Towards Enlightenment (1): The Ground Floor of Heaven and the Slowly Boiled Frog Syndrome

Nice title, isn’t it? I’m going to do it now. I can’t write the article right now because I’m suffering from the slowly-boiled frog syndrome. I have to meditate first and I’m sleepy. I’m going to meditate while lying in bed to get out of the frog mode. If I succeed, I’ll be energized and calm and then I’ll be able to realize this article that I’m intending to write now. It promises to be an interesting essay. See you soon. July 14, 2015, 22:50 Note: It is very difficult for me to write before the next day, I will probably start tomorrow.

It’s morning. It’s 7:05 a.m. I just got up. My mind was extremely active and complex last night. During the day I had eaten/drunk an apple in the morning and then ice cream, goat cheese, goat milk, 1 corn, some of the dessert the neighbor gave me as a gift and some of the small rolls, olive oil, bread and the pastry my father bought for me. My mind was a soup. I also followed the posts on Facebook for a few hours. When I went to bed at night, I fell asleep trying to focus on my center and this effort continued weakly throughout the night when I was able to be conscious a little and occasionally. The rest of the time was full sleep time. After waking up, I sat up in bed and continued my centering effort. My nose was running and it’s still running a little bit. And my head is still fuzzy. Now… I thought I should write a little bit as I am gradually moving from the confused mind to the serene mind, so I wrote. I will continue later. July 15, 2015, 07:10

I did sitting meditation. (Spiritual Heart Meditation) I was distracted by the kitten in my lap and my father, but I made the necessary effort. My mind is a little clearer now. I will lie down for a while and continue meditating. This also crossed my mind during the meditation. Meditation (or proper prayer) and fasting will be among the most important preventive and curative medical practices of the future. I’m now adding yoga-like movements to this. I’ll expand on that later. June 15, 2015, 07:45

Wow, it’s 9:03. After taking care of the cat’s food for 10 minutes or so, that means I meditated for about 1 hour sitting down. My mind is very calm now. During the meditation I started to want to create a series of articles, the first in a series of articles. Should I call it Towards Enlightenment? Something like that crossed my mind during the meditation. Now I’m going to attempt a ten-kilometer run in the enlightenment effort, whereas I can run a few kilometers. By analogy, there’s a marathon (40-odd kilometers) and there’s an ultra-marathon (more than 150 kilometers). So I want to share with you my experiences in my development as I try to take my current level to the next level. I also have some concerns, I wonder if I can continue this for a month or so. I thought I would do my best for a month or so and share my experiences with you. I am not going to beat myself up, and I may not be able to share everything, but I will share as much as my heart is able.

What do I mean by Ground Floor of Heaven or Slowly Warming Frog Syndrome? Now I’m going out for a walk and to do a little bit of my own exercise, which will include some of the movements I’ve picked up from yoga and from here and there. After that I’ll meditate again and continue writing. I’ll explain these things more clearly then. My mind is getting a bit fuzzy again. I haven’t fully calmed down yet. It is normal. I will continue. July 15, 2015 9:11 am.

10:48 I’m back from a walk on the beach, sports and meditation. I meditated sitting on the bed for a while. I haven’t eaten or drunk anything yet today. I wanted to fast for a while. But I wonder if I should drink water because my body is thirsty. I want to lie down and sleep for a while. I think there is a fatigue and resetting. July 15, 2015 10:50

12:44: I lay down for about an hour and meditated sitting for about an hour. While lying down I tried to be in a meditative state, to focus on the Spiritual Heart. Now I feel calm. Many thoughts went through my mind while meditating. Also about the article I was writing. I don’t remember them much because I was making an effort to focus my attention on the Spiritual Heart. When the time came for me to write, whatever I was going to write was going to flow out of me at that moment.

Now that time has come. When I say the Ground Floor of Heaven, I mean that according to my feeling and experience, one can have Heaven-like experiences in this world. For example, now a kitten is biting my thumb. What was I saying? Yes, I don’t think heaven has to be a place where you go after death. Because there is no limit to what a soul can experience now. I feel like I’m on the ground floor of Heaven, because I can feel God’s love within me when I focus. Even though my ego is usually not serene and distracts me a lot, if I focus, I gradually become serene and peaceful, just like the experiences I’m writing about now in this article. I feel like I’m fulfilling the purpose of my life. My life has meaning, but that meaning is rooted deep in my heart. This is the ground floor, because there are still many sensual desires that come and go and distract me. But I feel that our deepest desires are already being realized in this world. God gives us what we want, but not what we want on the surface, but our deepest desires take priority. Isn’t that what Paradise is all about? I don’t know exactly what’s on the upper floors, but I know that on the top floors, the ego starts to go out of the way and you start to live completely with the Creator, feeling as one with the Creator. I’m near the door now. I know that if I stop focusing on the Creator, if I stop working for it and start focusing on my ego, after a while I’ll leave the door and enter the door of hell, which is nearby. It’s actually a very scientific phenomenon. God gives us whatever we want. Now I want God, I want God’s love and I focus on that and it starts being given to me immediately. When I let go of that and start focusing on the egoic patterns where I believe that God’s love is conditional, then I experience that love conditionally, so sometimes I am happy and chasing after momentary desires that I know will pass immediately, and sometimes I am unhappy because the conditions don’t always arise to satisfy those desires. There are deeper realities, they come into play. For example, you satisfy the ego but you run out of energy. You have chosen to enter this system, nothing is forced upon you, but you run out of energy, and when you don’t choose to directly experience the unconditional love of God, when whatever conditions you give yourself to are met, you can find some energy, and when they are not met, you become powerless. As I said, this mechanism is not forced upon you. You have somehow created it within yourself, or you have chosen to enter into such a protected mechanism. What do I mean by protection? For example, it is not possible to be a complete monster and still be happy all the time. You are bound to sabotage yourself, because your real desire is to find and know God and to help the whole universe to find/know God. If a monstrous and destructive being could be happy all the time, he would destroy the whole universe with the power of that happiness. Allowing this is not the plan of the universe, apparently. We are the universe. Anyway, we’ll get into this more.

