Plant Medicine As An Ally In Meditation

Copyright, Parker Stafford

I was given weed recently as a result of my describing what took place this Summer where weed had made me more psychic, something I wrote about here at WTI.

Alone finally last night after the holiday goings-on, I decided to get ready for bed and go through a meditation after using the weed I had been given.

I used a very small amount, about a pinch, about 3/4 the size of a pea (if that). This amounted to two regular puffs and one fraction of a third. This was a very low dose, although the version I used was described as being a strong hybrid version. I put on my headphones, pulled up a Monroe Institute Hemisync program from the Gateway Experience, and listened with headphones. This particular audio helps to induce deep Theta states, and while there are directions for relaxation and breathing, most of it is designed for your own inner work. The audio lasts about 45 minutes, just enough to get you there.

Everything happened very quickly. Before the narrator/guide began his first comments, I already felt a presence of a male who was speaking to me in this bright excited voice who seemed to be positioned above me who extended his hand saying, “Take my hand and I’ll show you all the places you can go!” At this point I was already dissociated from my body and traveling through what looked to be outer space. I remember having an experience like this before many decades ago where I moved out of my body and began seeing a starry sky and feeling that the stars were actually consciousness. The sensation at the time was overwhelming and it put an end to the projection because of the state of overwhelm I invariably would fall into that kept me from further projecting. This time, I thought about this and as I saw all these stars, I didn’t feel overwhelm but instead felt a stirring warmth in my core where there was only love. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I acknowledged this love as the next step in my evolution and the evolution of everyone on the planet.

I was interupted by the narrator of the audio a number of times as he made suggestions for how to breathe and relax. I was there in seconds, I was ready instantly and kept having my meditation interrupted by this voice. It didn’t trip me up completely though, it was more that I paused my meditation and waited for the voice to complete what it had to say since it pulled me out of the “broad mind” state as I felt pulled into a more linear language-based state (rational left brain). I’ll have to work more on that in the future. I found myself back at my body after expanding outward through both space and dimension, which all took place very quickly.

I noticed during this whole experience that my third eye had become very active. This time, though, I could feel the third eye pressure at the bridge of my nose. My third eye is now a vertical band that goes from my nose all the way up to my hairline. When it activates, it is usually felt as a large dot on my forehead with a sense of energy and even something that feels akin to tightness of a sort. This tightness isn’t inhibiting in any way, it signals that my third eye is activating in a strong way. It is more that this tightness is the result of these bands of energy that flow around it and out of it. When this happens, it is a sign that I can begin to see clearly beyond the physical if I focus my mind correctly with the third eye center. The two work together in bringing information through. I was aware of information streaming into different parts of my brain which would get routed to the third eye as the lens used to see into the realities that these intuitions represented. Likewise, I was aware that the third eye could see into the mind to pick these things up. It was a fluid dynamic system where informatiin flowed both ways.

As I thought about this, the third eye energy shifted up into its usual place which was mid-brow up to the edge of my hairline. The whole area constitutes the third eye for me, which is akin to a long extended flame of awareness and sensation. The Hindu seers who paint the tilak on their foreheads are using an image of how I experience the third eye. Two vertical lines with a cental line in the center all corresponding to the Ida, Pengali, and Shushumna nadi. The Ida and Pengali merge in union and balance in the Shushuma, the place of boundless bliss. Below is a photo of the tilak as it is worn by mendicate monks. There are variations of the tilak, so the one shown below is just one of a handful of versions used.

I was also met by a small presence that I can only describe as dwarfish that spoke and moved excitedly as it began showing me the energy lines in my legs. I had gone from standing on a beach to being up in the hills in a tropical location atop a flat-topped roof of someone’s house, which was where this being began pointing out the energy lines in my legs.

I was in this kind of environment because the hemisync audio uses ocean waves as part of its audio. I naturally found myself standing on a beach, and later moved from the beach uphill into the mountains above where I landed on a slightly sloping rooftop. The being was showing me where the energy lines crossed in my legs when the narrator broke in and it made it hard to continue. I will see about going back to this in another meditation. I knew or could feel how others had mapped the energy body in not too different a way in the past in meditations much like this one, and I thought how easy it was, not the arduous task as I had originally had thought it was.

