Letting go of mental impressions

Becoming familiar with sushupti or dreamless sleep.

Yesterday morning, I did a 15-minute zazen meditation while seated on my zafu on the faux Persian carpet in my living room. I kept my eyes half open (or half closed, same thing) in a soft gaze, resting them at a 45-degree angle and directed towards a point about four feet in front of me. This soft gaze blurred my vision, allowing me to see images hidden in the carpet (like a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle illustration) that I would not have noticed otherwise. A pin-sized face appeared. At first, it looked like a Sumerian priestess. Then it became a Dervish wearing a sikke, then a Hasidic holy man with a thick, long curly beard. But the eyes stayed the same and it was my imagination that influenced whether the face was male or female and from which geographical and historical region it was from. I felt as if some ancient wise being was communicating to me through the guises of his/her many different incarnations. The rest of the carpet faded into a blurry, moving psychedelic pattern, like seagrass swaying underwater, while the face became more distinct as the focal point of my vision.

When my meditation ended, my pupils constricted back to accommodate normal vision and instantaneously, the tiny wise face on the carpet disappeared. I scanned the area where my eyes had rested and searched for the two dots, elongated face, head dress or beard but could not find it. I sat there for a few minutes, squinted and tried to do another soft gaze, but to no avail. That morphing face – a series of dots and lines, contrasting light and dark colors on dyed fabric – which my mind interpreted and saw as “wise holy person from distant land”, was gone forever. It was frustrating to see something so clearly then lose it. But I know there’s a lesson here. (Isn’t there always?)

I’ve been recording my dreams since I was eleven years old. When I awake in the morning or the middle of the night, I’ll lie still for a few moments attempting to recall the last dream I had, which I then write down in a notepad on the bedside table. There are times when the clarity of the dream fades, but some impression of it lingers. An artifact (an object, a word, a face, or a feeling) might float in my consciousness. I’d be aware of some lost story (like a scene or movie) that this artifact was a part of and if I manage to link the artifact back to its context, I’d be able to recall the entire vignette. Sometimes, just not moving enables me to remember consecutive dreams, a single dream in its entirety, or a portion of a dream.

But sometimes, nothing comes to me and I am left with only the artifact (object, face, feeling, impression) floating inconsequentially, lonely as a cloud, in my mind. When this happens, I get very frustrated. This “tip of your tongue”, “slipped my mind” phenomenon fills me with a weird sense of loss and anxiety, and I wonder if feeling like this might be the worst part of having amnesia or dementia. Not the complete forgetting, but that sense of half remembering and half forgetting a thing. It is uncomfortable to hold the certainty that I saw something which made sense a moment ago but can no longer find it or make sense of it anymore.

Why is it so hard to let go of mental impressions? Why do I need to record everything, cling to and grasp my thoughts, internal narratives, or reminders about things that need to be done. I think it’s because the mind is a meaning-maker and executioner. When it can no longer spot patterns, create coherence, put random images and sounds together into a narrative, or make something happen, it gets scared. What good is a mind if it cannot imagine? If it cannot play show and tell? If it cannot solve problems, create things, interpret and analyze?

According to Eastern philosophies, we are always in one of three different states of awareness or “levels of reality”: waking consciousness (jagrat), dreaming (swapna), and dreamless sleep (sushupti) – a state free from sensory perceptions and mental content/movement, where the mind and ego dissolves. It has been posited that dreamless sleep is a state of pure potentiality where the soul returns to its divine source. Thoughtless, imageless, impressionless, sushupti is our original state of consciousness. It is where we came from before we developed a brain and body. It is the birthplace of our souls.

So maybe I better start getting use to letting go of faces seen on carpets, of dreams, of opinions, of powerful emotions, or ideas about who I am, how the world works, or what I should do next. Because this mind, after all, will eventually disintegrate into absolute stillness and emptiness. Through meditation (with eyes closed), my mind is learning to move less and to more swiftly release whatever shows up.