I wanted to share a few reflections from my time on the cushion. Doing extended periods of meditation like this makes you feel a little like an explorer mapping new territories, albeit we are talking about an inner landscape. And as I write these words, I can feel the deep echo of those meditative hours reverberating in my being. Deep ease, unthinkable stillness, emptiness and fullness, delight…all of these are qualities I would use to characterize my time in this two day meditation vortex.

There were some challenging moments in the early hours, but in truth, the overwhelming experience was one of deep and total resolution without much of a ripple. And that is part of what I find very interesting.

Where did this resolution come from and what was it? Why didn’t I experience much fatigue in the second 24 hours? I didn’t sleep for two days straight, and yet I came out feeling fresh and light and ready to go. That just doesn’t seem to line up with everyday reality.

One thing strikes me right off the bat. I went into the marathon having made up my mind that I was going to sit there for 48 hours no matter what. Nothing was going to change that, and I had no ambivalence about the mission. I was totally resolved that no matter what my experience was, I was going for it and it was going to be incredible. The longest I had meditated before was for 36 hours and that was great. But unlike that previous 36-hour stretch, this marathon vaulted over a whole second night session from midnight to 6am—always the toughest hours. And yet somehow, I knew before I started that it was going to be great. And, in fact, it went way beyond my expectations. I didn’t budge from that deeper position for 48 hours.

I tend to think of previous extended meditations as letting go and dropping ever more deeply into myself, but this had the quality of becoming ever more still. The more I let go, the more there was a sense of totality and completion. I was no longer moving at all, outwardly or inwardly. My mind was distant and irrelevant. It was definitely active and in motion, but I was not. I was completely still and in some way it was like I wasn’t there anymore, but I was aware of everything.

During this process, my mind moved to the background, and something else moved to the foreground. It was as if there was only awareness, but without a vantage point or perspective. In that awareness, I could feel everyone around me was in the same state, almost like we were breathing and being as a single entity, as awareness itself. For hours and hours on end I was incredibly awake and my awareness seemed to expand the more deeply still I became. At times, I could feel compelling trains of thought come roaring in, but I resolved to keep letting go and not move and the thought streams always passed and faded. After about 30 hours, this stillness and panoramic awareness became the predominant experience.

Experiences like this one always remind me that we live in the middle of an incredible mystery. Things seem one way, but experiences like this open up new dimensions and realms of consciousness that seem to operate according to different rules and standards. Time doesn’t pass in the same way in these states. Often it would seem like no time had passed and the session would suddenly end. Forty-five minutes passed in what seemed like 5 minutes. And energy…sometimes between sessions I would feel exhausted like I was going to collapse but as soon as I sat on the cushion I would be energized and ready to go. How does that work? I don’t pretend to understand it, but I have experienced it enough now to know it’s real.

Another thing…there is incredible intimacy in doing this with others. When we slow down this much and drop into such deep and profound states of liberated awareness, the feeling of shared depth and space and consciousness is very poignant. You don’t need to talk or make eye contact to feel where someone’s attention is and if you have your attention on the same thing. It’s like being together in a pre-verbal knowing where there is no awareness of separation. This type of being together has the effect of reinforcing and amplifying the meditation. You are so open that without a word or a glance, you know that you are fully connected at the deepest level. It is, perhaps, the deepest form of communion I have ever experienced.

There is more to share, but I wanted to write a few words while the experience is fresh and thank the many incredible friends who supported me in meditating for 48 hours. Your support made this experience a genuine labor of love and I would do it again in a second.

This is a big topic and something a lot of us are very interested in understanding for many reasons. First, in the experience of deep meditation, we feel the intimations of a profound possibility–that meditation should lead to a life of much greater depth and freedom. Second, we are emerging from modern structures of consciousness and naturally we want to know what the tangible concrete application of meditation can be in our lives. For example, can periods of deep stillness make us more productive as some people suggest? With the stunning advance of neuroscience, can we begin to measure the actual effects? And tacitly, I think many of us are looking for proof that meditation is relevant to our lives on a daily basis.