I was keen to get into the leg chakras because I could feel how there was some blocked energy that resided at the junction of the torso and the legs. It was curious how this energy trailed off behind me, right around my behind and extending out like coat-tails behind me. This awareness has always been one of the great gifts conferred by awakening, and the awareness itself has been enough to dissolve countless blocks in my field. At one time many years ago this awareness would make me feel defeated by the sheer volume of material present to still clear. Now, though, it existed more as a remnant, a trailing bit of material near my lower back.

What is worth mentioning is the back trouble I have been having since November. The week of Thanksgiving was where it came to a head after driving to see family. It was so bad I couldn’t move from a sitting to a standing position without the use of a broom handle which I used for about a week to get up from my couch. Luckily, I somehow managed to keep working even though all I wanted to do was to lie flat on the floor. I have been slowly rehabilitating my back muscles so I can move more freely. What would have taken weeks if adjystments by a chiropractor I was able to do on my own and now the sore muscles are in a much better place with slow and gentle stretches. It was I think not a coincidence that I was having this tightness along with the enhanced awareness of the stuck energy near my bottom in this meditation.

I soon decided to drift off to sleep after this took place. I revisited the idea of telepathy before going to sleep but every person who I put my mind to seemed much too vivid and in a tangle for me to even try another experiment along these lines. I did however find a part of my mind aware of one person who I kept feeling like I was communicating with during the meditation, like a quick check-in contacted me and there was an important message waiting for me from tat person when I checked messages this morning.

I say this only as a reminder about the things we can explore, learn, and discover. We are all inheritors of a noble light that is supportive and loving. We go and experience things that are part of our present “set and setting” and experiences are part and parcel of where we are at any moment in time.

I will note that up until this summer, I have only ever used natural methods for reaching accelerated states of being and awareness. I have also been an advocate for this approach for many decades (using it myself exclusively) since my early twenties—in the late 1980’s. My experience this past summer made me rethink this approach. After being able to reach these ecstatic states naturally, I have considered what some substances might do to help further expand both awareness and experience. While I have no interest in being a heavy user, I am considering this as one wrinkle among many in this entire process.

If weed helps me to hone in on the remnants if blocked energy, then I will consider future meditations using very small amounts to assist in sharpening that awareness. I don’t sense that weed opened my third eye, that initiation took place in a meditation in late 2006. Rather, my intent to do this meditatiin was set on “finding out what I might see ir discover” with my third eye dutifully responding to that intent and also aided by the much more fluid state I found myself in as the weed began to take affect.

The goal for me is to learn how to emulate these states without outside substances. I will mention though that even the food that we eat can have a significant effect on our physiology not unlike weed has done. I have found states of bliss after eating cantaloupe and other melons because it served to modify how my body responded to the energy of the awakened state. Just being well hydrated can change how I feel. Taking vitamin D has had dramatic effects on how I experience bliss, for example. So weed? It may well be one of many plant helpers that I can use to help open up my cognition and awareness to valid physical and nonphysical states, not as a distorter of experience, but as a liberator from an inhibited state to one that is not as inhibited.

I hope you are getting a break and have enjoyed the holidays. If you don’t hear back from me, happy new year!

Advertisement

Scientists Scan The Brain Of A Woman In An Out Of Body State

This article was too interesting not to reprint here. I think any time that we can use different tools to understand a given phenomenon, it can sometimes yield unexpected results or information that can serve to help us to understand  things better.  While the results may suggest that the woman was merely thinking she was moving or out of body, I think the research helps point to how the brain handles this kind of data.  I hope researchers are not quick to reach conclusions!  More information is probably needed, and this is a good start!  The article is below in total. Sadly, there is talk of this experience being like a hallucination….which troubles me because it continues this bias some have, many have, that consciousness cannot exist beyond the body (it is huge if it does, so let’s not toss out the baby with the bath water alright?).  It is just as possible that the brain is recording information that is existing BEYOND it…..and if it IS then that is HUGE!  And yet, I am very glad that this research is being done.  Being able to have robust discussion is important so people like us can bring our own ideas and proposals to the table for consideration.  Nonlocality would be a giant step or leap for humans to recognize in this kind of work!

 

By Jennifer Welsh March 7, 2014 6:27 PM

It may sound like the plot of the Twilight Zone, but a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa says she can voluntarily enter an out-of-body experience. This was a lucky break for scientists, who were able to scan her brain during the episode.

