From time-to-time I will publish photo essays, or my poetry, and of my life on this curios planet, Earth. Time on Terra is precious and it is a mark of dignity to record it as much as possible for others to read, or in this case see and read.
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Mahteighja Miller-Gill
You don't change worldviews overnight, and it's not like changing your outfit, and putting on a new guise and shouting to the world, "Voilà, I'm brand new!" No, at fifty-four you're pretty set in your ways, and this was going to take time and help, not only from Alinda, but from a new friend I'm about to meet, but first. I have to move and get out of that drafty, money guzzling apartment, and my faithful caseworker will find the place I'm still in today, fourteen years later. People, I'm moving up in the world from a two-room apartment with a bath, to a three-room apartment with a bath. Yea! Believe it or not have a just a bedroom will help me, I don't need anything more. I now have an efficient apartment I can use as a studio/writer's den, and the living quarters, perfectly sized for me, are tiny. I'm two blocks from the grocery store so I can get cigarettes when I need them, and I'm a block from the local city recreational center, where I will here Joe Biden speak, when he is running with Obama for Vice President of the US, but I'm downstairs, and with my COPD it was difficult to get up and down the stairs with my groceries; however, I have a north light for painting, if I'd ever take it up again. I moved August 20th 2007, and I signed my rental agreement.
Alinda was still with me, but I don't see her in the flesh. I see her as a vision when I meditate, or when I'm in the state of hypnopompia. I recommend every one meditate, and I'm not talking about prayer as in Christian prayer, I'm talking about slowing your brain down by concentrating on your breathing, it is called mindful meditation by most, and you become mindful not mindless. Some say meditate on nothingness, well shit, what is nothingness, and if you find nothingness to think about, doesn't that by definition make it something? I can reach a state of "not thinking" but first I have to concentrate on something, i.e., my breathing. Before, in life counting backwards was a way to relax and go to sleep, so the anesthesiologist taught me in 1971 to do this before surgery. Now, I was taught by my guide to focus on my breathing as I count backwards. Instead of adding things like sheep, I'm subtracting things to get to unconsciousness, and the state of hypnagogia is the realm of neither asleep nor awake. You're drifting. Everyone goes through this as they go to sleep. You're lying there in bed and suddenly you feel your head sink into the pillow, and you'll jerk awake. That jerk is called a "hypnagogic jerk." Or you might be drifting to sleep and you feel a cat jumping on your bed, except you don't have a cat, or someone sits on your bed except you're living alone, etc.
The idea in mindfulness meditation is to stay in that realm, whether in sitting up and meditating or when you are going to sleep, you don't want to actually sleep, you want to stay in this nether-realm. Here you will have visions, and they will play like movies on the back of your eyelid. What are organ are you using to seeing with? You're seeing with your third eye, an actual eye deep in your reptile brain that was used to tell you when to hibernate, and it had an optic nerve and cone cells to see with. It is this eye you're using, because you're not in REM sleep. The images will move rapidly at first like a movie sped up, but with practice you can control them. Don't worry, this is not evil, it is quite natural and up to twenty percent of humans have them.
