Yesterday I visited Sacre-Coeur in Paris. I had been watching the building from afar the lasts couple of days and really wanted to visit that place.
While I was inside the church an interesting experience happened. I was a bit tired and sat down. Soon I started meditating. Immediately there was energetic movement in my head. There were flowing waves, tingling all over, and this sense that my head was being slowly energised. That grew over the next 20 minutes and after a while the upper part of my head felt, in a way, like the dome above me; it was energised all over in a kind of static way while more dynamic things happened on top of that.
I reflected on the meaning of Christianity. I felt into the sense that it is about bringing the transcendent realm/nirvana close to the human realm/samsara.
From time to time I looked at Christ doing the big arms thing:
It seemed to me that he is blessing people. I relate blessing to fullness, overflowing, bliss, expansion, pleasure, etc. Then I notice the wounds in his hands and that the position really corresponds to someone hanging on the cross. Pain, despair, contraction, etc. At one point I realise that what this image represents is inseparability of pain and pleasure. Contracting and expanding, blessing, bliss, suffering and despair are non-dually present in the very details as well as the whole of the image. That’s why it’s beautiful, holy, and awe inspiring (I also notice now that the face is equanimous, while his body/soul radiates light; during the experience the focus was on non-duality). And the insights continued to come: This very image is the presence of non-duality within relative consciousness. Art manifests non-duality within duality. So, interestingly, art — something “made up” — is closer to absolute reality than physical reality (the real real to many). This also indicates that certain parts of relative reality is closer to absolute reality than others.
I could go on and on here, it’s like these ideas come by themselves (piti in the mind?) but I’ll leave it at that.
And I also had this in the back of my mind, Shinzen talking about pain and pleasure merging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Oh, I forgot about the nuns. Nuns walked in and started singing while this was happening. I acted like I was catholic and tried to stand up and sit down at the right times.