Usually out-of-body experiences are a part of, say, a near-death experience. A patient may float above their own body as surgeons work on them. These experiences are usually attributed to the drugs in a patient’s system, or the hormones released into their system by trauma.

A unique experience

The study — which only involved this one person — was published Feb. 10 in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, a peer-reviewed open access publication. The researchers are members of the School Of Psychology at the University of Ottawa.

According to the paper, this woman enters her out-of-body state right before sleeping, visualizing herself from above. She started doing so during naptime in preschool, they write. She currently only does it sometimes.

The researchers wrote in the paper:

She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling along with the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving “real” body…

She told the researchers:

I feel myself moving, or, more accurately, can make myself feel as if I am moving. I know perfectly well that I am not actually moving. There is no duality of body and mind when this happens, not really. In fact, I am hyper-sensitive to my body at that point, because I am concentrating so hard on the sensation of moving. I am the one moving – me – my body. For example, if I ‘spin’ for long enough, I get dizzy. I do not see myself above my body. Rather, my whole body has moved up. I feel it as being above where I know it actually is. I usually also picture myself as moving up in my mind’s eye, but the mind is not substantive. It does not move unless the body does.

The brain out of the body

The researchers did a fMRI before and after asking her to enter her out-of-body state to find out what that looked like in the brain. They compared these to when she was imagining, but not actually entering, the state.

Interestingly, the pathway that seemed to be activated during her out-of-body experience is also involved in the mental representation of movements.

Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014

Brain regions activated by the out-of-body experience include the supplementary motor area, the cerebellum, the supramarginal gyrus, the inferior temporal gyrus, the middle and superior orbitofrontal gyri.

Some parts of her brain involved in interpreting vision were turned down in activity, as shown below:

Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2014

Brain regions inhibited by the out-of-body experience include the visual cortex.

She didn’t have any specific emotions surrounding this experience, and i t seems to be a kind of hallucination she can turn on at will.

What’s happening?

Even if there is no soul stuck in our bodies, this woman isn’t making this up. There’s obviously something happening in her brain that is making her experience the world in a different way — but researchers can’t yet say exactly what it is.  Plus, this study was about one woman’s out-of-body experience, not all out-of-body experiences.

Still, the changes they observed could be similar to how the brain can be trained using meditation. The researchers even suggested that this could be something many kids can do, but that with practice could be carried into adulthood.

Interestingly, the researchers suggested that this kind of experience may be much more common than we thought. The woman in question actually “appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this,” the researchers wrote.

They compared it to synesthesia — the condition in which people hear colors or smell sounds — which was thought of as “out there” but has become widely accepted in the last few decades.

The article appears HERE

In Dreams…

This idea of dreaming is near and dear to me.  It is near and dear to me because along with a spiritual journey since age nine, I have been fascinated with dreaming and what this very significant amount of time we spend each day is used for.  I have also been fascinated with dreaming because I have had what I consider to be quite fascinating events take place within my dreams and I am also brave enough to simply tell you what I have found and also what I think as part of a CONSIDERED opinion (which stands apart from an opinion that may not be based on significant evaluation of ones own dreaming).  I also like dreaming because its MINE. It is my own landscape, my own stuff. I get to go into the temple of my OWN dreaming and no one else’s.  I can explore and discover and learn.  I have spent years studying my own dreams, by the way, so I know a few things about it that are not in the mainstream and bear mentioning….

The thing I think that is so great about understanding dreams is that we each have the opportunity to be experts with our own dreamscapes.  Since we each dream, just as we live a life, we ourselves can learn a lot from our dreams. I did this by keeping a dream journal starting in high school until I was married, which was a period of approximately ten years.  We want, though, to wait on what others have had to say about dreams in order to understand them, but even the supposed experts haven’t been that great at coming up with a theory that works for how and why we dream.  Freud said dreams were unfulfilled wishes.  Excuse me, but my dreams have had healing elements, points of resolution, I have had what appear to be out of body experiences, and I have also had dreams that have clearly shown the future.  So if the supposed “experts” can be so off on all of this, it stands to reason that our own observations might well be a little more helpful in helping to progress our understanding of dreaming.  Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of fascinating information out there from REM being a way to nourish the cornea with oxygen, to dreams being an expression of unexpressed wishes and desires (thanks Sigmund). It is all sounds very nice, I just think it is woefully incomplete.

