Today’s post is the second in my Cosmic Corner series, where I explore some of the existential and spiritual reorientations available through practice.
As a kid I spent hours sitting at our living room coffee table flipping the glossy pages of a book called Powers of Ten. The book was based on the acclaimed 1977 short documentary by the American husband and wife design team Charles and Ray Eames – a film “dealing with the relative size of things in the universe.”
If you haven’t seen it, do yourself the favour. The film and book start with two people picnicking in a Chicago park. The camera moves back by factors of ten: 10 meters the first ten seconds, then 100 meters the next ten, then 1000 meters the next ten, and so on. We see the park, the neighbourhood, the city, the region, the planet, the solar system, the galaxy … wider and wider until we reach 100 million light years out … and then we swing back to Earth and down into one of the picnicker’s hands, until we end up at 10-16 meters, vibrating with the protons and the quarks. The ultimate existential yoyo.
At around ten years old, I had found my first spiritual practice (although I didn’t know to call it that). When life got hard – when it closed in, got too painful – I’d lie in my bed and imagine zooming out. Doing this calmed me and put my worries in perspective. It also did something harder to explain. As I practiced the expansion portion, my body squirmy with vertigo, I always felt I was about to pitch backwards off the face of the planet, into … into what?
What the hell kind of life / reality had I found myself in anyway? How could the universe keep moving back forever? And who was I trying to know all this – how did I fit in? It wasn’t just an intellectual inquiry; I was really really trying to know, trying to know by feeling directly into my right-now experience. At a certain point, the sense of infinite space all around me would become indistinguishable from the infinite space of my own awareness … and my brain would short-circuit.
~ pzzzt ~
And then I’d come back, refreshed.
Fun times!
The emphasis in today’s guided meditation will be on perspective, with an option at the end to trip out on the weird mystery of it all. This last bit may not seem very practical (it isn’t!), but that doesn't mean there’s not something interesting to explore here. In fact, many contemplatives report the experience of not finding any limits inside or around them can have a liberating effect on their understanding of self and world. It can become its own kind of answer, even if that answer defies words.
Let’s go defy words.
Jeff
The agitations that beset you are superfluous, and depend wholly upon judgments of your own. You can get rid of them, and in so doing will indeed live at large, by embracing the whole universe in your view and comprehending all eternity and imagining the swiftness of change in each particular, seeing how brief is the passage from birth to dissolution, birth with its unfathomable before, dissolution with its infinite thereafter.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.32
I wanna talk about my mental health, but I can’t because of my mental health! – CEC Meditation
Monday March 31, 2025, 7:30pm EST
Online via Zoom
The Consciousness Explorers Club is a not-for-profit I founded in 2011, with a mission to make practice fun and accessible, and to seed mini-practice communities around the world. We host free virtual guided meditation sessions every Monday night. It’s a wonderfully supportive community of humans. I’m guiding tomorrow, March 31st, if you want to join. Here’s the blurb:
I wanna talk about my mental health, but I can’t because of my mental health!
First of all, it’s hard to see the thing that you’re in when you’re in the thing. Second of all, the nature of the thing you’re in may be a muddy lack of clarity and inability to find the words. At the very time you most need understanding from others, you are least capable of articulating that need. Welcome to the human condition in general, and the neurodivergent condition in particular. In tonight‘s meditation, we will practice articulating to ourselves the thing that we’re in, even if it just means articulating our inability to articulate the thing that we’re in. Progress!
THIS WEEK ON THE MIND BOD ADVENTURE POD
This week we meet relational facilitator James-Olivia Chu Hillman, whose teachings on radical responsibility, congruence, and unconditional positive regard are already shifting how Jeff shows up in relationships, and how Tasha ghosts the people who annoy her. 😅 This is a very animated and joyful episode, an enactment of relating within the subject of relating. Whoot!
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