So, is there any truth to these intimations from the inner world? Can we bring the perfection we discover and love in meditation into our active lives?

This question haunted me for a long time in my late teens and twenties. Often I would have deep experiences of peace, ease, and bliss in meditation, but as soon as I stood up and started to engage with life, it seemed like all that joy and lightness of being would just evaporate, and I was back to my normal neurotic self, lacking in confidence, very idealistic but without depth and any real rudder in the very human and inevitable storms of confusion.

These days, meditation is so central to my life and my own sense of fundamental confidence that it’s hard to relate to how it was before. But in retrospect, I can see that there were some key insights and moments in my own development where everything changed. And in essence, those were moments when I started to recognize that meditation was not just an experience; I saw that meditation is who I am at the deepest level of my being. In retrospect, it’s clear that these were key moments when the inner journey started to bear fruit in my outer life. A link between inner and outer was being forged as a subtle wall between me and everything else started to crumble. That link or bridge was my own growing conviction that the limitless place we discover in deep states of meditation is simply who I already am and not a place to get to or state to attain.

This may seem obvious to some, but for most of us it’s not. Because our largely secular culture is focused on the surface of things, we end up trained to be highly refined experience junkies. Tacitly or explicitly, we are focused on how good or bad we feel, how hi or low, how clear or confused. And just as experiences come and go, often our confidence and our sense of self goes with them, as fickle and ephemeral as the different experiences we have moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day.

More often than not, we bring this same relationship to meditation and therefore we judge our progress and our “enlightenment” based on how deep and satisfying our experiences are. That was definitely my experience. But it’s important to understand, that although it’s important to have these deeper experiences, we eventually need to abandon our compulsive relationship to experience in order to discover a deeper source of self and confidence, and more importantly, begin to recognize that meditation is more about who you ARE than what you experience. In my understanding, it’s only at that level that we can start to see and experience the real fruits of meditation in our active lives.

But what does this actually mean, that who I am at the core is that very same depth of self I experience every time I sit down to meditate and let everything go?

There are a few things I want to emphasize here. One, that when we start to identify with meditation as the deepest part of who we are, we no longer worry about experience. We trust that there is a part of us, the deepest part, that is rooted in infinity, that never moves, and it is the source of our awareness. One way to think of meditation is that it is a gradual process of aligning ourselves with that infinite dimension of being. As our practice matures through dedication and consistency, our confidence in this part of ourselves grows. We begin to know at a pre-conscious level that we are never apart from that boundless self, and that it exists beyond the changing circumstances of this world. It is beyond experience. Having this conscious baseline gives me a steadiness of being, and it allows me to access that depth just by putting my attention there.

Recently I was discussing this part of the self with a fellow student of meditation, and it was amazing to experience the sudden shift in self-sense as I started speaking about this infinite dimension. Immediately, the qualities of that part of myself came to the fore – ease, depth, lightness of being, and a palpable sense of limitlessness. The more I spoke about it, the more the doubtless quality of that infinite self started to infuse my words. This was fascinating to me because I realized that because I don’t doubt the truth and reality of that boundless part of my own being, just by putting attention on it, that self began to predominate.

It’s an amazing thing to experience whole dimensions of one’s own self open into infinite depth and being. At the same time, it’s not completely mysterious how this happens. That’s not to say that meditation itself isn’t fundamentally mysterious, because it is! But when we understand that who we are is that limitless depth, and we are convinced about it, through the cultivation of our own spiritual self-confidence, we know that we could never be separate from it.

This type of shift is foundational and when this happens, our whole relationship to life begins to change. There is no part of our lives that we can’t start to look at through the lens of total freedom. And when we start to do that, I have found that where I put my attention and how I spend my energy begins to change. Are my choices and actions reflecting the profound and limitless freedom I discover in meditation? And what happens when I hold the line with myself and refuse to let my awareness contract? Do I really want to be free or not? The evidence is all right there in front of me with every choice. And even more to the point, the strength of that bridge between the inner and the outer is getting stronger or weaker with each choice.

