Mindfulness meditation:  that’s where you sit down and breathe.  You breathe and observe the breath coming in and going out.  The air in your lungs: now they’re full, now they’re empty.  Within this process thoughts and emotions arise, blossom and fade.  The point is to observe them without attaching yourself to them.  The point is to see that they are separate from you, the inner you who observes.  As you participate in this ongoing process you come to understand that emotional and mental events pass through your consciousness like clouds.  Like clouds in the sky of the psyche.  Within the parameters of the meditation, these events which stimulate, depress and excite in the normal course of life can be experienced at a distance, as if they were happening to someone else.

They are, in fact, happening to someone else.  That someone else is the personality you have created for the purposes of your current incarnation.  You are much greater than your current personality would suggest.  Your spirit encompasses so much more than the distillation currently on display.  You may understand this as a concept but the experience of it may continue to be elusive:  the tail which you are chasing as you explore the ego looking for the soul.

Be assured, my friends, that the experience is there, awaiting your personalized discovery.  I was made aware of it tonight in the midst of meditation.  Suddenly I felt an aspect of self, one which exists now but one that I shall reach fully after the physical passing of “Gordon”, and that aspect was experiencing Gordon’s entire incarnation, the life I am living now, as just such a cloud, as “I” here experiences various thoughts and emotions as clouds passing through the sky of my psyche.

On one level it was the proverbial lightbulb going on in the head, and on another it was a lovely momentary dissociation from the concerns of the personality, and on another a voice was singing, “It’s only a lifetime, it’s only a lifetime”.  Levels of perception within the one consciousness that appears to be “mine” but which I know is only my share of the Universal Mind, that universal mind in which we are doing time.