Sometime around the year 2012 I had an experience that is so simple, and so lacking in details that it is barely describable.  However, since it has stayed with me for several years as an “outstanding event,” I assume that it was more important than I knew at the time and therefore worth attempting to describe.

One day in the mid-morning hours I was sitting on a pillow in my living room, meditating.  At some point in the meditation I opened my eyes, but stayed in the meditative mood.  I do this fairly often as it seems to help me become habituated to meditation while looking at the world.  It is a practice of taking in the surroundings while staying “empty.”  This is one of the first steps to staying in meditation all of the time, even while actively engaged with the world.

On this day I had a very unusual experience when I opened my eyes. When I looked at the room and my surroundings everything was as it normally is as far as placement, color and content were concerned.  However, everything was totally different.  My feeling was as if I had been normally looking at a two dimensional view of the world. It was as if my normal view is similar to looking at a photograph or a movie screen which appear three dimensional, but are actually flat.  My normal flat view of the world had somehow been changed into becoming a three dimensional world; with depth that I could experience, not just look at.  All of a sudden the feeling of being flat dissolved and it was like I was suddenly in another dimension.  It was more than just a shifting of point of view; it was a change in how it felt in my body.  This feeling and view of somehow being “in three dimensions” lasted for a relatively long time – ten or fifteen minutes or longer. 

It seems odd that all of a sudden it felt three dimensional.  After all, we live and perceive in a 3-D way all of the time.  This part is not new or novel in any way, but that day something was completely novel and approached being an “earth shattering event.” 

I finally came out of my meditation and the feeling/perception vanished, dissolving back into the everyday view of the world.  This moment stays in my memory as a very different, and probably important, event – but until recently I didn’t know why. 

Maybe I got a bit of an insight into this from a book that I got on my birthday a few weeks ago.  My daughter gave a book by the Dalai Lama called, How to See Yourself as You Really Are. I am having a very difficult time reading this book because it seems so foreign, but at the same time so obvious to me.  I think I get a bit of it, but then it seems like he takes a sharp turn in his descriptions, leaving me high and dry wondering what he could possibly be trying to talk about.  I will need to re-read this book a few times before I can decide if it makes sense or not for me.

However, I think it helped me find the importance of that three dimensional event. I think what may have happened is that I stopped looking at the things in my house filtered through my interpretations of what I think they are – instead I just looked at them as they are.  I didn’t look at a chair and see a “chair.” I looked at a chair and saw lines, surfaces, planes, and colors.  The same thing happened with the walls and windows.  They weren’t walls and windows; they were just what they were without any conception.  So instead of looking at these things as they were remanufactured in my mind’s eye, I looked at them as they were.  They were devoid of feelings, and understanding – they just were.  This made it feel like I was in the middle of a three dimension world (which I was), instead of like I was looking at a movie (which is a two dimensional view of three dimensional things).  I lost much meaning, but gained much knowledge about how things are as a part of the whole, rather than as individual items that were formed into concepts and notions filled with emotion and history.  The room and its contents were all the same, there were no separations between the things, and between the things and myself.  They were like they always are, but they were not they; they were it – and I was included as a part of it, rather than something separate observing it.

This silly little poem that I wrote seems to sum up a bit of this feeling:

              How far into the rabbit hole can you go?

              Can you see that all is one?

              Can you see that one is none?

              When you turn off your mind,

              And just see what there is to see,

              You will find that you are it, and that it is you.