So'ham, Ham'sa

Chittanandarupa, Sivo ham, Sivo ham.

I get settled in on the floor. I can't meditate very well sitting up when my knees are bothering me; I do better flat on my back.

I have trouble with unguided focus meditations. Tonight we were supposed to visit the sea of the collective unconscious and spread healing there. That is not a place I've ever been, and I get a bit panicked listening to the rest of the meditators begin the slow and even breaths of deep meditation.

I call on the mantra I use to sleep. I am Shiva, the Bliss of Consciousness; my feet Shiva's lotus feet, my heart open like the lotus, my dreads (because Lord Shiva wears his hair the same way I do) in a topknot through which shines the manipadme, the Jewel in the Lotus, the thousand-rayed crown.

Suddenly I am at the sea, my skin an ashy purple, my body strong and muscular and male, hypermasculine almost, and the trident taller than my topknot that tip me off: Sivo ham.

The sea is full of Lovecraftian goo, like an oil slick, but with colours out of space that are nauseous to the sight. Like Oppenheimer, I am become Shiva. Wherever I point my trident, I make not. The Destroyer of Worlds. So'ham.

I wade into the water I have cleared, the water that has become the Ganges, the Saraswati, the holy rivers. Though there is more of the semisentient ooze, it cannot approach that which I have made sanctified, and I stride forward, under the water, walking along the floor to the place where it drops off and the light of the sun can no longer be seen. There is only the light of the manipadme which shines from within and all around me, but it is sufficient.

I see a fish, Leviathan-sized, that was never meant for this world, something made less earthly by its interaction with the slime coating the surface of the worlds' thoughts, like a shark with a catfish mouth stitched on and teeth set at angles that would sever the skin of its face at the same time as they crushed their prey. I point my weapon at it, but in the same instant I become large, so large that my topknot reaches out of the sea and into the sunlight. Now I am Leviathan and the fish is no more than a guppy, and instead of blasting it, I cup it in my hand. When I open my fingers, a goldfish of almost Disneyesque, fairy grace darts off into the sea.

I become tired, and lie in corpse pose on the sea bottom, watching the bubbles rise in the light of the manipadme, the light that, even diffused as it reaches the surface, makes not those things that would create separation, those globules of wrongness that are the veil of maya.

I sleep, and when I awake, I rise from the sea and walk, becoming smaller as I go, until I reach the seashore only slightly taller than a human man should be.

Ganesh is there, a pink-skinned child of perhaps two or three, waiting patiently away from the water. Within my sight of the coast, it is clear, and I motion that it is all right, that he can approach in safety. As I turn my back and feel the water drying on my violet skin, I see him place his trunk in the water and trumpet bubbles in the surf with unbridled joy.

And again I am myself, not on a beach in the daylight but on the floor in the dark, with the slow breathing of my compatriots telling me that I am the first to come out of the meditative state. Slowly, in exhaustion, I pull my body into a protesting lotus, to bless the aspect of Devi that has given me parsad in the vision of myself-in-Shiva, Shiva-in-me.

So'ham, ham'sa. I am that, that I am. Om shanti, shanti, shanti.