My friend Everett is newly interested in altered states and how to achieve them naturally through meditation. He takes a combination of prescribed medication that has taken away his sex drive the past many years, and he’s into unconventional sex with his wife i.e. BDSM, an erotic practice involving consensual use of restraint and intense sensory stimulation. He’d not yet been successful in achieving what he considered meditation, and he asked me how much I thought the medications he was taking affected that. I told him that in my experience, anything that heightened or suppressed my brain activity might affect my ability to “get in the slot.” That included the restraint and spankings he was so fond of. I told him: “We meditate to bring ourselves to a stillpoint several times a day, in order to refine our perception and enable us to grasp the more subtle nuances of sensory input via our neuro physical makeup. The more we are able to bring ourselves to a place of detachment from external stimulation, the more subtly our nervous system will become attuned to respond to the nonphysical environment around us. When you are in a habit of bombarding yourself with ever increasing modes of external stimulation, you are likely to lose the subtleties entirely and that could keep you from reaching certain altered states of consciousness.”
When you go into the silence alone and achieve higher states of meditation, it’s not so much an emptiness as it is an enormous presence of a world that remains hidden during daily waking consciousness. The more often I attune to this world and allow it to bring me back to center, the more fully I can handle all areas of my life in the physical world. The more power and influence it gives me to operate in my physical world.
Last night I was sitting in a friend’s studio listening to some music he’d made twenty years ago. As a musician/singer/songwriter, he had many cds of his own music spanning many styles over many years. I wanted to hear some of the late 80’s and we did so, facing each other in big swivel office chairs. I sat with eyes closed and listened, recalling some of it from early WFIT days. I was having a very full and lively subjective, internal experience and all he could see was me sitting there with my eyes closed.
“What are you thinking?” he asked after a bit. I was totally digging it, so much so that I thought it’d be obvious to him. I laughed as I remembered how often we sit just inches apart from someone who is having a different experience than we are. My experience was listening to some really great industrial music and being transported back 20+ years in time. It was all I could do to sit in the chair. I could feel every cell of my body alive with being into it. The endorphins were flowing big time. His experience, however, was watching me sit before him with eyes closed, with no indication of how the music was landing on me and what I thought of it.
I had to laugh. Him thinking I might be bored by what I’m listening to, all the while I was enjoying it on so many levels. He’s heard his music for his whole life, he’s used to it, he hears it now with a critic’s ear and in light of new knowledge and experience, it’s become almost ordinary for him. Yet when I hear it, me being someone who has trained my nervous system, through meditation, to detect and respond to this world on a deeper and more subtle level, when I hear the music it transports me into a very expanded and sensory filled world.
This is the world that my friend Everett tries to achieve in his BDSM games. But the remedy is to remove stimulation rather than add more. Not remove forever, just remove it for a break so your body can reboot itself and find a new zero point. One that allows you to tune into the world at a more subtle level, to derive more intense enjoyment of each moment of it. Then you’ll find that less is so much more. And when they don’t know that your quiet smile means you’re having an enormous ecstatic internal experience just by sitting and breathing in the same room with them, you don’t care. You’re having enough fun for both of you.
Later, I got an email from a friend: “Gotta tell you privately. . . I’m a dominatrix, sweetie! And you have BDSM all wrong–it’s NOT all about the external stimulation, not at all. The externals are as much a part of BDSM as a caress is to “normal” erotic stimulation. It’s about the consensual exchange of control. Sometimes physical, but ALWAYS psychological. There is a term in the “lifestyle” (what we insiders call it) called “subspace”. That’s the goal of most lifestyle practitioners–for the dominant to get his/her submissive into “subspace” which is a mental state that transcends the physical. There are many ways to go about this, but the primary stimulus is mental. So–does BDSM prevent one from a meditative state? NO. It’s not all about spankings and being tied up. There are SO many different practices. . .but the one thing they have in common is that one person submits to another, and that the person in control is trying to fulfil that person’s expectations and bring them into subspace.”
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