Muhammad Rasheed's Blog, page 236

Awakening the Atrophied Eye - DAY FIVE

It has been awhile since I’ve been on Clesson H. Harvey’s pyramidtexts.com website.  Mostly because I had already taken extensive notes from his essay and FAQ, and I own his book The Short Path.  Plus I noticed that he had long ago stopped updating it.  I knew he was really old, and I was afraid he couldn’t update it anymore because he, you know, forgot that he had it or whatever. But now I see that he’s published a new book! Opening the Door to Immortality seems like a great read, and from the description it looks like this is the one.  Apparently he stopped updating the Utterance translations on his site because he decided to put the rest of that content into this, the comprehensive explanation of all his research.  Sweet!  I ordered it.  Can’t wait to read it.   Alright, I’m back.  I got me enough sleep.  I didn’t bother to set my alarm as usual because I got up at 5:28am and my old USA cell alarm is already set to get me up at 6:00am to get ready for work.  So this was my first session where I didn’t stop meditating prematurely before the alarm went off. The morning prayer is at 4:12am right now, and when I lied down I didn’t fall back to sleep, so I was still in my purity state.   Pillow.  Closet.  Sit.  Close door partially.  Recite ‘sah.’  Focus on fovea spot.

Light was coming through the opening in the closet door, but from the angle of that window, there was shadow right in front of me which kept me from seeing any detail in the wall.  As long as I focused on the fovea nothing from my peripheral distracted me so it was all good. I guess the novelty of the whole experiment has worn off, because it didn’t take long at all to find that state of super peace.  I coasted there the whole time.  VERY pleasant.  Very few of the threshold visions made their appearance, and all in the very beginning.  I noticed those swirly-dos moving around at some point, but they stayed very faint and in the background… like they were behind a veil of some kind that caused them to be very faint and grayish instead of that glowing blue color.  They never got stronger than that and faded away after a bit.  I enjoyed the serenity feeling of the whole session though… …and then the alarm went off.  Time to make the donuts.  See you later for Day Six. 

Awakening the Atrophied Eye - DAY FOUR

One of my sisters expressed that reading these blog entries was frightening her.  “What do you mean?  What’s scary about sitting in the dark thousands of miles away from my loved ones, taunting mysterious entities hell-bent on sabotaging my very soul, just on the other side of a doorway into Beyond?”
Chicks.  smh.
But maybe she has a point.  I suppose it’s possible that I could accidentally let something in.  My bed is only a few steps away from that closet after all.  While I’m lying in bed, in that vulnerable half-alert state in between wakefulness and sleep, I could feel the weight of some presence pull itself up on my bed. Or open the closet and find that feral little boy from the remake of the Wolfman crouched in there snarling…
It can happen, I guess.*
But no new Great Frontiers were ever discovered by the craven gutless!  Only the brave… those valiant and daring heroes leading the way into Glory… have the gumption and wherewithal to pull the species kicking and screaming into a magnificent new age in which unicorns float above fresh green grass, etc.   You know what I’m saying.  Sure it’s scary.  But bravery is doing stuff despite the fear. 
That’s not the stuff I’m scared of anyway.  That’s not the stuff that has always made me hesitate on following through with this experiment into spiritual science before.  What scares me is the unknown.  What if I DO open my Third Eye?  What will it show me?  What lessons will I be confronted with?  Or worse.
What if my immortal half doesn’t want to meet me at all and is genuinely disgusted with all it has witnessed thus far? 
It can happen, I guess. **
Sometimes the truth about yourself can be far scarier than any Stan Winston FX creation, and at almost 43 years old, I figure I’m about ready for some [more] truth.  And who’s more qualified to reveal the truth about me than myself… the part of me that has personal memories of the paradise described in sacred scripture that it desperately wants to get back to?  My immortal half will not coddle me, or tip toe, or walk on eggshells, or be afraid to damage our relationship by being over-the-top blunt.  The mystic Third Eye will be a mirror.  That’s pretty scary, especially for folk like myself who have a unicorns-floating-over-flowery-lush-green-grass mindset.
So here I am on Day Four of my attempt to awaken my atrophied Wisdom Eye.  My short term goal is to achieve that [“SERENITY NOW!!”] serene state of super-peace I found the other day.  It felt like I could float there forever.  How kickass would it be to be able to meditate regularly for exactly an hour at this early date?  Very!  I certainly didn’t expect to do it as long as I did during Day Three.  Near the end of the month of Ramadan, on the Islamic lunar calendar, is an event known as The Night of Power.  Ramadan is the month that the first verses of the Qur’an were revealed to the prophet Muhammad (May the peace & blessings of God be upon him), and The Night of Power was the very night those first verses were delivered, on the 27thday.  Traditionally the faithful gather in the masjid (mosque) on that night to celebrate it with extra long prayers and lesser meditation techniques and such.  How awesome would it be to be able to do an hour-long session of correct meditation on The Night of Power?  Very!  If anything exciting was going to happen, SURELY it would be during THAT event.  So being able to gain the ability to comfortably meditate for an hour with no sweat this early, means it will be a piece of cake by the time Ramadan rolls back around next summer. 
Unfortunately I didn’t really pull that off for Day Four’s session.
It was one of my longest times though.  Set my alarm at 1:29am, called it a day at 1:52am.  The problem was, remember that day when I said the conditions for being able to meditate correctly involved getting enough sleep beforehand?  Well, yeah.  I did kind of the opposite of that.  The previous night I was up pretty late and I could feel how sleepy I was when I sat on my closet pillow.  I experienced a painful but mild eye strain sensation when I began trying to hold the fovea spot in place, but I tried to power through it, thinking that if only I could reach that state of super peace everything would be fine.  And then I started yawning every freakin’ four seconds, and my eyes started tearing up.  I didn’t experience that breathless hyperventilating sensation (no shit; I was sleepy), but again I thought if I could just power through to the super peace state everything would be fine. 
But the yawning wouldn’t stop.  It was genuinely annoying.  And just before I decided to call it a night, I saw something.  Something like a faint comet of blue light trailing a Tron energy line behind it.   Instinctively I glanced down and to the left, but it stayed put.  According to the pyramid texts “there’s a fine line between enlightenment and illusion” and you can differentiate between the two by which disappears and which doesn’t when you perform that trick.  This comet thingy stayed, and in fact other glowing lines started swirling around that, representing the start of Stage One.  Fascinated I kept meditating, and the yawns stopped, presumably because my change in attitude made me more alert.  But it didn’t last, and I started yawning a lot all over again and the phenomenon abandoned me.  I kept it up a bit longer hoping it would come back, but it didn’t.  I then got up and went on to bed.
I promise I’ll get some sleep before Day Five.

