Squirminess: 10 March 2013

Today I couldn't come to meeting, so I had silence on my own in the Prayer Room for an hour. I actually started by playing some music on the piano in there. I miss having music at church. It was one of the only parts I liked. Granted, it was often also the part of the service that most deeply upset me, and many worship songs carry terrible connotations in my memory. But if you spend six years wholeheartedly trying to connect to a playlist of worship songs at least two or three times a week, some songs will end up speaking to you.

There were two songs that connected to me in particular:

Everyday, by Hillsong

and Blessed Be Your Name

We didn't even sing these very frequently at Youth Group, back home; for the most part, I perceived them as "cliche" in my teenage years. I remember on a couple occasions where each of those songs really clicked for me, though, where they became as direct streams of communication with God. They are relatively plain, simple songs - songs about the goodness of life - but they provided me with the renewal and a certain kind of energetic emotion that felt like catharsis that I needed today. They're bouncy and full. That was something I could shoot through my fingers, into the piano.

When I sat down to silence, it felt natural to begin to concentrate on a round ball - something like a ball of led. It turned and turned, and I tried to center myself, to clear my mind. After a few minutes, a very large, cavernous mouth appeared around the ball and spit it out. The ball subsequently bounced off of whatever hard suface seemed to be the floor of my brain, and I couldn't regain it. But just a second later, I was back in the mouth, and the ball was there, in the middle, maybe halfway between the teeth and the soft palate, suspended in midair maybe six inches from the tongue. (In total, the mouth might've been fifteen inches tall inside. I felt like Jonah in the whale, or maybe Pinnochio and Geppetto in theirs.) Then the ball got swirled around in strange patterns by the tongue and got spit out again. This happened several times, the ball gaining more energy and momentum with the swirling each time.

Then the tongue just started licking things - I'm not sure what. Flat surfaces on the edges of my mind. I was just weirded out by this point, because I didn't know how to concentrate on the image without thinking about it. I was having a very, very hard time focusing on anything this morning. Part of that was probably lacking the presence of a community; it felt a little disjointed. But I was also completely consumed by meta-thought, to the extent that I would keep wondering whether it was even worth it to write about the experience because so much of what I thought about was thinking about the fact that I was thinking about sitting in that room thinking about writing about the fact that I was thinking about my thinking. It was kind of ridiculous.

Last night, I met a dear friend of mine at the mall and we had dinner and chatted for several hours. We know each other very well and I have a great fondness for him. We had a number of good conversations about personality types and relationships and people we know and religion and stuff going on in our lives. When we were walking back to campus, he told me about a recent socio-emotional development he's made in which he's realized that romantic attractions and the emotional bonds between close friends aren't nearly as distinct as society seems to like them to be; that his initial attractions to many people he knows have been a large and very authentic part of the reason he's loved them in such a way as to end up impacting their lives profoundly. I was able to share a long and wonderful hug with him at the end of this conversation; it was moving and comforting and very warm.

There is a type of energy that I get after long hugs that's similar to exercising or masturbating or taking a good nap - the kind of energy that makes your lungs feel bigger and healthier than normal. I still had a lot of that energy and warmth when I woke up this morning, and when I sat down to meditate, it was buzzing around in me like a disoriented insect, as though it had collided with some of the anti-climax of not going to Meeting and with my bodily hunger and lack of structure. It felt like potential energy converted suddenly into heat energy or static electricity. General fuzziness. I think this is where the random licking came from. Although the licking wasn't really very sexual - honestly, it was much too strange for that, it seemed more as though the tongue was trying to clean whatever surface it was licking in lieu of a dishrag - that visceral incarnation, that desire for sensation and a strange closeness of sorts and an exchange of energy was certainly present.

