Chapter seventeen: profound groundedness.

The call of the whale is the lullaby of the tides. (60)

Over the following weeks I gratefully returned to the groundedness of everyday chores. Relishing my morning coffee and paying the bills seemed just as profound, and as reassuring, as Sun and Moon. My wife and I decided to take a vacation to Mexico, to lay on the beach, fish for marlin, and snorkel.

On our third day there we traveled to a remote beach on the Sea of Cortez to snorkel on the protected coral reef. Underwater is such a different world, where the fish are at home and a sense of timelessness reigns. A group of curious sea lions swam under us, as graceful in that environment as any ballet dancer could be in hers. Their unblinking eyes were riveted on us, sad and playful, without judgment. And then we climbed back into our small outboard boat to return to our origins on the beach, back to where we are at home, if not timeless. On the way, our young guide spotted a humpback whale breaching the water magnificently, and he headed the boat directly for it. Approaching the whale, we realized there were two: a mother and her baby. The mother only surfaced every ten minutes or so, while the calf came up for air every two or three minutes. These creatures were at once more alien than any animal I had ever seen and more familiar than my own heritage.

During the intervals between surfacings, my wife and our guide were talking excitedly about "la Ballena grande" and laughing with glee. My awareness began to sink deeper underwater, down to a shadowy and dreamlike world. Whale's realm felt like a vast library, repository to ancient and arcane knowledge. I had the sense of wanting to be silent, respectful of the accumulated wisdom of all the earth's generations. Somehow these regal scholars were caretaking the archives of earth's history. Whale had integrated the knowledge and carried it incorporated into her bodily organism. Whale embodied the wisdom of the ages.

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Wisdom requires consistently consolidating all that you know, and pruning it by unlearning what you cannot enact in ceremony and carry in your body. Use your Dreamtime for reverse learning. (61) Was Whale using metaphor to teach me? Surely she could not mean what she said literally. It seemed ultimately reasonable in that dreamy underwater realm. But what did it mean in my world? Develop your capacity for disattention as well as attention. I began to feel almost flooded with a subtle understanding of the apparent paradox. This capacity plays a central role in the shaman's visionary experience, in a hypnotized person's focus on an internally generated environment, and the quiescent periods of meditation. (62) It is the same capacity as becoming deeply engrossed in imaginative activities producing vivid imagery, reverie and daydreams, and engaging in holistic thinking. Call it "mild mystical experience" or "flow": a joyous and creative total involvement with life. (63) These abilities are also characteristic of dreams. (64)

I had the same experience of intimacy that I did with Bear in his cave, the womb-cave, except there it felt tightly contained and here in Whale's world I felt expansive, as if the entire environment was wide open unlimited horizon. Bear had shown me the purpose of entering the cave, to digest past experience and arrive at completion with it. Whale was now showing me what to do after reaching completion: let go of the past, open to visions of the horizon, dream.

With the smoke detector quiet, allow the GPS in the brain to rest also. The GPS? This underwater realm did seem to soften negative emotions: no smoldering fires to produce smoke, no blaring smoke detector. Although I had never thought of it as a GPS, I did have a faint recollection of an area of the brain in the upper rear known as the orientation association area. This was located within the direction of Dreamtime in the North, Whale's realm. This is where we get our ability to orient ourselves in space and time, which gives our bodies a sense of physical limits. It is also where the brain "makes" our sense of an individual "self" existing apart from the rest of the physical universe. This part of the brain goes dark when one dives inside, when the outside world recedes, effectively blocking the sensory input that ordinarily streams into our brains. With no information flowing into that area, the brain cannot create a boundary between self and outside world, or locate itself in physical reality. As a result, it has no choice but to perceive that self as endless, interwoven with everyone and everything. (65)

Whale offered the recipe for creating the myriad forms of mystical experiences known to seekers across time and culture: the shaman's visionary experience; quiescent periods of meditation; the euphoric, otherworldly states described by Christian mystics and Jewish Kabbalists, Himalayan yogis and Sufi whirling dervishes, Buddhist meditators and whales. Quiet the smoke detector and the GPS in the brain. But how?