*No.  No, it can’t.**Probably.

Awakening the Atrophied Eye - DAY THREE

Set my alarm at 8:25pm.  Called it a day at 8:54pm.
That’s a lot.  For me.  I’m kind of impressed by it.  lol
I was a little upset when I started.  I thought that I should meditate to calm me down, and then it occurred to me, “Why not?”  So I got up and put the pillow on my closet floor, set my alarm, turned out the lights, shut the door (left it open a bit to keep fresh air coming in there so I don’t end up on the news), and started “reciting the great word ‘sah’” as the pyramid texts so eloquently put it.  I entertained an amused thought at how older, more famous translators of the Egyptian hieroglyphs had no idea what those Utterances were talking about.  Clesson H. Harvey’s knowledge of meditation techniques gave him a serious leg up, though one probably wouldn’t see how the two interests would correlate normally.  Would you?  That’s evidence right there that there should be more cross domain training throughout the different fields of knowledge in our society.  How much further advanced would we be if the different specialists were more aware of what their counterparts in other fields were working on?    I’ll bet it would be CRAZY far.
The threshold visions were waiting for me again.  Kinda creepy.  What does that mean?  Whatever.  They are no match for the Powers of Perception at my command.  *glance down to the left and back* Take that!  What?!  You like it, huh?  Well, take THIS!  And THAT!
Hmph.  That’s what I thought.   
But what’s this?  That funky breathless/hyperventilating again.  But I’ve barely started!  The door IS open about four-five inches.  I can feel the air on my neck.  What IS this?  I don’t know.  Perhaps it’s the secret weapon of the threshold visions in their lame ass attempts to thwart my goal of meeting my immortal self.  Well, it’s not going to work on me.  I’m going to power through this. 
It WAS disturbing though.
For a while it seemed like it was getting worse.  But I kept my focus on the fovea spot, didn’t let it get away from me.  And then my eyelids started involuntarily fluttering really fast.  And then my eyes started watering a bit.  And then the threshold visions started up again.  I performed the old trick a couple of times and they stopped.  The fovea spot then seemed uncharacteristically calm… moving around a bit, but not as frantic as usual.  And then I noticed that my breathing was normal.  More than normal, kind of serene.  I felt VERY peaceful.  I kept on meditating in that new state for a bit and it was quite pleasant.  I would’ve kept going, but I had to get back and monitor something going on in the real world. 
I stopped, saw the cell phone alarm and felt myself grin.  I may not have got to Stage One again like I really expected to when I started this, but I’m definitely making some kind of progress.
I’m really looking forward to Day Four.  Hope to see you there.