The structures of human consciousness are habit patterns. That’s not a negative thing—it’s how the universe is created. Habits are formed at the level of matter, at the level of biology, and also in consciousness and culture. We are habits. And so unless there is a powerful energy and focused intention to break out of our habit-patterns and create new ones, it’s more than likely that what will happen in the future will be similar to what’s happened in the past. It takes an enormous degree of focused concentration, a big vision, and a deep commitment in order to break through the established habits and create new ones. But that’s what conscious evolution is all about. – Andrew Cohen

Recently I meditated all night long. I have posted about this before, but it always amazes me what happens when I stay up all night meditating. And this time was no different. And at this point, I feel obliged to report to you my findings from these sojourns into deep spirit.

So on this night, I was longing to let go very deeply. It was one of those times where my work, relationships, and all sorts of life circumstances were building in a crescendo of overwhelm, and I could tell it was time for a major gear shift. So I sat without moving for a long time—many hours. It was quiet and beautiful and empty. I gave all my attention to letting everything go again and again and again. And, as time passed, everything just fell away and disappeared.

The release and relief that comes from sitting over night with strong intention is hard to compare to anything else. Through my own efforts and intention, I can deliberately shift the balance and weight of my own being into pure freedom and limitlessness. The effect of meditating like this is like taking a shower for my soul – washing away all the inevitable frustrations, disappointments, attachments, and relative hardships of life and nourishing it with a strong response to the most wholesome desire to be deeply and totally free.

And this point is important. In fact its always more important than I realize. Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber talk about creating kosmic grooves, which are habits and patterns that are ingrained in the very fabric of the cosmos. They are currents that run through human culture and consciousness—the effect of centuries and millennia of repetition. And it occurred to me after this night of meditation, how important it is that I work to create the type of habits that result from meditating with passion, consistency, and intention.

What meditation can do, when practiced in the way that I am describing, is fuel our intention to be free at the deepest levels of our being. The more I do it, the more I invest in it, the more I creatively engage with it, the more it yields in terms of spiritual self confidence. And perhaps more important than spiritual self confidence, it creates a groove in culture which others can benefit from…

The day after an all night meditation session is always amazing. I am never sleepy. On the contrary, I am buoyed and fresh and filled with lightness of being. These are the qualities of the unlimited space we access in meditation, and because that infinite space is who we are at the deepest level, the effect of meditating like this transcends mere experience. It is deeper than experience. And that is partly why this idea of creating new grooves or habits in consciousness is so important. Meditation, powerful meditation, orients us to the more profound dimensions of our being beyond the superficial world of experience. It gives us different reference points and an anchor that can’t be touched by this world. We need habits and grooves like this more than ever as our world gets increasingly complex, speeding up every day.

In the middle of the storm, when it’s all raining down on me, nothing is more powerful than stopping and letting it all go on the spot to remind myself that there is a deeper truth, a greater reality under all of this, and it is perfectly untouched by the beautiful and overwhelming chaos. And the power of creating habits like this is that there is no place to go and nothing to do to access that deeper dimension. It’s who I already am and I know it. Confidence in that knowledge is everything.

I remember lying in bed one night after the lights were out and thinking and imaging with all my will what it would be like not to exist, to simply “not be.” And I remember that as I did this, my heart started to thunder in my chest, and it was like I was approaching some great cosmic precipice and looking out over the edge into eternity. As I innocently contemplated nothing, something was definitely happening, and it scared the hell out of me.

As an adult, after embracing the path of Evolutionary Enlightenment, I learned that the teacher of my teacher’s teacher, the great Ramana Maharshi, had done something very similar. And for him, the result was much more dramatic. When he imagined his own death, it changed him forever. He writes:

When I lay down with limbs outstretched and mentally enacted the death scene and realised that the body would be taken and cremated and yet I would live, some force, call it Atmic power or anything else, rose within me and took possession of me. With that, I was reborn and I became a new man. I became indifferent to everything afterwards, having neither likes nor dislikes. – Sri Ramana

Years later, in very deep states of meditation, I would experience the extinguishing of the I-sense. It was the absence of me, so to speak. But with the lack of me, there was always the fullness of awareness. And in fact, the deeper I would go into meditation, like on a silent retreat, I would long very deeply for this sense of non-being or what the Buddha called cessation. The more I would give myself to the instructions to let go of everything, the more I longed for everything, including me, to completely disappear. Thirty years after trying to imagine my own death, I seemed to be approaching that same precipice of eternity but from a completely different vantage point.

