CHAPTER 9: AWAKENING

Somerai awakens from her afternoon slumber and opens The Guide to Chapter 3 Meditations.

It reads: “Focus your attention on the tip of your nostril to follow your breath. Now observe your thoughts and sensations.”

Two lines, that was it. What was she supposed to do with that?

That wasn’t a step-by-step guide on how to meditate properly. AI could have done a much better job. Nevertheless she had nothing to lose, so she decided to give it a go.

She wrapped her meditation shawl around her head and shoulders, focused her energy internally and took a breath in.

She felt the movement of air at the tip of her nostril then let her breath out.

Follow along with her, you could do with a calm mind too don’t you think?

Breathe in, feel the chest move upwards but focus your attention on a singular point,

the tip of the nostril.

Now Breathe out.

Feel the air flowing out through the tip of the nostril.

Repeat…. (20 second silence on recording)

How do you feel?

As Somerai watched her third breath come in, a thought from the Monkey Mind appeared.

He said: “You still have so far to go to get to the mountain, you’ll never make it.”

Like she had opened a link on her phone’s newsfeed, five minutes later she was still thinking about the best route to get to the mountain and had forgotten altogether about watching the breath. This was more difficult than it seemed.

Sometimes she disappeared into images in her mind that popped up and watched the mental movie of a previous experience. In this way she was always living in the past.

She tried again. The same thing happened.

Her mind was constantly crashing her party by speaking to her or serving up images unrelated to her chain of thought, dispersing her attention .

She realised she had no control of her thoughts. She quietened the monkey by focussing on her breath as a single point of attention to anchor it down and promote stillness in thought.

As she practised more and more, the longer she was able to keep her attention on the flow of airthrough her nostril without a thought creeping in.

Her mind felt empty and lighter rather than jumpy and incessantly streaming. She enjoyed this emptiness.

Then the monkey mind appeared again through an unwanted thought. This time she took a Third Person Perspective to view the thought from an outsider’s standpoint. She imagined herself as another person (an outside observer) watching herself think about this thought.

At that moment of being able to step outside her own thoughts and see them objectively she began to realise that she was not her thoughts. They were two separate things. Her thoughts were separate from her as a person.

She even went to the degree of scolding her mind like a naughty child when it allowed an unwanted thought to enter. Taking this position gave her some control over the monkey mind. She was not a slave to her thoughts anymore but rather she was the bouncer at the door, allowing or refusing entry to unwelcome thoughts.

So if she wasn’t her thoughts, then was she her body?

Her body and physical appearance presented her as Somerai to the outside world, a 20 year old South African female. It was her external identity that interacted with the outside world.

But the more she meditated, the more she began to realise a whole new inner world where anything was possible, by transcending the limitations of her physical identity. Like a Large Language Model orchestrating a robot, she was a spiritual being having a physical experience, within the casing of a temporary human body.

As the mind became more still she started noticing pain, heat, cold and different sensations on her skin and in the body. She became more sensitive.

She observed these sensations such as an itch on her shoulder and she noticed that it always went away. Another itch on her leg surfaced, she didn’t scratch and then it too went away.

She noticed that all these sensations were impermanent. In fact everything was impermanent, even her.

So why worry? Why fear?

Her body was like a petri dish ripe for analysis, and her attention was the microscope. She was doing experiments on her own mind by observing her bodily sensations. They reflected her emotional knots and all the conflict she was holding on to.

This was the scientist investigating her own mind and body and learning directly from her own physical experience.

Who needs a teacher or a book to learn vicariously about others’ experiences she thought, all that one learns from books is nothing but the reflection of the inner being.

There she was teaching herself through direct, first -hand experience, observing her sensations and reflecting on them to extract insights.

Everything you need for learning lies within, the university is YOU.

She realised that some of the sensations she was feeling came from her senses making contact with stimuli in the real-world that her ego either liked and desired or did not like. These desires created craving for more pleasurable experiences while the things that happened to her that she did not like like Shanti dying, she rejected, feared and moved away from.

After contemplating on this she realised that both good and bad things would happen to her in life, but it was better to remain even-minded and balanced no matter what happened.

Remaining equanimous where she neither craved for pleasurable experiences or moved away from negative experiences would allow her to accept whatever happened to her in her life.

