Midwinter Night’s Dream Meditation
In Five Acts
One
Leading an early evening meditation in Virtual Reality means helping jacked-up people settle down. That’s what they come for.
I don’t bring up enlightenment much. I just say, ‘let me help you take a little vacation from yourself.’ I’m sure others have that before, but it gets the point across.
At the beginning I gab a little about my idea of a meditation. People bring expectations, a vague sense that it’s hard and about focusing. People have been focusing or at least trying to focus all day long. They don’t want to focus any more.
I say, ‘please don’t focus. Just let your attention rest lightly on my voice and let my words carry you along. I’ll put your mind on a slow moving sidewalk so you can just calmly watch the show go by.’
And when you realize, oops, you’ve been thinking about that person who pissed you off earlier this morning for a bit there, I say, ‘please just come back to my voice. That’s all. No points will be deducted.’
To an officially authorized meditation leader, which I am not, the meditation hasn’t even started yet. I’m just letting words flow in a soft voice about what’s going to be happening. To me, this is the meditation. It’s part of meeting people where they are and gradually helping them settle in.
Two
The shift from introducing to being in the thing you came for might be a visual or some vocal exaggeration, like, ‘Now we’ll start by inserting the micro micro micro video camera sub-cuuuutaceously, here we go, yes. We’re off.’
‘We see all our organs squished in and pulsating away because you’re alive. Everywhere we look, something is moving up and down, back and forth, expanding and contracting. Watch them all in motion.
This is alive.
When we shift our cameras in more deeply, let’s pick some muscle areas, say, in our right shoulder, and now we see the long lines of carbon molecules that make up our muscles. They are all vibrating, even faster than the organs we just saw.
We know when we zoom in more that it’s just atoms colliding and empty space, or it looks empty now in our camera view, right? The atoms are vibrating so fast we can’t see the motion any more — a billion times a second. Back and forth, back and forth.
That’s pretty fast, but we’re just imagining now, so let’s see what happens when we go inside just one single back and forth, just one oscillation of one of the atoms we see in here.
Ready? We’re right in the middle, getting closer to the turning-around point. Closer. Picture us getting closer to the end.
Now, we are right on the turning-around little teeny so small point, and what? There’s nothing. Whoa. Let’s step back.
Let’s take a breath. Try pushing the air gently up into your lungs from your diaphragm. And let it fall back. Breathing in. Breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Nice. Now let’s check out the turning-around point again.
See the atom? Here we go. Right in the middle of the cycle again
Getting closer to the end, time feels like it’s slowing down as we get closer.
Almost ... and then, here we are. Everything stopped. This is the point, there has to be this point.
Three
Rest. This is rest. There has to be rest. For there to be motion. Everything is stopping right here on this point, for us. So we can see. What? What is there when there is no motion? There is nothing from our perspective as living things.
It’s OK, we’re here together.
Our Observing Selves are here. The part of us that’s watching us meditate now and notices when we’ve gotten distracted by the guy who pissed us off again. That part is not made of atoms even though it might be dependent on them, doesn’t mater. We’re here.
What if we could take a picture of everything? At rest, which also might be nothing. When everything is moving, it’s something, when it’s not, it’s nothing. But it’s still everything.
How would we remember what we can see now, when it all stops for us? Would it be like a dream? Where it feels like crazy things happen for a long time but it was only seconds?
What if this turning-around-and-stopping place here is a portal to everywhere?
Let’s go through. Here we go and what I think we’d take with us would be some background, like Winter, where most of us are now.
So we’d come into a winter scene in a perfect winter forest, lit by full moonlight that shows every branch of every tree perfectly holding its perfect batch of snow just resting there on it.
We know now we’re on snowshoes and the others are up ahead so we’re each alone in this winter woods on power snow shoes slowly pushing us along so we can breathe the air … remembering what it’s like to feel cold air in our lungs … feeling the air on our skin, our face, our cheeks. All part of the beauty of this place and now up ahead the woods are clearing
Four
The others are there. We’re at the top of a hill.
Little disks are there and we don’t stop to talk or think we just get on the disk sleds and start going down feeling the pure pleasure of sledding.
I invite you to leave this sledding time and go to any sledding time in your life … and now bring it into this ride down with you. If it is a hard memory, hold it tightly as we keep going down. Bring it all into this ride Please keep your attention with this voice.
There are fruit trees up ahead we didn’t see at first. We can’t just let go. We need to steer. So we don’t hurt the fruit trees.
Or ourselves.
Stay with the ride, we’re almost through the trees, you can see.
We are, it’s levelling off now. Take a little breath. We’re slowing down. And stopping.
We’re at the bottom, together, not speaking, looking all at once at seeing a man making a snowball. Not to throw, but to put on the ground and start rolling up. Pushing the snowball up the hill, we see it is Sisyphus.
We feel that he likes this. He digs the ride down. Going back up is different but it’s ok too. We all make snowballs.
Have you pushed a snowball up a hill? Feel it getting heavier. You’re working harder. Just a little bit harder, every step.
You look over at Sisyphus, up ahead of us. He’s humming.
You turn back to your quite large snowball. You still feel his humming and find a hum of your own that is in harmony. All of us do.
We are almost at the top again. We look up and as we do, our snowballs all roll back down as we knew they would all along. We just notice it. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be. The snowballs rolled back down.
Sisyphus is already on his way back down. And in that instant we are all back looking through our video cameras inside of ourselves, back from the portal where things come to rest for just an instant, back looking at the atoms vibrating and bumping into each other.
We pull back again to see carbon molecules and very quickly back to our organ view then we stop to breath.
Putting our attention on the breath gently pushed up from our diaphragm into our lungs and then slowly releasing and letting it drop back out. Breathing in. Breathing out.
Letting the images play across our Observing Self of moonlit forests. And sledding rides with all the good parts. Walking back up. Back and forth. Up and down. Meeting Sisyphus. Humming with him.
Breathing in two deeper breaths now through the nose. Noticing how it affects our alertness. Our sympathetic nervous system is coming back online.
Moving your shoulders up and down. Gradually opening your eyes and coming back to this place in Horizon called Cycles and Circles World.
Five
It is unusual to leave our normal state in a meditation and come back to a made up virtual place that is now back to normal.
We need to be quiet together. Then I call on someone and ask them if they would like to say anything about anything. Most of the time people do want to say something, although first they need to say, ‘well, I don’t have anything to say.’
Sometimes they don’t and they do later, but maybe not. It has to be completely right in my heart as the host for someone to be with us in silence. It is, because I know what it is to want that way of being with others.
The meditation takes us out of our own familiar pathways for a bit. So do other people’s check-ins. Each one is a meditation, where we put our attention on what the funny looking avatar is saying and turn away from our chatter.
We do it for as long as we did the meditation.
About forty minutes after the hour, people leave the world for other worlds in VR or for the consensus reality we call the place we plug in our headsets.
