session I kept wondering if it was safe and I decided to sneak out of the Vipassana to check on it.

After i’d done that a few times I considered myself as escaping from the structures of the facilitators in the same way as the allied heroes in the old series ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ who escape the incompetant Nazi oppressors by using underground tunnels.

Well …. at one point, sitting in the meditation, I literally got a vision of the character from Verb, that’s what’s happening appearing in my mindseye and saying “YOU’RE ONLY HURTING YOURSELF” given my movement out of the space rather than sitting through the meditation

And then, swear-to-God a disembodied presence that felt like the story superhero from Schoolhouse Rock appeared and said “YOU’RE ONLY HURTING YOURSELF!”

From Wikipedia – “in the philosophical theories of Hinduism, every karma (action, intent) leaves a samskara (impression, impact, imprint) in the deeper structure of human mind”

The Equanimous Regard

Before this moment I had heard people speak of the idea of being equanimous with one’s circumstances, yet it was not until the events along the quest which involved meeting Amy Leipert in Valhalla and subsequently reserving a place to do the ten-day vipassana meditation that I truly anchored what would be one of my greatest challenges in the mortal plane.

This was different from the viewpoint on the ethers which had come to me during “Savagery, Super-Science and Sorcery” where I’d had a flickering viewpoint of the Creation as a canvas of vibrational impressions that required me to generate impressions in order to have facility in the world and then to generate other impressions to release myself from it’s bondage. Here, after twenty years of struggle with the incoherent deluge of my difficulties managing my consciousness I was seeing something else. Something that chilled me to the bone and which despite it’s intent to give refuge and release from the repetitions became a trigger-point for the incandescent rage I felt at feeling imprisoned in the very nature of mortal existence.

The idea was simple, yet it’s application was brutal. At it’s core, it was about regard. Or rather, about the effect of regard in terms of accumulating or releasing the karmic impressions within one’s mind and body. It was about the formation of karmas in response to one’s relationship with the conditions of the mortal plane, and was distilled into the idea of craving or aversion to what-was-happening in one’s life. It was a process to which I had tremendous success and failure.

Sanskara – The patterns in the prism

Kalapas – Elements of Life

As I sat in the meditation they provided videos of a famous practitioner of the vipassana technique describing the elements of the practice in both a structural and a functional way, explaining how sanskara, the patterns in consciousness that the intention of the meditation was to dissolve through equanimous regard were themselves made of kalapas, the smallest units of matter itself.

Here was something I could really understand, for what they were referring to with the idea of sanskara and kalapas resonated deeply with the structures that i’d been feeling all throughout my life and which i’d striven to make sense of through the synesthete overwhelm that was my perception.

It was not entirely blissful, for in this I also saw myself in a cycle, repeating the patterns of a strange music

Kalapas and Aka

Without doubt, the divination that came to me then was itself influenced by the devotion to story that defined my path.

Lines in the Sand and Soil

It was during one of the breaks as I walked outside that the relationship between the self and the landscape of it’s legend anchored to yet another degree, the flickering sense of the energies which gave rise to our lives grounding in a vision which came to me beneath my footsteps on the grass outside the temple.

Here the patterns I had sensed began to clear as my consciousness was able to process the idea that what I had been perceiving the whole time were the karmic impressions of sanskara which were more enduring than what we perceived as the current conditions of our life.

They were like the ripples in a pond, threads of cause and effect etched into the ether which formed the fabric of our lives, shaping the shape of our stories, and which were stored within the depths of our body, it’s karmic substance sewn into the very shape of who we imagined ourselves to be.

It was a moment of deep clarity, where I saw my story and it’s connections as part of a greater pattern, flush with a purpose that lay beyond the concept of our current incarnation.

The idea of karma and sanskara lay at the core. From an early age i’d been able to feel the vastness of the elements and been thrown by the immensity of that vision, and during my time at the Academy I had gained a grounding into how those things played out in the cycles of the planet and in the ways in which we defined our self …

Karma and Sanskara

And so I asked them – “What is the relationship between karma and sanskara?” and their answer was “They’re the same thing.”

This landed deeply for me as I went through the piercing clarity that was arising through the chaos. Things were made of things. What was referred to in the cultures i’d traveled through as ‘karma’ and now as ‘sanskara’ were subtle physical things which defined our experiences across lifetimes. Accordingly, what they were referring to as ‘kalapas’ I perceived as the elemental units of those things, the minute parts of what combined together in infinite variations to make up the many forms of the universe.