This she could not control.

What do you think?

Its better not to form attachments to your feelings right?

..as this would make you dependent on others and on having particular experiences that you crave. Rather than hold onto things of the past, it’s often better to let go of it and move on in life. She decided to accept that Shanti was gone, she replayed the incident in her minds eye and cried when she thought about it to release the trauma and then let it go.

At least for a while.

The more and more she meditated, the deeper she was able to feel these sensations in her body. She began to experiment with moving her attention which she imagined as a ball of light moving through different parts of her body.

Try it now together with Somerai. Move the ball of light from the top of your head down your chest and arms, through the torso and down the legs to your feet.

Using your mind as a microscope, can you feel the sensations?

Is there any pain, itching or heat or cold as you move your attention.

Then move the attention in the opposite direction from your feet back towards your head.

For Somerai, this produced a pleasurable flow of energy up and down her body. She felt it especially in her hands and feet because there were more nerve endings there. They felt like bubbles moving through her feet and legs as she moved attention up and down.

As she moved her attention, she zoomed in to the bubbles she felt in her feet. After long periods of concentration and taking a microscopic view through deliberate concentration on micro-sensations she began to feel like her entire body was vibrating.

Her entire body was a mass of vibrating micro-particles that clung together through forces of attraction to represent her physical form. This was a revelation!

Was she experiencing the nature of atoms and molecules at a micro-level? This was insane.

And if her body was a mass of vibrating particles then what about everything else she encountered in daily life. What about plants and dogs and tables, were they vibrating particles too?

Are you a clump of vibrating particles? And if this is true what does it mean for you?

What happens if one of your electrons from your body’s clump of atoms dropped off and attaches to one of your dog’s lonely atoms which was lacking sufficient electrons. Does that mean that the dog is technically now a part of you?

And if the electrons can move across and recombine, then can atoms also be re-arranged? Heat when applied to an ice-cube seems to re-arrange the atoms from solid to liquid form.

So can objects and human bodies change shape when heated or electrified or if some other force is

applied?

This scientific explanation seemed to suggest that physical things were constantly changing and impermanent. So why should she bother with things that were temporary like her body and physical people. Why not be more concerned with deeper things?

Her perception of her body as a collection of atoms made her identify less with the body and more with her internal world. At an atomic level things were pretty similar and if everything was made up of atoms with energy moving in-between, then all matter had something in common.

Maybe this common foundation was how the real self, the inner spirit permeated all beings? What interested Somerai was how she could re-arrange atoms to help her survive in the wild.

A 3D printer uses heat to melt plastic, squeezing it out through a narrow nozzle with pinpoint accuracy to layer and shape a new form as if by magic.

Similarly Somerai believed that she could re-arrange atoms to construct new objects. From her recent experience she reasoned that the illusion of the physical form of the world was projected onto the screen of one’s own life as experienced by you, the subject.

In turn, you play a central role in constructing the grand theatre of your own life experience.

A gust of wind swept by and with it Somerai heard a voice from deep within saying

“Wake up! Wake up!

It is time to see the truth.

It is time for your real self to awaken.”

She began to grasp the unity of everything.

As she looked around with her atomic view glasses on, all objects in front of her seemed to be vibrating.

The baobab tree she was looking at was shimmering with the particles swarming.

So was her tent and the backpack.

Her augmented reality view of the world showed her things as they truly were.

The real-world was an illusion, there was a lot more complexity and change happening deep downat a molecular level.

She suddenly felt a familiar certainty that this was how things truly were and that she had long known this truth from previous lives passed.

She knew that her power of belief transmitted through vibrational forces could will things into this quantum reality.

She looked at the acacia tree in front of her ablaze with microcosmic solar systems in flux. She could sense the tree was suffering from a fungus covering her outer branches.

It was already a fact in her mind that she could remove an electron from a cluster of atoms making up a twig. The twig was holding a low-hanging bunch of leaves on the outer right branch of the tree.

With clarity and unflinching belief she focused her laser-like thought and imagined the twig breaking, visualising it in detail in her mind’s eye.

As if an overweight pigeon had caused it to break, with the faintest snap the twig broke off and landed in front of her feet.

This was unreal, it had to be a coincidence.

She tried again, this time she went for a larger branch.