Awakening the Atrophied Eye - DAY TWO

I mentioned the other day about the fovea spot being identified with the pole star by the ancient Egyptians.  At the time they wrote the pyramid texts (or when they were chiseled into the stele anyway) it was Sirius that was in that role, and they took it pretty seriously.  I wonder if any of them would sit in such a position as to line up their individual fovea spot to the actual star and meditate that way?  Or for the pharaoh and the high priests meditating in the King’s Chamber within the Great Pyramid, I wonder if those mysterious ‘star shafts’ had anything to with that as well? 
It’s a curious but idle thought.  I have no interest in incorporating that kind of literal star symbology into my own meditation practices.  There’s a reason why that great civilization is no longer among us.  You know what I’m talking about… I’m Muslim.  In my studies I’m very carefully trying to separate the chaff from the wheat, so to speak.  I’m not interested in the pagan b.s. aspect of the stuff the ancients did; I just want the advanced spiritual sciences part they developed over those tens of millennia. I’m wary of inadvertently incorporating some pagan foolishness into my system just because it sounds cool and ending up drawing down the wrath of you-know-who.  So in that regard it’s best to keep it simple and as barebones as possible to be safe.
Anyway, after talking with my family on a video call at around midnight I started getting ready to bed down when I decided to meditate.  I had napped earlier, so I wasn’t particularly sleepy.  The idea of it got my adrenaline pumping so I was like, “Let’s do it!”  So I set my pillow in the bottom of the closet, set my alarm for 1:04am, turned out the lights, sat in the closet and closed the door. 
Boy was it dark!
It’s funny that when I started the ‘sah’ breathing and searched for the fovea spot, the threshold visions had already began.  And about a minute into it, after properly getting rid of those friggin’ threshold visions by quickly glancing down to the left and back again, I noticed that most of the “tv noise” of visual purple cells vanished from my field of vision.  It wasn’t the pure, high-definition blackness of the event horizon stage that Clesson H. Harvey described as being the final stage before the Third Eye opens, but it was a VERY smooth black… blacker than anything in my experience and it was kind of alarming.  For a minute I thought something dramatic was about to happen.  Actually I’m still not sure if it wasn’t THE pure black he was talking about… maybe it was! Well, I lost the rhythm of my breathing and had to concentrate on calming the hell down.   I refocused on my fovea spot and got my breathing rhythm back.  It didn’t take long.  Holding onto the fovea spot calms you down naturally.  
I was sitting on my butt this time, my legs in front of me with the knees bent, and my feet against the wall, heels on the floor, toes bent up.  It was a comfortable position and I didn’t shift around at all.  I should be able to maintain that for the entire life of my meditation adventure. So I continued the session until I started feeling a kind of breathless, hyperventilation sensation (maybe I should crack that closet door?) and decided that was long enough.  Checked the cell phone clock:
12:18am.
Similar duration to Day One.  Next time I’ll make a stronger effort to push through whatever discomforts I’m feeling so I can try to hit that half hour mark.  See you on Day Three, God willing.

