Thursday, May 20, 2010

Meditating In A Dark Room

I've had a couple of interesting experiences in complete darkness recently. At the new place where I live, the basement has several rooms, and there's only one room with windows. When you close that door the rest of the place is completely dark. Then you can go into another room and you're even more isolated.

I'm using this room as a "meditation room," so far, where I can read my Bible, other spiritual literature, do certain exercises that I do, pray, and just sit and meditate. A couple of times so far I've turned the light off and just sat in complete darkness. Today I even did my exercises in complete darkness. To me it's a very interesting experience.

I started thinking though about fish that don't have any eyes because they're down a trench where there's no light, and even though I'm not really worried (because I'm not going to be down there forever), it's something to think about. It's a very strange feeling, as most of us have experienced at one time or another, to be in complete darkness. The expression, "You can't see your hand in front of your face," is very true. Because I've tried!

There is a little bit of illusion to it, because your brain tries to compensate and you think you can see the shadow of your hand. And other shadows as well. I have some pillows there in a pile that my dog was laying on the other day, and I thought it could see some light shining on one of the pillows. But then I started thinking maybe it was just my imagination or my brain compensating, etc. I put my hand in front of my face and I thought I couldn't see the light. I lay down on the floor and couldn't see where any light was coming in. Yet I could still see it. It turned out that the pillow has some kind of very light florescent surface, at least on one edge, and so that's what I was seeing. So I tossed it out in the hall.

It's a freaky thing then if you sort of halfway lose your sense of direction and are trying to get to the light switch. I didn't really lose my sense of direction, but you can get off by a couple of feet while exercising and have to start feeling around. I had a small fan going and so I could judge my positioning by it.

I really think I'm going to like this room and my experiences in it!

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