Consolidate all that you know, and prune it. Develop your capacity for disattention as well as attention. It seemed impossibly paradoxical. How was l to do this? I sensed instinctively that it must be related in some way to the tides, the lullaby of the tides. But how?

There are many rest-activity cycles throughout our lives. Every day we digest and sleep, everyday we eat, work, and play. This cycle is active during sleep, too, creating the cycles of rapid eye movement (REM, dreaming) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM, nondreaming). This is the 2- to 3-hour ultradian rhythm of alternating brain activity between the right hemisphere and the left. It influences every aspect of life, from mood and emotion to intelligence and mental performance. REM sleep, and activation during waking, correspond with greater activity in the left hemisphere, higher blood pressure, and fight-or-flight stress response. NREM sleep, and waking non-activity, correspond to greater activity in the right hemisphere, lower blood pressure, and the freeze stress response.

One function of dream (REM) sleep is to find and remove undesirable modes of mental processing in the brain. Such modes are detected and suppressed by a special mechanism that operates during REM sleep and has the character of an active process that is the opposite of learning. Use your Dreamtime for reverse learning. Whale seemed to almost blush with embarrassed self-consciousness when she added, whales and dolphins have mastered the process of unlearning, so our sleep is uninterrupted--unihemispheric. (66) But I can teach you how to master it too.

My head was almost reeling with all the information. I wanted to give up, to rouse myself from the connection with Whale, and rest. I felt the need to stop the flow of stimulation, find a place of quiet, and take the time to assimilate what I had absorbed. And I knew that I could, yet I was drawn as if to a magnet by the prospect of learning the secret to mastering consolidating and pruning, attention and disattention.

The organizing wind of the Breath of Life arises from the Dynamic Stillness, producing rhythms within rhythms. (67) Some of the body's rhythms are much more brief than 2 or 3 hours. There is a long tide, a deep and slow rhythmic impulse of about 1 1/2 to 2 minutes in duration that emerges from a deep ground of stillness at the center of our being. A mid-tide is about 25 seconds long, and another rhythm is about every 5 seconds.

First, know that there is a little gap in the transitional moments between rest and activity in any of these cycles, whether during sleep or awake time. That momentary, interlude that is neither one nor the other is a sublime pure consciousness, a silent void, the deep ground of stillness at the center of our being. (68) Whale was conveying something very profound to me about an opening into an entirely new way of being. Yet it is an experience that all of us have every day, unknowingly. Whales and dolphins can live in that way of being, neither on one side nor the other but hovering in between. An exhilarating thrill shot through me as I realized Whale was about to teach me how to hover there too.

Integrate the chaotic sea of rhythmic changes with your breath. Pay attention and you will discover that, awake or asleep, during times of left hemisphere dominance (active phase, REM sleep), the airflow in your natural breathing is greater through your right nostril. Likewise, during right hemisphere dominance (resting phase, NREM sleep), the airflow is greater through your left nostril. Deliberately breathing through the right nostril stimulates the active phase and deliberately breathing through the left nostril stimulates the resting phase. When the smoke alarm is blaring, provide an antidote by breathing through the left nostril, which lowers heart rate, blood pressure, and fight-or-flight (stress) activity. When you want to stimulate your energy level, breathe through the right nostril. Alternating between left and right nostril breathing harmonizes the body's physiological and psychological systems. (69) Bring to consciousness the state you create.

Whale was teaching me how to integrate dream consciousness within waking consciousness. And, possibly, waking consciousness within dream consciousness, too.

I gradually became aware of the excited laughter and awe that the two others with me in our small boat were expressing. I shared their exuberance, and yet I felt very much still in a dream. Just at that moment both mother and baby breached the surface two boat lengths from us. Their tails splashed cool salt water on us, and I began to rouse more completely from my reverie. We knew they were diving deep and swimming fast for open ocean, surrendering to the unlimited horizon they could both see ahead.