But it’s interesting, because the “me” that would disappear was really just the objects in my consciousness that I was compulsively relating to – things I wanted, things I didn’t want. Or even more to the point, and this is pretty subtle, but the “me” that disappeared was that part of me that related to anything at all. When there was no relationship at all, when I was holding onto nothing whatsoever, there was no me, there was just the fullness of everything. There was just awareness itself.

Our relationship to eternity is a funny thing. Who is relating to eternity anyways and what is eternity? According to the dictionary, eternity is infinity in the context of time—endless time. That is an idea that inspires me because these days, eternity seems more present, more part of life right now, not part of life after death. It doesn’t feel abstract to me or distant. More, it feels to me like my own consciousness is imbued with eternity. Over time, meditation has helped to break down the hard boundaries of who I think I am and there is just more space in there.

The way I experience it is that our real nature, that one we discover through meditation, is more aligned with eternity than it is with this limited and time-bound sense of self. But in our culture, which is deeply secular and focuses our attention on the surface of things, it’s very difficult to connect with this infinite part of ourselves without a practice like meditation. This lines up with the teaching of many great mystics, that the more we meditate, whether we know it or not, we are actually identifying with a part of ourselves that is limitless, and which doesn’t die and was never born.

When I sit and let go everything, its almost like the walls of the buildings dissolve, space collapses, and time disappears – everything disappears. Now I understand that this is what it really means to not exist. When I was a kid, and haunted by this idea of death and eternity, I think what was happening is that this infinite part of myself, the part I would call spirit, was pushing against all my limited ideas of reality. What else could have compelled me at the age of ten years old to imagine, with real passion and dedication, what is would be like not to exist?

One of my first intuitions that there was something mysterious beyond this world came when I was a freshman in college, and it came like a whisper from another dimension. I was sitting out on my front stoop in the Georgia twilight, when it grew very quiet and still and I felt something tugging on my awareness. Suddenly my attention became very focused and it was as if there was a sound under all the other sounds that I could just barely hear. It pulled on my awareness and it had a magnetic quality, but I was sure that it was a sound. And yet to hear it, I had to listen with a different part of myself than just my auditory senses. I had to martial every single bit of myself to hear it, like tuning in to a different frequency, and I gleaned pretty quickly that something more than just hearing was happening. It was more like communing.

A few days later, I asked a good friend of mine, a disciple of the great boundary breaking sage Sri Chimnoy, about this experience. He said to me, “What you are describing is meditation—yeah, that’s meditation!” I didn’t know much about meditation at the time, but I remember that this made sense to me when he said it. I was compelled by the magnetic quality of that sound, and I wanted to experience more of it! It seemed like a mini-miracle to my materialistic self at the time that there was this kind of omni-present phenomenon that I could tune into if I just listened with all of my being.

That same year I had my first real enlightenment experience. Through a series of choices and events, something big had happened to me, and for about three months I was in an altered state – filled with a clarity, conviction, and singularity that I had never known before. And interestingly, out of the blue, I became obsessed with listening to Jazz. And in particular, the Jazz-fusion music created by Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis. Every day at the University Library, I would check out the album by Miles called Bitches Brew and Hancock’s Empyrean Isles and listen while I studied.

Every time I listened, these albums seemed to reawaken that powerful state of consciousness and keep it going and so they became my constant companions. Before that time, I really didn’t like Jazz-fusion at all and couldn’t relate to it. Now, suddenly, I couldn’t be away from these sonic Masters for long without feeling diminished. There was something in the freedom and spontaneity of that music that unlocked my being and set me free.

When I met Andrew Cohen and started to practice his instructions on meditation, I started to notice that on retreats, in particularly deep states of consciousness, there was an experience of transparency between self and sound. Hearing a bird in the distance, or the bells on the collars of the goats grazing in the early evening, these sounds seemed to carry me beyond myself into a huge space. I was transported by the sound, and more than that, the experience of these sounds was delightful, tantalizing, promising and totally fulfilling all at once – perfect.