It’s probably a problem of clarity, though, why we have so much trouble being able to figure out what dreaming is….. for the simple reason, most likely, that WHY we dream is so broad that any one theory will have trouble containing it all in a neat tidy way that will make a scientist feel good about his or her work and reason for being. It is a bit like asking me what the purpose of LIFE is.  Do you have a few days to have a seat and talk about it?  really, I don’t think you can sum it up in a few sentences, and if you do, it will probably be so hopelessly simplified as to bear very little meaning.   So having said that, I am going to tell you a few things about my own experience in the same way that a tourist might come back and show you a few pictures of a trip, say, to Tuscany, or Greece, or Neptune, or somewhere near the Dog star….

One thing I can tell you is that dreams can be precognitive.  Not maybe, but certainly.  Not only that, but my dreams have not only been clearly precognitive, they have also shown a most interesting phenomenon that an old friend named Rodney called “periodicity” when I walked into my Wednesday night jam session and explained how I had uncovered something incredible about my precognitive dreams. What you should first know is that I have had these precognitive dreams my whole life and second that they have been very detailed so as to eliminate any guesswork over whether they were just a lucky guess or actually seeing “remotely” the events that would take place later.  What I had uncovered in my journal work was a very distinct pattern in my dreams that all showed precognitive elements.  This phenomenon showed that my precognitive dreams all took place on very specific days, and this was tied to the lunar cycle.  Now for some, this might sound a little crazy, but to a scientist, this suggests other forces at work.  What those are, I don’t know, but in the same way that the moon has an effect on tides, it apparently has an effect on seeing the future as well….and as a result may well help us to better understand HOW to bridge the gap between now and the future.  For those who aren’t sure what precognition is, it’s simply being able to anticipate future events. Now I know that for some, such a thing seem preposterous and flies in the face of everything we think we know about time and space.  Well, clearly, we don’t know everything there is to know about time and space or else I would not be going around having these dreams about the future!

But so you can appreciate what I am talking about, let me give you a few examples of my precognitive dreams.  When I was a pre-teen I dreamed that my neighbor was pregnant with twins and that these twins were born and had blonde hair.  The twins were a boy and a girl in the dream. Now the thing to realize is that the mom and dad were both very dark-haired people.  The father had this jet black hair without a hint of gray in it and the mother had chestnut colored hair.  At the time of the dream, there had been no talk about their having children.  They were without children at the time of the dream that I had.  In just a few months, I did find out that the mother was expecting and while I did not pay much heed to the dream, I found that she gave birth to twins who grew up to be blonde, both of them, which was itself a bit odd since there was so much dark hair in the family.  Skip forward in time to 1985 when I have a dream that I am floating above the earth and witness an explosion at a facility in Russia.  I hear the voice of a t.v. anchor narrating the events taking place. He says that there was an explosion over Russia that sent a plume of radioactive gasses into the atmosphere.  I watch as I see a white cloud rise and spread.  This cloud spread to Europe and rained down as radioactive snow.  I watched as people were herded onto freight trains in order to get them out of the area quickly. I saw an odometer type device that was showing the current count of the number of people who had been evacuated from the area.  At the time of the dream I saw a number around 80,000 as it continued to climb.

At the time of this dream, I was more focused on the out of body aspects of the experience, which involved me flying over the earth and walking across a bridge that floated in the sky.  The experience with the  news broadcast began after I observed that the entire scene turned to snow or static and was replaced by a new scene.    At the time, though, I described the entire dream to my roommate, Joe, who in three weeks called me into the living room to watch a news broadcast about an explosion over Russia in the area now known by the world as Chernobyl.  Each element in the dream was exactly as the Chernobyl event several weeks later.  There was a radioactive explosion (not a leak—this was an explosion that sent a cloud up into the atmosphere). This cloud menaced Europe in the dream, which did happen in the Chernobyl event.  People were herded quickly onto freight cars both in the dream and in real life as a way to get them quickly out of the area.  The count I had seen was over 80,000 had been evacuated, which suggested this was a city or town area.  When Joe called me in as he sat amazed at the news report, they said during that report that as many as 80,000 people had already been evacuated from the area.

