Which way is up?

Do you meditate? I do. Well, on and off for a while now. Usually in bursts, interjected with the opposite - substantial periods of a mentally distracted lifestyle. In fact, you could call it a stuffstyle - too much analyzing stuff, pondering stuff, stressing about stuff, and wondering what will be the stuff I do with my life.

I generally experience my consciousness as an acceptable bracket within the much wider sliding scale of the human experience. A scale, which I imagine, is between a paper bag of sausage and a zen master teleporting their way out of their final stint in this physical reality.

At the end closer to the butcher shop is the disconnection from true self and the myriad of trickle-down effects that this devastatingly underrated spiritual faux-pas inflicts on the human race. When I disconnect from my true self, I lose sight of my goals and end up wasting time invested in activities that I think I should be doing. I become susceptible to underlying stress that affects me physically and mentally, even though I'm still overall a happy person. 'Important mental stuff' becomes the focus of every minute, such as work, research, everyday stresses, and the artistic project I'm aiming to finish by Friday, when realistically it needs 6 months and a team of five to help me.
As I shift further toward life as an uninterrupted procession of thoughts, I become what feels like a floating mind that hovers around 5 feet four inches off the ground, with little sense of my soul or the neglected body that drags beneath it. The mind floats up from the bed in the morning, floats into the home office, boots up the computer [yes, somehow] and glares more intensely than the monitor. It leaves the computer only a few times throughout the day for hygiene purposes - ie. it dunks itself in caffeine. In the final stage of the process, the floating mind gravitates closer and closer to the monitor and attempts to mind-meld Vulcan-style with the computer. To the floating mind, this final upload of self seems a logical merger, as all the mind's life, work, communications, and busy montage of over-activities have transferred entirely to the digital realm. Life couldn't be more perfect... but wait - what's that stench of rotting corpse?

Ever so thankfully, at this point, there is always an intervention of some kind. There's a defiant protest and shocked denial as each spongy lump of suctioned brain is plied off the monitor by the mind's dedicated sponsor [my loving partner]. I return to my body and use it to kick, scream, and blaspheme. I bow out of the mental race. I sit still, away from the computer. I even go outside and exercise. I eat wonderful home-cooked meals instead of astronaut food. I go to the toilet instead of using the astronaut - oh... never mind. I meditate and allow myself to truly drift off into space. I remove all thoughts. Most of them just come from other thoughts, anyway. I reconnect with myself again, and thank my loving sponsor dearly.
 I return to the preferable end of my relatively liveable bracket in the scale of human consciousness. Here I find mindfulness, physical calm, mental exuberance, energy, positivity, heightened awareness, balanced activity and inner peace. The sum of these cultivate a genuine space for creativity, wisdom and personal growth to cascade. Ideas and personal revelations explode like fireworks, one popping into the next, a continual illumination of everything that is truly important for me to see. Some call this being connected.
Only through recognition of true self, can I develop recognition of true purpose. An adopted purpose is really someone else's life. To live someone else's life is a form of death. With meditation and the art of simply being, I have come to experience an amazing side to the inner world, which is the force that drives my outer world and keeps me in check.
There is even what some call synchronicity, where many things just collectively go right. We have often heard of the adage - when a person follows their true goals, the right people and opportunities appear in their life at the right time. Some people would consider this surrealism. There are many people who think 'things going wrong' is the norm for reality. If this were the case, the universe would have started with a big bang, followed by a self-manifested slew of everything going wrong, and then - with an unfathomably infinite drop-jaw expression - imploded shortly after. 'Everything going wrong' cannot be the order of the universe, and therefore nor the individual – only 'everything going' can. The right or wrong is up to us. :)
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