Now, after years of practice, this is a regular experience. I notice that as I let everything go, I drop into a deeper state of being and I experience sound not as an external event, but something that is both within and without. In the context of Being and meditation, it is as though I am external to nothing and nothing seems to be outside of me. In this letting go process, something gets removed between you and everything, and yet I feel more fundamentally me than at any other time.

Sitting in perfect silence and stillness, deep in meditation, our attention travels outward and inward, infinitely and all at once. The whole Cosmos is so close, there is no distance at all, there is only perfect union with everything. In this context, silence and the ultimately compelling sound of silence is synonymous with meditation. It is a place of complete awe and wonder.

So what does it all mean about who we are and how we should live? There is no doubt in my mind that sound and spirit work together in profound and mysterious ways. Some obvious points; sound deeply affects the substance and condition of our consciousness – arousing it (a jazz fusion jam), focusing it (the OM under everything), expanding it (the sounds of nature). And because we are talking about sound in the context of awakening to higher and deeper states of awareness, could it be that we are tuning into a more pure form of our nature as undivided from the whole of existence when we experience sound in these ways? I think so.

Classical Pythagorean mystery schools and ancient schools of esoteric Christianity had a concept called the music of the spheres. The Pythagoreans held that the universe, when all the planets were in balance and alignment, produced a tone of perfect harmony. And the esoteric Christians referred to it as a state of consciousness correlated with a heavenly realm. Were they referring to the sound of silence we experience in these deeper states? Maybe.

If anything, sound seems to be an unmediated bridge to infinity, another deeply compelling part of the mystery of who we are, and a stirring catalyst to think more deeply about our indivisibility with everything.

In evolutionary enlightenment, meditating on consciousness while renouncing any focus on the objects that arise in awareness is one of our core practices. We just pay attention to awareness itself and assume no relationship to the actual contents of consciousness. It’s a simple practice, but it’s incredibly challenging and endlessly subtle and it’s the bedrock of my spiritual life. A meditation practice that is strong and stable is priceless because it keeps me connected to the source of my deepest intention and it reaffirms my deepest conviction in the inherent positivity of life.

And it was during this recent practice session, when I was letting go again and again and again, that I started to reflect on what it was I was actually doing. In essence, this type of meditation is like a constant state of questioning or inquiry. You are casting absolutely everything that passes through your awareness into question at the most fundamental level. By paying no attention to any thing at all, you negate the possibility for any thought, feeling, desire, or aversion to become real or gather weight and momentum within you.

How do I actually know that? Because I have tested and verified this approach through fifteen years of exhaustive repetition and discovered that when I don’t pay attention to something in the field of my awareness, it always inevitably disappears. It lives or dies in relationship to how much I feed it with energy (awareness).

Now the cool thing is that I don’t really think about all that. I just let go, again and again and again. I hold onto nothing, and the more I do, there emerges an energy that seems to grow stronger with every successive act of letting go. I let go once and I want to let go again. There is a mysterious and positive feedback cycle at work…I drop into a deeper state of being each time I let go, and I resolve more and more into the absolute center of things.

But what compels me in all this is the intense interest and curiosity and determination that arises every time I taste the fruits of letting go. As much as it is a total renunciation of knowing in the mind, there is a nourishing of another kind of knowing at the level of soul or spirit. At that level, Knowing and Being seem to become One!

Here I have found that curiosity and experimentation are crucial elements to a really thriving meditation practice. There is so much to explore in this practice, such riches to reap from engaging directly with the unlimited dimensions of our own consciousness. But without a spirit of exploration and inquiry, we are not likely to get far. We need to be convinced, through our own efforts, that meditation is actually relevant and important to our lives. And that sense of relevance comes from deep and penetrating engagement with my practice, both on and off the cushion. My deepest breakthroughs with meditation have actually come through inquiring off the cushion! I don’t know why it works this way, but it does. I need to connect the dots for myself to be convinced beyond belief.