These are the kinds of dreams that I have had over my life.  They have been specific enough in the ways I have explained to you to be more than merely plucking a good guess out of the air.  The level of corollaries between the dream and the events usually within a month of the dream, have been extraordinarily good in my view.

Now I know what some people have said to me about this in the past, which have been along the lines of “Well, Parker, its easy for YOU to have dreams like this, but you aren’t LIKE other people…”  and to this I have to carefully explain that in each person’s life there is some evidence for unexplained phenomenon.  Maybe you don’t have dreams that came true, but perhaps you find yourself thinking about someone and find that they were mentioning you at the exact same time, or perhaps you get a feeling of foreboding only to find that at the same time a loved one was involved in an accident.  Perhaps you experience this in dream, or waking, or both.  You see, to my mind, dream and waking are all part of life and both serve important roles in our lives. Me, I just don’t ascribe to dreams just being random firings of the brain as it sifts through the days’ material.  I know that dreams are therapeutic, quite literally releasing trauma from the past, working through issues within the emotional landscape as well as deeper soulful issues.  I also know that dreams are a kind of window into other dimensions, dimensions we travel to by traveling not through space but through our own awareness.  You see, we ARE the window to other worlds and that window CAN be found by expanding consciousness.  It is curious that in dream we do the same things as those who meditate and are able to let the ego go in order to experience cosmic consciousness.  The cool thing is that ego is dispensed with the same way you take off a pair of socks or pants as you get ready to go to bed.  In fact, you can’t really do most of your dreaming with ego still all around you.  But when you let go of ego, some quite remarkable things begin to happen.

Now as an aside I will explain why I am talking about ego. I mean, how on earth do I KNOW that we let go of ego when we dream?  My work during my awakening of kundalini has shown me quite clearly that the concept of “ego death” (a term I absolutely dislike for how incorrect it is) goes hand in hand with being able to experience similar KINDS of things while still awake that the mind does -normally- when asleep.  I have also observed how ego has been lain aside while awake in order for certain dream-like phenomenon to arise much like what some people do in meditation or in shamanic practice.  The main feature of doing this is that you are more free to tap larger portions of awareness that naturally get filtered out by the controlling agent called ego.  To show what I mean, perhaps you can remember starting to dream and then realizing that you are dreaming.  What happens when you do this?  In my experience I always stop dreaming.  I have become self conscious.  I have suddenly taken on ego as “I” identifies that “I” am dreaming.  Ego and dreaming don’t work together.  You need to have a loosening of the ego in order for the part of you that can create those dreams to operate properly.  Part of it has to constructing a kind of creative scaffolding where your imagery can spread out and play. This play, though can be mulling feelings over, venting, thinking, hallucinating, seeing the future, and traveling out of body (OOBE) somewhere quite interesting.

The ego can be quite the wet blanket, you see.  It’s a very useful thing, but you have to learn how to put ego aside so you can begin to experience the broader realm of your being.  I promise you that ego limits you absolutely.  And this is, of course, why I LOVED dream so much.  It let me go ego-less during a time when I was simply not yet ready for this thing called ego death (which I experienced during my awakening process).

But this isn’t about seeing the future.  Not really.  I am using seeing the future as an example of what CAN be done.  I figure if I can show you some rather fantastic examples of what has happened to me, you might just realize that you too have the same opportunities.  (Jesus said something about others doing even greater things than he did….) Granted, you might not be so keen about time travel.  Maybe for you its something else, like experiencing the effects of shifting from one brain state to another while “awake” in the dream state.  Clearly the static I saw in the dream of Chernobyl where once scene shifted into another was itself the shifting from one brain state to another.  I have actually been able to fool my brain into thinking I am asleep when I am actually awake and the exact same thing will happen, and I am able to observe it while I am awake and it is VERY much like a wall of static filling the view and my body and I simply vibrate into a different state and scene. It is, I do think, a way for the brain to travel dimensionally by changing its own energetic signature via its brainwaves. it turns out that this technique has been used for thousands of years by Tibetan monks and is a way for them to dream awake, or to have lucid dreams while being fully awake instead of asleep. You might think that dream and waking are fundamentally different, but I am telling you that you can and will break down the barriers between waking and sleeping when you begin to become more inclusive or broader in your awareness of these different states of being.  And don’t worry; all will not be chaos.  Instead, what will emerge is a sense of unity of awareness.  You simply wont see dream as some strange land anymore.  It will be understood as a very useful tool for relaxing, sleeping, as well as having all sorts of adventures both fictional and nonfictional.

