Field Notes 20260425 - Friday
Step Off the Cliff Again
Afternoon
- Sun: Taurus 6°
- Moon: Leo 23° | Waxing Gibbous
Meditation
- 50 Minutes.
- Tom Campbell’s binaural beats, 128-64-32.
A little over half a year ago I began to use “session questions” in my practice as a general guide for meditations. The idea came from solving a particular problem that would creep up now and again: lack of direction, desire to continue learning but without a guiding principle of where to even begin looking.
Some sessions would produce results right away; the classic signature of this is an answer arriving slightly faster than I could cast the question. This is a fairly well-talked-about phenomenon regarding meditation. A much more common mechanism of this process, however, is receiving the answer after the session is over. It can come within that same day, in 24 hours, or several days.
The key to all of this is a well-developed intuition channel. The Gateway Program emphasizes this process early and reinforces it through all of the waves (stages). From my own experience I’ve only received immediate answers a few times; the vast majority of inquiries usually resolve within a day or three.
What if, instead of asking a question during the meditation itself, the query is asked before and the direction followed as the result during the sessions?
Today I found myself feeling aimless and a bit lost as to where to look for this week’s longer sessions, so I turned to a familiar instrument to orient me. I asked my trusty Smith-Waite Tarot deck, “What is asking to be seen in this session?” “The Fool” jumped out of the deck before I finished shuffling, followed by “Knight of Swords” and “10 of Cups”.
Interesting. What’s asking to be seen is “The Fool”. Given how this deck tends to answer my questions I now have the following: The Fool is the posture, the Knight is the trap, the Ten of Cups is the condition that becomes available when the posture holds.
Today’s session, the Fool is asking for: demoting the analytical mind to background and approaching the entire session as if I don’t know what it is. No technique memory. No expected sequence. Step off the cliff with the dog at my heels.
Now, sidelining the analytical mind during meditation is a prerequisite to any worthwhile session. Sometimes I struggle with this; the mind is strong in its desire to interrogate everything and anything. Throughout my practice this has been one of the key pillars at achieving truly deep and immersive altered states. I know about this deficit and have come to wrangle it under control very well, but just like with anything worth doing there are times where I have to learn to deal with it again.
Lately I have been refocusing on the present, the eternal now, specifically because my sessions have been falling somewhat flat and further immersive altered states became weak or inaccessible. So, the direction that I got this afternoon feels very pointed and I can’t help but feel that someone is helping me out here.
This afternoon I went into the meditation session with the usual prep, because we can’t just throw that out of the window. The track that I chose is one that I’m very familiar with by Tom Campbell. After all was said and done I initiated F10 (mind awake, body asleep) and we were off floating on the lazy river of awareness.
I kept it light and simple: let my awareness dictate where it needs to go, what needs to catch its attention, be open to anything. The moment that I felt like my analytical mind started to leak I would repeat to myself, “Step off the cliff again,” disengage, and continue on.
It’s completely not surprising to me that my awareness was lazily bouncing off of one thing and then another. Observing thoughts, observing scenes, observing the… observing.
The majority of the session I would categorize as a “struggle-fest”, as I’m not really comfortable going into deep waters without a plan or a mission, a direction, a goal. On the other hand, this session isn’t really that unfamiliar to me; I tend to do this type of meditation every now and again on Sundays.
Somewhere towards the end the drift of consciousness was very real, but something started to occur. I felt myself drop. Imagine treading water for a long time over a deep ocean and then suddenly you go under, and fast. That’s the best way I can describe how this drop felt.
What was not so awesome is the physical full-body jerk I experienced once I was well under my way somewhere. This completely yanked me out of my ideal state. What the heck was that about!?
Two possibilities come to mind. One, I suddenly and very acutely began to detach from everything and the physical body did what it usually does by performing a “body check”. It could have been just a slight jerk of the foot, but because I was dropping so far down it felt far more jarring than it actually was. Two, it really was that bad and a part of me resisted whatever was about to go down (heh).
Both could be true. It’s been a while since I’ve had a very immersive altered state; a lot of it has been mild or somewhat deep, but not like what I became used to over a long period of time. Perhaps I’m just out of practice, finding a new entrance, re-remembering the “state of now”.
I was able to recover from this detour and head back into wherever I was, but the momentum was gone, that much was clear. I set my gear aside, made a strong intention for further exploration, turned over, and began to hunt the threshold before losing consciousness. Darn, I missed it again today, but the nap was very nice!
Adjustments
Tomorrow I’m going to repeat this session but with one specific change: I will set a destination for F18 (heart energy) and consciously move to that state before allowing “open to anything” to continue.
Overall this was a good experiment, but it reminds me of what Tom Campbell says on each and every track (and in his lectures, talks, and books): you need to have a mission or a purpose for the session, otherwise you will not be successful.
Holding a question to cast during a session is a purpose; that’s why it works. Aimlessly meandering in consciousness-verse without a cause, however, is a lot like going to a buffet when you’re not even remotely hungry.
But let me pause myself here, because I’m doing something I recognize: framing today’s session as deficient because it didn’t produce the destination state I’m used to. That’s not honest accounting.
Today’s session wasn’t aimless. “What is asking to be seen?” was the purpose, the Fool posture was the method, and the drop at the end was the result. The body jerk that pulled me back wasn’t a failure — it was a real threshold response, surfacing exactly the kind of exit-point friction I’ve been working with for a long time. That’s documented data, not a near-miss. I crossed something.
Directed-state work and receptive-mode work are two different instruments. They produce different kinds of data. Today was receptive-mode, and it showed me something specific about where my own block fires when the analytical mind isn’t actively steering. That’s not nothing.
So tomorrow’s adjustment isn’t really a correction — it’s an A/B test. Today established what pure receptive mode produces at the threshold. Tomorrow’s question is what happens at the same threshold when I approach it with directed momentum. Same boundary, different angle of approach. Two data points instead of one.
The ego has its place. The domain today’s session was pointing at isn’t one of them.
The Fool is zero. Pre-ego. “I am” doesn’t need a mission.
