The Tiny Torus Of The Self

EXPLORING THE CENTER POINT

Last night, seated meditation in bed.

Focusing on my inner self, my identity, attempting to perceive my consciousness with my consciousness, I went through a period in which all my surroundings became cartoon-like or dream-like, with no loss of detail. This has happened in the past, and indeed is fairly common.

As I settled into rhythmic breathing, I closed my eyes and went within myself, far within, seeking my own source. This is a fairly common meditation for me. In the past I've often gone so deep and so far that I perceived a tiny single point, the very center point of my being, what I think of as my "I AM" point because in order to see it I must free my mind of all concepts except my own basic sense of identity and pursue only that. Salvia is so powerful in this particular manner, it gives you what amounts to almost a super-power of concentration. With salvia I can narrow my focus to only one exclusive concept and simply not think of anything else, at will.

So there I am floating in the black void of my inner self, starred as always by the millions of tiny lights that I always see even when I'm in normal mind. The remains of my old childhood hallucinations, the leftovers of my old visions. I'm floating in this, this vast expanse of what looks like space but unlike space I can feel it as if it were part of my body. I sense the currents and swirls and movements of my "astral plane" for lack of a better term. I focus on my source, and let everything else fall away. It's effortless. I no longer know my own name, that I even have a name. I am a point, a floating viewpoint, in this vast cavern that is my own mind.

I sense something different, floating in front of me in this space. What can it be? It looks like a smoke ring, perhaps three-quarters of an inch in apparent diameter. A smoke ring floating in the space of my mind. I can feel it twisting there. I see it twisting in on itself constantly, as an actual smoke ring usually does. It's a floating torus, spinning not on its axis, but spinning around the center of the toroidal tube that makes up the ring itself.

I approach closer to it. Now it's right in front of me. I can feel it there, twisting in on itself there in front of me.

Then something really strange happened.

It seemed to suck me in, to suck in the floating viewpoint that was all I was in that space. I became one with the torus, and all of a sudden I was twisting and torquing within it as if it, were me.

I distinctly remember the feeling of being turned inside-out when it happened. It is an incredibly unusual feeling to cope with.

Then it happened again. I remember thinking "inside out and inside out and inside out and inside out..." many times as I experienced the chaos of being a twisting smoke ring, a torus of energy, feeling my entire being twisting itself inside-out over and over and over.

Eventually I decided to disengage with it and wake up to full consciousness, and did so. All I remember thinking at the time was, it was like I finally found the very center of my being, and it was a spinning torus of constant self-inversion, spinning smoke-ring-like in the quasi-darkness of the deepest recesses of my mind.

Overall, a very interesting experience, rather pleasant.

Another Kind Of Distance

Recently:

Sitting in silent meditation, 100X. I'm playing around with what feels like a field around my body, a field that I can feel as if it were a part of me. I move it to the left and to the right, feeling it move, feeling it like an extension of my will. Then suddenly I feel myself, sitting there, suddenly shrink down to microscopic proportions, and seep through the floor of the room into an identical but far smaller version of my room. So there I am, having just filtered down through the ceiling, sitting there, and it happened again. Once again I shrank down, seemed to filter through the bed and floor as if it were a permeable membrane, and wound up where I started, sitting on my bed in my room, wife asleep by my side. Then again, it happened. And again.

I seemed to shrink, again and again, and seep down through the material plane I was in and fall into a far smaller, identical one!

Of course, each new plane of reality, while immeasurably smaller than the preceding one, was completely normal to me once I entered it, because I was so much smaller too.

It's an amazing feeling, to feel your whole body shrink suddenly down to microbe size or less, over and over, four or five times. I never experienced that before.

So that was interesting.

This brings us to last night.

Once again, sitting on the bed cross-legged. Reality around me morphs into an extension of my head, seeming to be all a part of my head, or passing through my head. I see reality in a confused daze of reality-chunks, pieces of the surrounding room arranged seemingly at random around me, physically touching my eyes and head. One such chunk was the size of my whole cheek, touching my cheek, blended with it somehow. Confusing.

In this state of *blending* with my surroundings, a common state for me while meditating on salvia, I get the clearest sense of my reality not being outside my head and body at all, but instead all in my head, or rather all in my mind, *including* my head and body. Of it all being a mirage, a figment of my imagination, even down to my physical body.

As this state started to abate, and I became more aware and lucid, I could feel my body as usual in its seated position on the bed. I had not moved. My normal sense of kinesthesia returned, my body-sense became clear again. But what's this? I feel my body seated on the bed in my room, but I also feel many other bodies, many others of my body, all seated on the bed, all in *almost* the same identical posture but not quite. They all differ slightly, some very slightly. So once again, I sense a "cloud of me's" or many "me's" all seated in the same location.

I was sitting in one place, many times over. Not all identical sitting postures, but very similar. It should be noted that I could also clearly sense this, that all these bodies of mine were not in perfectly identical postures. I could "see" (in my mind) where others differed. One positioned slightly to the left, another with part of my right arm not in the same exact place, and so on. None differed greatly, but all differed at least slightly.

I have been in this state many times in the past. It's even rather comfortable for me now. This time was different though. This time I could also very clearly sense the distance between each of my bodies.

I could clearly feel the distance between my many bodies that were all sitting in the same physical location.

Think about that for a minute.

This sense of distance was incredibly clear. Think of holding your arms apart with your eyes closed. You can clearly sense the distance between your two hands, even if you cannot tell it's exact length in centimeters or inches. There's no mistake that your hands are well apart, you can clearly feel that even with your eyes shut.

This was the same degree of certainty.

So I'm sitting there in many, many bodies, all in the same almost identical physical location in my bedroom on my bed, but I'm sensing the distance between each body. It wasn't a long distance... perhaps a couple of feet. However, and this is key, this "distance" wasn't in my normal three-dimensional world. It was not a distance in any spatial direction that I had access to. In my normal 3-D world, this distance was in a "hidden" direction, as real as anything I could point to, but not really *in* my regular world. I could not point in the direction that I sensed the distance, for that direction did not exist.

It was another kind of distance, in a hidden direction. I could feel it so clearly; it was not to the left or to the right or up or down or to the front or the rear. It was a distance to "elsewhere" that had no direction.

This is not a concept that lends itself well to our languages, but I experienced, clear as day, the distance between the planes of my own multi-plane or multiversal existence.

And I did so with all the clarity that you're experiencing now, reading this.

This is why I love salvia divinorum.