I tried to clear my mind for awhile, after that. Normally, the way I do that is by imagining a tear in the fabric of my thoughtspace, the plane in which all these images appear. Beyond the thoughtspace there is nothing - no boundaries, no lack of boundary, no object, no calm, no energy, no gravity, no vacuum. I wanted to describe it as purity, or even nothingness, but by sheer lack of definition, I cannot say whether it is impure or full of things or not, I only know that I see and feel and think nothing. If I break out of this space for even a moment, the boundaries of reality come fizzing back in. It's like a spark landing on a piece of paper and burning a hole, except backward, and lacking in heat or color. So I expend a great deal of effort in trying to keep the walls from closing in, because the goal is to stay on the other side of the reality divide. I might add that it's extremely shocking when any external stimulus enters my vicinity while I'm in this space, because the speed with which the edges of this boundary close creates this type of sucking motion that's like a whirlwind.

It didn't even take noise or distraction today. The rapidfire in and out of the boundary was like elastic. I couldn't get it to stay. I had a momentary image of me, once, sitting in the curve of the hole, trying to pry it open with my legs and arms, trying to get it to stay, and it wouldn't. I'd just pop out on this side of reality. Well, so much for that. Guess the serenity thing's not happenin' today.

Eventually what this image decided to turn itself into was a strange type of electrical lazer show, different extremely brightly-colored fiery, electrical circles of energy (like the burning ring above) would buzz around my field of vision, first only in two dimensions, and then in three, and then in another dimension I'm not quite sure what to call. What I know is that it went from the hole between realities to a really bright overimage of this hole to a whole ton of overlapping overimages to crazy colorful three-dimensional spastic electrical movements to something slightly more complex than that, like it had found a way within the line itself to move more, to be fuller. Likewise, the colors were not always visibile colors; I remember there being an extremely bright royal blue, once, and once there was a speckled type of orange, and once a neon fuchsia-purple, and once a blinding yellow sphere. But other than that, the color, no matter how hard I concentrated on it, was something other than a describable color entirely, though I know that it was very bright, whatever the color was. In fact, there were two or three distinguishable colors like this, that have no visual counterpart - all distinct, all blindingly bright. I want to say they were something like an oil spill, but that merely captures my inability to pinpoint visual single colors.

Anyways, the sheer amount of energy in these strings and blobs of light and energy and color was just incredible. Even when it was only a gentle, pulsing type of glow, it still seemed extremely strong and uncontainable. (Appropriately enough, these images you see to the left took forever to organize themselves into any kind of appropriate order in my blog.) It's very hard to describe. But even this was constantly interrupted by internal dialogue - attempts to describe what I was experiencing, and anticipations of how I'd end up describing it, thoughts about how I shouldn't be thinking about how I'm thinking about my thinking. It really did not feel productive or peace-making at all. I felt relatively aimless. I remember thinking in the last couple minutes that I had finally come up to a moment of rest in an interesting thought that I could write about, but now I don't have any recollection of what it was. Go figure. Honestly, I'm glad I don't remember. I hate how contrived it all felt.

At this point, I was just hungry and wanted to go to lunch. I was restless. My brain was not cooperating, and it felt like trying to hold down a toddler to try to put my thoughts at "peace." I probably just need to exercise more or do homework, but meditation just didn't work this morning. I do find it interesting that similar themes were in this week's entry to last week's, though. Despite the almost antithetical difference between my emotional responses to the two experiences, there are still 1) human organs dismembered from their bodies, 2) light-energy symbolism, 3) distressing, uncontrolled movement. Gotta say, they're strange motifs. Let's see where they take me next week.

If I'm to impose a hunk of meta-analysis on the experience several hours after the fact, that uncontrollability has some parallel nature to relationship, to love, the same stuff that seemed to instill this energy in me. This particular energy was not as warm or peaceful or still as friendly or affectionate love typically is, but perhaps it can be likened to the kind of passion you get for life when you hear the birds chirp for the first time in five months, or sexual energy, or the surge of adrenaline when you pick up your pen after the last stroke of a difficult test. Understanding other types of relationship and love we have with and for the things and people around us with some of that uncontrollable, frustrating, fiery energy might give us some fleeting insight into the unpredictability of life - or even the uncontainability of God.