This is perverse and heretical. It could cause you a lot of damage. Please be careful. I'm not recommending you do this. But if you go ahead and do it anyway, please make sure you do it in a safe and protected environment. I did it this morning in a Buddhist gompa during a ritual. And in the chequerboard of my strengths and many weaknesses, it's just possible I'm strong enough to cope with this anyway.
What am I talking about? A perverse corruption of the 9 second Play as Being practice. First a recap about what Play as Being is about at its core. Instead of assuming that all is solid reality around us, we experiment by thinking that somehow the appearance of everything we perceive is presented to us by... well, by "Being". Whatever that means for us. And that during those 9 second meditations, we play as being Being ourselves, the thing that is doing all that presentation of appearances.
Now I'll go back to my first post in this experiment. I wrote, "It seems more accurate to say that the rest of the time is Playing as Non-Being". And Piet Hut, the founder of this project posted a comment saying, "You might say Being is playing as non-Being. And by reversing the roles, we may wake up to the mistake that was involved."
So now for the perversity. I said to myself, "What would happen if I turned this on its head?" Supposing that instead of deliberately spending 9 seconds playing as Being, I deliberately - REALLY deliberately - tried playing as NON-Being.
Now you might think all that would happen is I would just have my day-to-day consciousness. Isn't that what I was just talking about? No. That would be what happens when through laziness or ignorance we don't focus on anything else. Instead what I did was use all my powers of focus, the same laser beam focus I'd been using playing as Being, but this time focused on playing as non-being, imagining what I saw to have objective separate self-existence that I was no longer part of.
The result was horrible. It was like switching meditation from good to pure evil. I was filled with such a revulsion that I didn't know it was possible to feel. It was an insight into Hell, perhaps quite literally. I was almost lost for words. This was way beyond my current daily experience, and I'm glad I'd drawn a 9 second limit because more than that would have been far too painful.
What did this tell me? I have a whole jumble of thoughts that I need to reflect more on. But first look says we are headed in the right direction with Play as Being and also indeed I am personally with my normal religious practice. Where we've come from, it seems, is a truly dark place. And that place is inhabited. I feel we need to shine a light and throw a rope for anyone who wants to escape the sheer open-wound agony of that place.
I'll not do it again. And I don't recommend you try this at home. But more than 12 hours later I'm still reeling from the intensity of what non-being is truly like.
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Thank you, Storm, for sharing your experiences with us! Yes, play can go in many directions, to pleasant and even blissful as well as to unpleasant and downright terrifying. Without that power, both ways, our explorations would have no bite.
ReplyDeleteThere are many things I'd like to say in response, but we can do that in-world, later on. Just two for now: 1) the PaB exploration seems to protect itself remarkably well, and part of the reason may be because it doesn't look sexy and juicy enough to jump in prematurely and misuse it, like may happen with tantra, say; it requires very considerable experience and insight to even know what it would be like to try to misuse it and by that time you may be able to handle it, as you did -- no guarantee of course, but a strong reassurance; 2) whatever happens, as soon as we remember "this too, is one way that Being plays" all will be well -- and it will be well even if we don't know it right away, we simply don't have the power to compete with Being and let it not be well.