During the winter of 1981, I spent three months participating in a large group meditation retreat at Chateau Lake Louise, deep in the Canadian Rockies. During the third difficult day of gently persistent outbreath sitting meditation I completely lost ground...began swimming in a quicksand like mind of confusion, murky and bottomless with a complete swirling and the tremendous energy surging and the perceptual world without any solidity. My body was no longer clearly defined with the boundaries of skin to which I had grown accustomed and I had to take long, cold showers in order to return to a more solid state........ I learned from those quicksand days not to panic, regardless of what occurred, nor to push my way through. Each moment required complete focus.
As those days and nights of terror/wonder passed, the sandvision turbulence clarified gradually into an ocean of energy which flowed into, through and about and never for an instant was one separate ... the soft touch out breath dissolving gently into space without texture ... and the steep mental climbs past rockcloud bound kleshas and finally the relaxed soar into mind brilliant blue sky ... that first tremendous shock of blue...
A very strong connection with the earth began to occur and I could always feel the incredibly powerful energy flowing up through my very heavy feet...
Deep into the weeks of that blue/glacier winter, powerful experiences continued to occur. Late one nightmorning as he spoke I began to experience an extremely vivid mirror-like reality and from the center of that exploding perception brightness he smiled a go further look and suddenly with a tremendous jolt the body completely dissolved and there I sat in gone-out wonder nodding gently that I finally understood the precious mind of the lineage and all the while I felt like an ancient Tilopa sitting alone unseen in complete reality madness on the banks of a faraway river ... riverrun.
The world we look into is a shadowcave mirror
Plato dreamplay shadow puppets
Projected out the eyes by the heart mind resting nowhere in complete stillness.
Reflections impossible to grasp, taste, even touch...
Nothing listening to nothing, nothing happening to see.
Died alive Johnny ... Blue eyes breathing fire
Heartblood gushing through central vein channels.
Into that brilliant mirror without any dust
There is nothing left nothing ...
Nothing to say.
I walked the empty Chateau Lake Louise corridors deep into the sleepless night somewhat past aloneness and all the while felt so very sensitive to the softer light worlds of the dead. Sat alone until dawn at the glacier view window in a soft candleglow appreciation of the richness and patience of the lineage, and the ocean-mind world which was long sensed but unseen until that alone luminous night.
The return to Colorado was extremely difficult with all the mechanical energy and people along the street completely glued to their senses, mindlessly drawn along from one shop window to another. Eyes away cold on faces with no light and I as usual with so little to say walked the days slowly through the movie streets, watching...
Sitting motionless...bones harden into rock...
Mind pours into itself...senses achieve astonishing clarity...
Awareness without memory, luminous vision with no expectation...
An indestructible essence is realized... there is no longer fear...
To taste again mind without any taste, to swim in its ocean of brilliance...
To touch the powerful earth with these soft hands, mirror-hand-lines reminding...
To leave the deep stone footprints, for others to follow.
Two mirrors: no reflection...
First T, weeks later Blue.
Having ridden the powerful breathhorse into the fourth time
and viewed Shambhala with it's gemstone streets and
brilliantly coloured forests and valleys...
Walked this earth slowly with it's molten sunlike center
and for months carried it's powerful, nourishing energy
in these incredibly heavy feet...
And then one day, a glimpse of your soft eyes
in an unexpected meeting, and my life is once again
abandoned to the madness of poetry...
From "The Vermillion Journal of Eidolon Johnny Blue"
Writings 1981-1987
John Hopkins
Northern New Mexico
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