We are in the middle of this unfolding miracle of becoming more conscious. Meditation is one of our greatest tools for intrepid investigation and discovery and all the time I realize that it is infinitely more than I think it is.

I have discovered a lot of reasons why meditation is deeply relevant to my life in ways that are at once ultimately profound and completely pragmatic.

And to sum it up, I would say that the practice and experience of meditation gives me a new and unlimited reference point for making important decisions in my life.

How is this so? To begin with, meditation introduces us to the process and position of letting absolutely everything go. Through engaging with this practice every day with commitment and a strong intention, I have discovered a part of myself that is completely free from this world and anything in it. It’s a place of total quietude and completion – there is nothing there but an awareness of totality and infinity. And it is here that I find my deepest sense of self and a source of joy that is perfectly free and independent of anything in this world.

So through meditation, I have both discovered and cultivated a new reference point in my own experience that is defined by perfect freedom, which Andrew Cohen describes as having nothing, knowing nothing, and being nobody.

How does this new reference point come into play off the cushion and in the rapid-fire world of complex decision-making and relentless activity? When I consider much of what I am preoccupied with on a daily basis, it has little if anything to do with this deeper self or a perspective that is fundamentally defined by freedom. And often, that is appropriate. But there are other times when I find that it is incredibly important to contemplate my choices from the deeper vantage point of this free and infinite self.

For example, I can find myself dwelling on personal issues, stressed about work and time, or maybe I am holding a grudge against someone for a real or perceived slight. Or maybe I am just angry because things aren’t going the way I want them to. In one way or another, my perspective is contracted and decidedly unfree!

And it’s at moments like this when I have found it powerful to hold my concerns or desires or challenges in the light of this infinite self and ask myself, how important is it in the context of freedom? Does it really matter? What does it have to do with the ultimate truth I have discovered in the unlimited ground of my own being? Is it so important that I am giving it all of my attention again and again and again? Usually, the answer is no…it’s not. But without this new reference point, a living relationship with the infinite, these questions don’t come up.

What’s been powerful to discover is that this line of questioning comes from the part of my self that is already free, independent of circumstance. How do I know? Because every time I do ask these question, I discover a deeper freedom, release, and expansion of perspective. If you haven’t tasted this already free dimension of your own self, the odds are strong that you won’t have another reference point to compel you to look outside of your own mind and emotions for a broader perspective.

Connecting the dots between this infinite already free ground of my own being and my worldly concerns has increasingly forced me to consider the fact that I always have a choice in where I direct my attention. And where I direct my attention affects the depth and freedom of my perspective, the clarity of my vision, and ultimately the integrity of my choices.

I have also noticed that meditation is essential in fueling my own interest in this line of inquiry and the ongoing cultivation of my own freedom and perspective. This is empowering, because the more I meditate, the more compelled I am to question my choices and pay more attention to how I am choosing and who is choosing? Is it the part of me that is already free and convinced without a doubt about the immediate truth of freedom or is it a self that is limited and constrained and confused by desire and time and complexity.

What is the relationship between the position of freedom—having nothing, knowing nothing and being nobody—and the overwhelming complexity of life? What does it mean to have this kind of ultimate simplicity of being as a reference point for walking straight into the middle of the ongoing storm of life? These questions are endless, liberating, and rich with developmental potential. Most importantly, when fueled by a living relationship to our own infinite depths, they can help us to self-author a liberated life.

Artwork by Patrick Bryson

“The only true vacation is the vacation from your own mind!” –Andrew Cohen

I love meditating. I do it every day. I didn’t always love it though. I used to struggle with it enormously. I have been meditating with relative consistency now for over 17 years, and only in the last eight years has the practice become a powerful source of confidence and inspiration.

I don’t often hear people talk about meditation in the context of developing a deep and abiding source of confidence, but that is why I practice meditation. Real meditation means letting go of everything, and letting go of everything reveals a depth of self that is infinite and utterly free from the world. Spending time in this practice of letting go is a little like soaking your being in a sea of pure goodness. There is perfect silence and stillness there, and an abiding sense of completion and communion. What I have noticed is that over time, through practice, this source of self becomes less and less a place that I visit, and more and more the truth of who I know myself to be at the deepest level.