Awakening the Atrophied Eye - DAY ONE

The fovea spot is a pinpoint-sized area where the exact center in the retina of each of your eyeballs’ vision crosses over into each other.  There’s actually some form of an electrical effect produced in your brain from this that enables you to see the fovea spot gleaming like a faint star even in total darkness.  You can see it now if you want, just look up into the center of your vision about six inches in front of your brow.  The ancient Egyptians had all kinds of star references, analogies and symbols for this thing, and for good reason.  It’s the key to the whole shebang.  That’s the spot that the Third Eye portal will open up in.  After the proper breathing rhythm has been obtained, which we’ll discuss in a minute, steps two and three in this correct meditative practice as instructed in the pyramid texts, is to focus on that ‘star’ and, because it is elusive, hold it there with the force of your vision. As soon as you see it and focus on it, it will literally start trying to avoid your gaze and skipping around within the little confined area you see it in, but you mustn’t let it get away.  Make the conscious effort to focus on it and actually try to use your eyes to mentally will it to be still so you can continue to focus on it.  Repeat for an hour.  And that’s the entire meditative exercise.  It’s very simple.
For me it seems a lot harder in practice.   Wherever you are sitting, even after just staring at the screen of your preferred electronic device, you can look up at your fovea and try this.  The fovea will still be visible to you; I can see mine now, too.   But I’m very visual-minded, and get distracted easily, so I need to meditate in total darkness or I’ll ended up focusing on whatever I can see in the room and daydreaming about old Hong Kong Phooey episodes or egg sandwiches or whatever.  It has to be total darkness for me, or as soon as my eyes adjust to whatever the poor lighting conditions of the semi-darkness is and I start being able to identify stuff in the room, then I’m out.  Ideally, I need something like the true total darkness of the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza to meditate in, sans all the modern tourist lamps and torches and stuff. 
I don’t have that in my apartment.  What I do have is a closet that’s a tiny bit too little for me, that I can sit a pillow in the bottom of and slide the door shut.  I’ve been thinking about that for weeks now, and saw no reason why it wouldn’t work.  So at 10:31am this morning, I sat my pillow in the bottom of it, ambitiously set my cell phone alarm to 11:31am, closed the door, and practiced my Powers of Perception upon the star Sirius (or whatever the pole star is during this current age) in the form of my unsuspecting fovea spot.
Before I started I put myself in a ritual state of purity like I was getting ready to make one of the five prayers of Islam.  The ablution ritual, ‘wudu’ in Arabic, is sort of a mini-baptism symbolically transforming you from the worldly common state to a holy one.  It is composed of:
1.) using my left hand to rinse off my right hand three times2.) using my right hand to rinse off my left hand three times 3.) rinsing out my mouth three times4.) rinsing out my nose three times5.) washing my face three times6.) using my left hand to rinse off my right forearm, from wrist to elbow, three times7.) using my right hand to rinse off my left forearm, from wrist to elbow, three times8.) using both hands to wipe over my head and around my ears one time in one fluid motion9.) wiping over my right foot to the ankle three times10.) wiping over my left foot to the ankle three times
Done.  Now I’m ready to have a spiritual experience.  By the way, if you came from the restroom after a ‘number two,’ had sex, or was ill, then the wudu ritual isn’t enough.  You’ll have to take a full shower in order to be in the proper state of purity.
Anyway, so I sat in the closet, alarm set (*sniff*), door closed, and I began finding my breathing rhythm.  You have to breathe out of both your nose and mouth at the same time, slower on the inhale, and a bit forceful with the exhale so that the noise mimics saying the sound “sah.”  Not “saaah” or “sahhhhh.”   Just “sah.”
Okay, so I was doing it.  It’s fine.  I was nervous as heck, but I pretty much expected that.  But then I noticed I could see in that damn closet. 
“Eh?  What the…?  NO!!!”
There was light showing through the side of the sliding door.  It was 10:30am in the morning, and the sun pretty much lives in Kuwait.  Really.  Its summer house is right over there.  So it’s bright as hell.  I have the lights out in the room, the thick hotel-grade curtains are drawn, but there’s still enough light streaming around the edges of the curtains to read by.  I originally envisioned doing this at night for maximum darkness, but one of the conditions mentioned in the research is to make sure you get enough sleep beforehand, and I was WIDE awake at that time.  So combined with how hyped I was after posting my intro to this thing the other day, 10:30am just made a lot of sense.
I noticed that the other half of the sliding doors was closed on the other side of the closet, so I pulled that part half way open to overlap my side of the closet, and the light quality dimmed significantly.  More-or-less pleased I continued with the session, and was even more pleased to notice that I didn’t see the light or the interior of the closet at all anymore while trying to hold the fovea spot in place. 
After about a minute the threshold visions began to appear. 
There was a faint corona around the small dark area I was focusing into (I never noticed that corona before, but I had never meditated in this level of darkness before either) and these… shapes… were appearing out of the darkness around it, presumably attempting to distract me from what I was doing.  This happens every single time, and it happens to everyone.  The pyramid texts are very explicit about NOT attempting to see these things clearer or attempting to somehow identify them.  If you do, your immortal self will not allow the Third Eye to open for you.  Ever.  So don’t do it.  Consider these things your enemy.
The technique for getting them out of your face, as instructed in the pyramid texts, is to simply glance down to the left and then go right back to focusing on the fovea.  That’s it.  Just a quick glance down to the left and back up again.  I did that and they immediately disappeared.  They reappeared, or attempted to, after a few more ‘sahs’ so I did it again every time they showed, or attempted to show.  I redoubled my efforts to focus on the fovea spot and they seemed to leave me alone.  I continued for a while longer, excited to notice the beginnings of Stage One starting, and then I felt the symptoms of my legs starting to go to sleep (I was sitting back on my heels with my legs folded underneath me).  I ignored it for a bit until it became a clear distraction, and then I called it a day.  I opened the closet door, and looked at my cell phone clock.
10:43am.
Not bad.  About ten minutes.  I think that’s a record for me.  I’ll use that as a benchmark to try and beat next time, helping this feel even more like a workout.  I’ll also wait until after sunset, and try to figure out a pose that will be consistently comfortable for up to an hour.  See you later for Day Two.