First, it’s the music ~ music is one of the deepest reflections there is for me. A reflection in the most visceral sense where within me a recognition is stirred of the primordial nature of what I feel to be my very core self or essence. When I experience this kind of reflection, it’s as if I have access to the formless nature of being through the form of my physical self, the simple within the complex, and the vastness of the timeless within the present moment. It’s not as if I’m listening to music, but I am the music, the awareness, consciousness, and the embodiment of the music. ~ 10.7.11

Another is simply being one with nature ~ interesting, this one. Of course, I am one with nature, as there is no separating that very core aspect of this form existing in nature, as nature, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to perceive myself as ‘being one with nature.’ What occurs more than not, however, is that I am in some organized structure, a house, a car, something constructed out of nature, but one that creates more of a separation from nature than not. These structures and dwelling in them seems to me to be similar to the mind dwelling in a concept ~ there is some ‘safety’ or ‘protection’ there in the concept, but ultimately an artificial boundary.

Stepping outside of these structures, I find I meld with or join my timeless and natural state of being when just surrendering the form into natural landscape. I walk and walk up into the hills only to immerse my nature in the nature of these surrounding hills and forests, laying supine on a grassy slope facing the western sinking sun. I experience the closest thing to this ‘pre-mind’ nature in my ‘post-mind’ consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle describes nature and animals as being ‘pre-mind’ and humans as ‘post-mind.’ (In his CD collection called the art of PRESENCE.) What I take from this is that even though we, as humans, have been front and center so overly involved on an evolutionary level with the development of the mind and thus the preoccupations of the mind, we are actually at a time when we have the opportunity to step into a new ‘post-mind’ relationship with being that has an interesting relationship with the ‘pre-mind’ state of being we can witness in animals and nature. “Connecting with being,” he calls it “connecting with your body, it’s more than body, the invisible life that animates the body, the intelligence field.”