The branch crashed to the floor.

Incredible!

Did she really do this? And what else was possible?

Somerai had discovered anew power, a potentiality that always existed within her. The Mind Gardener had arrived in the African savannah.

She began to question all the assumptions she had been taught about life that she had not experienced first hand for herself.

She wanted to know more.

Do you want to know more?

From a book, so what?

Discover your own truth.

Do things, experiment, experience it.

Focus the mind, listen to the self,

The answer lies within you.

By focusing on the breath, and quietening her mind Somerai was able to hear the ancient sound of creation and listen to her inner voice, her intuition connected to her heart.

When faced with a difficult decision it always seemed to know the right answer. It always told her the truth. There was nowhere to hide.

When connecting to her heart she seemed to be dipping into a well of wisdom from past lives, a universal singular source, streaming from the supreme. Like a radio signal being sent from the origins of creation, she realised her heart served as a channel and receiver for communicating on a spiritual level.

When Somerai examined her thoughts and broke them down to their most basic building blocks, she found that they were merely words transcribed from the voice in her head, images and mental videos that were transmitted through electrical signals in her brain.

However in deep meditation, when thinking about and visualising another person, Somerai realised that through focusing on the centre point between her eyebrows and simultaneously connecting to emotion in her heart, she could transmit her thoughts to them.

She knew her father would be worried having not heard from her for so many days. In her mind she visualised her father and told him that she was well, she did not know whether he had received her message as she was out in the bush with no telecommunications.

As she did this she focused her feeling of emotion towards her father calmly on her heart.

Then all of a sudden she heard her fathers voice:

“I love you Somerai, keep working hard you will achieve your goal.”

Wow! Had it really worked or was she imagining it?

It somehow felt real, he had heard her call. She would ask him about it when she got back home.

As she spent more time meditating, she went deeper and deeper, discovering more and more. In the vast depths of meditation she had seen in her mind’s eye a vision of herself as an Inca warrior in a major battle between two competing tribes, slaying men at will.

While she she deeply regretted that she had taken life in battle, she knew deep in her heart that this had been her duty in one of her many past lives. Maybe this was why during altercations no one messed with her, she had the dead-eye look of an Inca Warrior Princess.

When she brought the recollection of the battle back to memory, she pressed play to view the battle scene by scene as she recalled it. She was even able to press pause, take different perspectives at will and walk around the frozen scene to zoom in on details like the emblem of the opposing tribe adorned on the weapons of her adversaries.

She observed the sequence of moves she executed to neutralise an axe-wielding opponent as he stormed towards her. It was like a video-game where she’d found the cheat code. She felt she was moving at hyper-speed and knew exactly what he was going to do before he did it.

She feigned left, spun gracefully and speared him in the back. So if in a past life she had had elite combat skills that she could remember in this life, what else did she already know?

When she thought deeply about it, she came to the sudden realisation that she had been sitting on a diamond mine but hadn’t known it.

She held within her an infinite reservoir of untapped knowledge and experiences from past lives, a possible Library of Alexandria that did not require an internet connection, data centres or electricity.

She had unknown, unlimited learning resources and potential she could download at will.

So learning was not about filling up oneself up with outward knowledge and experiences, but rather the reverse.

It was about creating the conditions for supreme knowledge and experiences from the past locked within to surface, be understood and put to use in this life.

This was optimal and regenerative learning, you did not need to start from zero.

But how could she access this pre-knowledge?

During the depths of continuous silence, solitude and deep meditation she had remembered the Inca battle, so maybe this was a clue.

The soul remembers, the heart never forgets.

And if she could look backwards into the past to recall knowledge and skills, could she mentally time travel into the future to bring back knowledge, competencies and science from her future self and her future lives that were still to be lived, accessing events still to be experienced?

This would give humanity the edge over winning a possible future war with AI.

All these experiences, introspective experiments and insights marked the beginning of Somerai’s awakening.

She now knew. The aggregate world was malleable and fictional, there was much more going on at a vibrational level.

There were forces at play that could be explained through science and if you tuned in, could be experienced through the body as a quantum research instrument.

The lines between past, present and future were blurred.

Why had she not known this earlier?

This was beyond possible, through experience and understanding she was transcending material nature and the limitations of her own mind.