That is what I mean about confidence. Over time, meditation becomes less about experiencing a particular state of consciousness, and more about the deep and unshakable knowing that who I am is that unmovable infinite self. I used to think that deep and powerful experiences of this Self were the main event! I could ride an experience of depth and higher awareness for long periods of time and learn a lot. Of course these experiences really are important, because they have fueled my interest.

But this confidence I am speaking about is much deeper than any experience or state. There is a kind of joy in this knowing, and I have noticed that now, even just speaking about meditation, I am instantly aware of this deeper source of self and that I am never apart from it or could be apart from it. When I speak about meditation or put my mind on it, I know that there is no distance between me and infinity and no process or journey to get home.

Sitting perfectly still in practice, letting go of every thought, every feeling, every aberration in my mind, every interpretation of what is happening, and any sense of time never ceases to amaze me. Whether it is through focusing on relaxing, on stillness, or on paying attention, each is a doorway to deeper letting go, and each yields new and deeper insights that then, in turn, need to be dropped. The letting go never stops, but neither does the infinitely compelling free fall into the depth of life and Being and wonder that accompanies it.

I don’t meditate to relax or to relieve stress. I meditate to cultivate deep joy and confidence in the source of existence and to deepen my own spiritual self-confidence. I practice every day to fuel my love for depth and my interest in what I will never see or know with my mind.

There are a lot of reasons why its powerful to meditate for long periods of time. For example, I meditate two hours every morning. For most people, that’s a lot. But when it comes to really letting go of everything and leaving the world behind it’s not very long at all. Whereas sitting overnight, in the quiet hours when consciousness is not cluttered with the melee of the work day, provides you a space to really abandon all the ambitions and frustrations of the day and genuinely let go.

Usually, during previous all night meditations, I would sit for an hour at a time getting up every 60 minutes or so to stretch, but recently I tried something different. At the encouragement of my teacher, Andrew Cohen, I abandoned the clock and tried to see how long I could meditate without stopping. I sat for four hours straight.

This blew my mind. I didn’t know I could do that but once I got going, it was like a different part of me kicked into gear and all that part of me wanted to do was see how long I could just sit there letting go again and again and again. Everytime I thought about time, I just let it go and experienced the existential release and relief that always accompanies genuine letting go. And so I just kept doing that…letting go of the need to know how much time had passed.

The more I did this, the more I dropped into a deeper and deeper space. I became incredibly still inside so that I didn’t want to move on the outside. As I dropped deeper and deeper, I could feel my awareness expanding and releasing from all the compulsive habits of mind I’m usually pursuing day in and day out. And as I did that, the perspective of freedom and limitlessness grew stronger and more powerful so that I didn’t want anything but to sit there and let go, knowing that there was nowhere to go in the universe that would make me happier than where I was at that moment.

We need to time to let go like this, to really release the world and all our concerns from our clutches. Unless you really make the time to do this type of long practice, it’s incredibly difficult to break through the powerful torrent of mind and time and world that we inhabit constantly and enter into the deeper dimensions of our beings.

Doing this with others is a sacred experience. Silently sailing through the cosmos on our cushions without a care and silently communing with the totality of existence is perhaps one of the most intimate things we can do together, even as we have no relationship to each other whatsoever!

Over the Christmas holidays, I had the profound privilege of participating in the 10 day silent retreat here at Foxhollow, EnlightenNext’s international retreat center. This was my fourth time on a retreat of this sort and it was, as always, an amazing and deeply impacting experience. Unlike other retreats we offer, this retreat is self-directed, and the results are directly correlated to the amount of effort and intention you bring to the practice and to giving yourself unconditionally to the airtight structure of the retreat which Andrew Cohen has created.

Indeed, there are so many things to say about these retreats, and this one in particular, but in this blog I want to focus on the heart of the retreat and the power and practice of letting go of everything. I plan to write future blogs exploring topics like: the value of spiritual experience; are the mind and time the same thing?; the sacred culture that emerges on retreat; and discovering the buoyant power of silence and stillness.