Dreaming can be a way to expand your own energetic signature and mobility of consciousness.  The more aware you are of what you do in dreams and HOW you FEEL in dreams can lead to being able to relate to certain energetic states that correspond to deep shifts in consciousness within those dreams.  If you can learn how to FEEL the way you FEEL in a dream, you are actually that much closer to being able to experience an expanded state of awareness while awake.  You don’t need mantras, you simply have to remember.  The more you do, the more likely you are to see the phenomenon in a dream begin to make its entrance into waking.

I recently read a comment someone made about dreaming and meditation and the person described meditating as a form of self-hypnosis.  The sense I got from the commenter was that this was somehow bad or not desirable.  But really, the vast amount of self-improvement that we do, whether in meditation or in the therapists office is actually attributed to hypnosis.  What many people don’t fully realize is that MOST hypnosis today is done while the subjects are completely awake. Hypnosis might work at deeper levels of the self if you are put into a deep state of relaxation (the “trance” as it is called) but everyone in the psychiatric field knows that this is by no means a requirement. So anytime you want to change, you simply make he suggestion to yourself that you want the change.  That is the nature of suggestion.  You can go into a deep state of relaxation, you can even make hypnotic suggestions as you lie down to sleep that you will use the dream state to do lucid work in that dream.  This is much like I did when I experienced Quetzalcoatl in dream work from the same year that I had the Chernobyl dream (1985).  In THAT dream, I was attempting to use the dream state as a way to springboard into an OOBE. The technique I used worked really well, and that technique was as simple as a suggestion I made prior to falling asleep.  You can read that entry HERE.

As an aside, my observation about out of body experiences (OOBE’s) is that they can allow you to experience broader states of awareness than you might otherwise.  In some ways, it can be a catalyst for greater change because it seems to me that once free from the body to a great degree, the experience of energy is so much larger, or broader.  The reason for this, I sense, is that the consciousness is not so tied to the body.  The body itself, not just the brain, is a series of blocks of an emotional nature that inhibit the flow of prana or universal consciousness.  When these channels are cleared sufficiently, there can be a powerful flow of energy released which the Hindu call Kundalini and what we often simply call “awakening.”

To some, this is kind of the holy grail of inner work since kundalini acts as an accelerating catalyst for inner change. This is nothing more than life force now flowing in abundance, but the effect this prana or life force has on you is that it stirs every inch of you and if you surrender you feel freedom and bliss and if you hold on, you feel paranoia and pain.  The stirring, though, is the stirring of the old blocks that reside in your body.  When these blocks are cleared, you experience the moment differently than before. Think of it as a kind of cosmic tune up that involves releasing lifetimes of pent up karma that has been recorded in your light body and is stored in your physical body.  It is itself a powerful process and can be akin to riding a roller coaster; you get on and there is no getting off until the ride is through.  But I suspect based on my own experience is that OOBE’s can provide the same unlimited flow of energy as in awakening without bringing it into the body.  This could have some advantages.  It COULD be used to gradually acquaint you with what its like to have this kind of energy flowing through you, to overcome what seems to be some anxiety or fear of such incredible flows of energy coming in and learn how to cope with it.  Now I say this based on my own experience with the out of body state, which was nothing short of a grand face to face experience with significant amounts of energy.  And where there is energy, there is consciousness.  That means your consciousness will expand. That sounds a bit like some of the goals of meditation, right? Find out who you are, what you are, what you are capable of?  Your birthright, right?

There are many ways to reach what it is you are looking for.  We are all in some way looking for it, even when it seems dysfunctional.  The thing we seek is what this prana force is.  It is love. I will just tell you now and get it over with because in time, if you clear the way, you will feel it so utterly that it will be entirely obvious.  But when that day comes, you will know this love less as a thing you feel for someone as it is a force as gravity and the wind are forces in nature.  It might be hard to imagine how love might be a force like that, but it is.  When you clear the way then you will feel love in all of its different dimensions or aspects.  And this is good because in doing meditation work based on curiosity about what you are, you discover the most beautiful thing about yourself. And that is a whole lot of good!