Black dog

The strangest thing just happened. I was lying on my back on the floor (stretching out my back after a day spent mostly sitting) meditating with my eyes closed — and I had the impression that a large black dog entered the room. I knew it wouldn't attack me, it wasn't even particularly interested in me, but still I found it hard to close my eyes again. Eventually I felt that it was not in the room any more, and went on to finish the meditation.

But it still disturbed me so much that I had to walk around the apartment, stopping in each room for a moment, to feel whether it was still here. I think it's gone now.

Very odd.

Buddha's belly, Jesus' tear

It's a funny word, "retreat:" so many meanings in so many contexts.

I'm on a retreat with Susan's* SecondLife meditation group, the third that I have attended with them (all this year). I even organized this one, which was something of a stretch for me. I've never tried to arrange a week-long event for a group of people before, and while it has worked out well there were definitely things that I did wrong. I'm going to write a piece on organizing retreats for the group's wiki, to help those who come after me to avoid my mistakes.

I discovered something quite unexpected today during a short meditation on Being (the group's shorthand name for The Everythingness Of Everything). I'm a very visual person, I think in images and analogies, so I began by visualizing the Being that was around me at that moment. I realized that I was imagining daylight, so I stepped back a pace (think here of the film Powers of Ten (and if you haven't seen that yet, rectify the omission at once)) to view Being including day and night; saw the stars in the sky and stepped back once more to include the observable universe, and so on.

Eventually I stepped back and saw Being as Buddha's belly, and felt myself as the Buddha whose belly contained Everything. This was something of a surprise since I'm not a buddhist and don't usually have any associations with that image. I realized that I myself was not yet in the picture, so stepped back once more to see what could enclose myself-as-Buddha-containing-Everything.

To my astonishment, the next step was to see Everything in a tear rolling down Jesus' cheek. My hands started to shake in my lap, tears rolled down my own cheeks. It was an hour before I was calm enough to talk about that image with the rest of the group.

The enormous strength of my reaction to that image staggered me. I don't know where it came from, because I think that I'm not a Christian. And yet I can't deny what I felt (and still feel, it echoes around in me now three hours later).

There's an unknown unknown here, waiting to be discovered.


* For new visitors who know one or more of my various "me's" in SL: I keep my SL identities separate out here in the blogosphere. Susan is the name (anonym) that Udge uses for that other avatar whom you know. Please do not use any other name for her if/when commenting here.

Plus ça change...

I would blame my three-week silence on the pressures of work etc, but regular readers know that there have often been such lacunae in recent years. I apologise to everyone I've been ignoring, all the bloggers whose posts that I haven't been commenting, all the birthdays I have forgotten (or worse, remembered and then put from mind because I couldn't deal with it). My behaviour upsets me at least as much as it does you.

Work has changed direction. I stopped the translation for half a year after the mess last summer, with them wanting me in Münster and then withdrawing the offer shortly before we signed contracts. Last month I realized that I had (relatively) enormous debts and no chance to pay them back without doing more or different work, so spoke seriously to G and U about my work in their office. The theoretical 20 hours a week had been creeping upwards, reaching an average of 35, which was a break-even level but no chance to repay or save anything. I explained all this and said I'd need to cut back to a real 20 hours in order to take a second job, terribly sorry. They thought about it overnight and made a counter-offer: 45 hours a week, slight raise in the hourly rate, and a productivity bonus guaranteed for 2009 that would let me pay all my debts.

I have to admit, that option hadn't occurred to me. I took it, and am now working fulltime and fairly happily. But it means that my lovely mornings at home have gone, so I am seriously behind on my blog- and book-reading, riverbank-walking-down-to-ings, and Second Life play. A fair exchange, perhaps; in any case I was glad to take it.

With the change in hours has somehow come a change in my style and manner. It feels as though I've shifted up a gear, or crested a hill and am now running on the level. I've started taking the job more seriously, sometimes arriving first and often leaving last, and am taking on more management and steering. Much of the technical discussion with structural engineers and HVAC planners and others that ilk, now devolves to me, and to my surprise I am enjoying it.

Second Life is changing direction too. I have stepped back a bit from the meditation group discussions, which lately had been more philosophical discussion than meditation. I often couldn't follow the sense of the conversation, for example the idea that the image of a chair on a screen is not distinguishable from the one that you are sitting in right now, dear reader, and I found that stressful. I have joined some more traditional groups to get back to calm and centering: "Sit down, shut up, just breathe."

Time for work. Let me leave you with a truly marvellous video (a genuine cinema short, btw, 16 minutes long) called Validation which offers exactly what the title says. Highly recommended, do watch it!

Shabbat shalom, dear friends. I do think of you fondly, even in my silence.