So back to this retreat – We start early, at 430am, with chanting about surrender. Then, at 5am, we perform 600 prostrations, which takes about 75 minutes, chanting silently and inwardly 300 times in sync with each prostration, “to be free means to having nothing, to be free means to know nothing, to be free means to be nobody” and then for the next 300 chanting, “to be free means to face everything, to be free mean to avoid nothing.” Both of these silent and inward focused chants are designed to ensure that we maintain the posture of consciousness itself, free from any reference points, returning again and again and again to zero and to letting go. It’s a very physical practice in one sense, and the goal is for the prostrations to look beautiful. This aesthetic and focused contemplation in motion creates a most profound environment of inner solitude and starting the day with such a strong outward expression of intention is sort of like launching yourself from a metaphysical cannon into a long comtemplative arc of the next 15 hours of practice.

What follows is an ever-deepening rhythm of meditation and chanting, designed to facilitate one and only one thing: letting go of absolutely everything. Until we really engage with a practice and retreat of this type, it’s impossible to imagine beforehand. Mostly, you tend to think, “Well, I could never do that much practice!” But I don’t think it’s actually true. On this retreat, for the first time ever, practitioners were participating (students who are relatively newer to this practice) – and they all flowered and soared throughout. Even after doing a number of these retreats, you can’t really anticipate it in advance, you can only surrender your mind and embrace the practice and see what happens. If you give yourself to it fully, you find yourself suddenly on a track of infinitely increasing depth and discovery.

What is it exactly that we discover? Well, in letting go of everything, or assuming the position of no relationship, you discover and rediscover, the simple and absolute power of letting go of your mind. It does not matter how many times you do this, it doesn’t get old and it doesn’t cease to surprise. I remember once Andrew saying to me during one of these retreats, how many times do you think you let go of everything a day? And I said it must be hundreds if not thousands and he said…probably more! When you really start to let go in earnest, there is no end to it, and you start to realize how subtle the process of letting go actually is. The mind’s capacity to weave itself into your practice is astonishing. In one instant, you can be deeply in touch with the sheer and total freedom of letting go of the world, and literally in the next moment, you can be a million miles away and lost in your thoughts, and you don’t even know. The experience and/or process of letting go is absolutely distinct from the the mind and time…they are, as Andrew has said, two lines that never meet.

My experience of letting go is such that the more I do it, the more I long to recede from any external stimuli. Like a whirlpool, there is a downward pull into the depth of the Self, into the infinity of pure being, untouched by this world completely. You just want to continue to release yourself from everything – from any assumptions, conditions, impressions, conclusions, observations, illuminations, experiences, insights, delights, all of it! That’s the thing – contemplating nothing means really contemplating nothing at all! Even deep and profound moments of inspiration become another object to release from your needy paws. It’s amazing to consider what we find in this process and practice of no relationship. There is such a total conviction in the perfect rightness of assuming this position of letting go because one knows, at a level beyond conceptual knowing, that this is a position at once invincible and free, and simultaneously You as your most essential self. I think for the postmodern self, like all of us, this is an ultimately important discovery, because, aside from drug-induced experiences, our secular and superficial culture does not offer any indication that cultivating this dimension of Self is important or relevant. In fact, according to our culture, it’s very questionable that this spiritual ground even exists and that is exactly why we all need to storm the spiritual citadel so to speak, and bring back evidence, through the transformation of our own selves, that this dimension is the essence of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

In truth, ten days is really not enough. Many of the masters go on retreat to abide in this non-being for many years on end, all to deepen one’s conviction in the truth of this part of ourselves. Ten days gives you a powerful taste of the truth of the Self. When I write or speak about the retreat, the deep echo of the experience reverberates in my being, and I experience permeability between this world and that one. I think that is part of our job as practitioners of evolutionary enlightenment, to continue to deepen our capacity to be vessels for this dimension, to bring it more fully into this world through our own intention, commitment, and love for Spirit. I feel very fortunate that we are all together in this, committed to bringing about some sort of tidal wave of spiritual renaissance.