The Space Worm

At the end of my zazen (sitting meditation) this morning, I encountered a monstrous phantasmagoria that raised some important questions for me about the cultural containers for spiritual practice in “the West,” for lack of a better descriptor.

I do periods of extended sitting practice following my Shamanic Tiger qigong routine. My zazen has been pared down to simply counting down 100 exhales and then staying at 0 as long as I feel like it.

0 is a big, empty place.

This morning, 0 opened up onto a pocked, blasted moonscape or desert, from an aerial perspective, and there emerged from a crater some kind of intelligent worm, though its shape and surface were luminous and shifting, suggesting I couldn’t see this thing in its real dimension.

The breathing in my practice is from the hara (the lower-abdominal energy center), and so the flow of energy is always down, down, down, out of the head, into the body. I had the sense that this worm-monster had been receiving lots of my juice this morning, without my knowledge.

Then it spoke to me (in like, you know, a Jabba the Hutt voice; this whole scene is very Star Wars, isn’t it). It said, “Wow! Thank you! I feel so good now! You really did me a huge favor this morning! K, bye!” Then it slurped back into the crater.

I got up after that.

Now, what the hell had I just done, and why? And what should I do about it?

It was a little intense for me to just go, “Haha. Silly brain. Guess I’ll go exercise and drink coffee now.” Plus I actually FEEL depleted. But I can also check in and tell I’m fundamentally all right.

So let me take stock: I had a bad night. I’m getting sick (thanks to the kids), I went to bed late (thanks to the kids) and was up all night (thanks to the kids). Along the way, I behaved in some… not-admirable ways, to the kids and to my wife, who is very busy this week.

Yom Kippur — the holiest day of the year, a fast day on which we complete the process of repentance and pray it is accepted — starts TONIGHT. I have every reason to be working as hard as I possibly can to be admirable and apologize for my shortcomings. Instead, I doubled down.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it is the spiritual context for this cosmic worm-vampire slurping all my energy, and it orients me in the situation. Maybe I’m the selfish worm, and my family is me. Maybe the worm is some great evil, and I’m feeding it instead of growing.

It doesn’t really matter. Figuring out the vision is not the point. Sublimating it into a skillful resolution to the situation is the point. And now I’m about to go upstairs and do that.

It doesn’t even matter if I “got it” or I’m “right” about what “happened.” It’s not some kind of video game. Transmuting space worms into being a better dad and husband is just kinda what life is like. It’ll be some other weird crap tomorrow.

But my question is, is “Western Civilization” ready to do that everyday? Does that sound like “seeing things as they really are” and realizing “everything is actually fine?”

I had a LOT of cultural help getting from space worm to better person.

We need that support.