From: M.
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 7:55 PM
To: Paul C.
Subject: RE: Friendship, Rapport, and ...?

Why didn't you enter that blackness to which you refer in your email? What held you back?

From: Paul C.
To: M.
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2007 9:03 PM
Subject: RE: Friendship, Rapport, and ...?

The short answer as to why I held back is that I psyched myself out.

The longer answer goes like this:

I had been wrestling with a quandary (mentioned in my email message to Bart) for several days. One night, about 30 minutes after I lay down in bed, I was thinking about what or who was the Awareness that I see. I don't recall anything special about the cycle of being caught in thought and then stepping back and being aware of the thoughts. At some point, a blackness appeared "behind" me. I remember the play of thoughts and watching those thoughts...

"What is this?"
"How can nothing be back there where Awareness should be?"
"Woe, something is happening, is this the start of an Experience?"
(I recall that my heart was racing, I was swallowing hard, and I felt a body-panic reaction.)
"Rose said be careful not to create an image of the Absolute. Don't wish too hard for a preconceived image."
"Am I creating this? Is this blackness my imagination?"

Within seconds, my mind and body calmed down. But it left an indelible mark because I now have nowhere to turn. Previously, I thought that my Awareness was "back there." In fact, somewhere Rose says that we return to the Absolute, but that once experiencing It, we find that we were back there all along. Maharshi also likened discovering our Source as something akin to a movie projector, and we need to look back into the source of the light. These statements now make even less sense to me. In fact, the reverse seems true, where paul is now the movie screen (with nothing behind) and he is at the same time outwardly looking at the movie. Yet his Awareness needs the movie to know that he is Aware (something external is needed to reflect from in order for paul to be Aware).

Honestly, M., that's the best that I can explain it, as wordy and senseless as it sounds. The blackness experience is not the Absolute, but it has profoundly disturbed me nonetheless.