I was also going to talk about the Slowly Heated Frog Syndrome, which you’ve probably heard of. It has been observed that if you put a frog in a pot of water and slowly heat it up, it doesn’t think to get out of the pot until it’s all warmed up and finally boiled. But it has also been observed that if it is suddenly thrown into hot water, it jumps out immediately. Now the effect of the ego is like that. If you stop focusing on God and start obeying the desires of the ego, in other words, if you start ignoring what you conscientiously know to be right and start living unconsciously, gradually your water starts getting hotter and hotter. A cloud starts to form in your mind, because your energy starts to go to the desires of the ego; that is, as you focus on whatever thoughts, dreams, desires, emotions it feeds you, and as you focus on whatever thoughts, emotions, and so on that people outside produce, and as the food you take physically, the air you breathe, the environment you are in change accordingly, your reality starts to change. As a reflection of this, there is a constant noise, a movement in your mind, emotions and body. People who live unconsciously or with very little consciousness, who live in a sleepwalker-like mode most of the time, experience life through the window of this mental reverie. You can also call it the nafs or the ego. How much the nafs/ego obscures your inner stillness depends on how much energy you have given it over time, that is, how much moment-to-moment momentum it has gained. What I call the slow-heated frog syndrome is a drunken, numb ego-influenced state of life experienced by a person who has given energy to the ego over a long period of time and has not focused on their spirituality to a level that calms it down.

Yesterday my mind was like a cauldron by the evening, largely because of the sugary junk food I had eaten, which didn’t do me much good (I wrote about it at the beginning of the article), and because I hadn’t paid much attention to meditation for a couple of days, so I had subtly put myself into the heated frog mode. I was in the state of confusion that I wrote about at the beginning of this article. A lot of it was the food that I was eating that was touching me, but I was also very focused during the day on things like news from the Internet, messages from Facebook and so on. I wasn’t completely lost, and the state of mindfulness that was going on in the background meant that I kept at least some of my focus there. In this way, I realized that I had become a frog being heated in the evening and I decided to say stop.

What would happen if I said stop? Would I be able to create an alternative beauty in life? Yes, I could feel it, because I knew where I had to focus and what I had to ask for in order to create such beauty. That’s what my heart wanted. To focus on God and to ask for God.

Don’t think of God as a cliché. Indeed, the Creator is the source of the most beautiful experiences in the universe. Can it be expected otherwise? Of course He is the source of all other experiences. But what I’m trying to do is to focus on the Creator beyond Creation, so that within Creation, by discovering more and more the reason for everything, by becoming more and more conscious and awake, you can actually have what many religions refer to as heavenly experiences. The love that you focus on while experiencing these things already wants to come out of you, to overflow and to be shared. You don’t experience these feelings selfishly after a certain stage. Because the universe itself also feels this love and God is creating this multidimensional universe as a whole. Our soul is part of it. Our body, our emotions and our mind are also part of this universe, manifesting as a part of it. Our soul is also discovering God by traveling with its own free will through the experiences possible in a universe with God and changing the universe in the process. It is engaged in a co-creative activity with God. God is creating the universe as our Soul and all souls. But at the top, at the highest level, he creates everything as one. We are therefore not a separate being from him.

The Slowly Warming Frog Syndrome is when a Soul temporarily gets the illusion that the reality it has created is the absolute reality and experiences a lukewarm numbness in it. When the Soul decides to wake up and turn towards God, the frog starts to gather strength in its legs, no matter how hot the water is, and after a while it can jump up and get out of the cauldron. There have been many Souls who have completed this lifetime without being able to do that. But when the frog decides to focus on God, even after its lifetime is over, it will have the opportunity to jump out of the pot of hot water. This is the state of Souls who are said to be able to enter Heaven after burning in Hell for a while. So you can burn in Hell in this world and you can enter Paradise after you finish burning in this world. Or you can go through these stages after your life is complete, whatever your reality after death is going to be. I’m not interested in that now, I’m saying let’s be interested in what we can do in this world, because we are living right now.

Yes, I’m starting to lose my centering a little bit. I’m going to meditate a little bit and then I’m going to leave the house to prepare food for the animals and feed them in the field, and then I’m going to come back and meditate again and continue this article, God willing. If I can do that, it will be an important stage for me as well. Because usually I haven’t continued this waking effort throughout the day until today. But today, insha’Allah, I will do it. I want to do it. July 15, 2015 1:31 p.m.

18:52 I’m back from the field. I went to the field with my father and I jogged a few kilometers on the way. I haven’t eaten or drunk anything yet today. My mind is sluggish. I feel a little thirsty. When I came home I sat meditating. The cat bit my feet and distracted me a bit. Now I’m trying to focus on the Spiritual Heart as I write this. I’m closing my eyes and stopping. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to write now and in the coming days. I only know that I want to make an effort to maintain this focus, and if I do, I will have achieved my goal no matter what comes out. I am going to sit and meditate some more. July 15, 2015 18:57

19:32 The intensity of the meditation decreased towards the end. The thirst was still there. I decided to drink a little, I didn’t want to cut it off completely all of a sudden, maybe to give the body some time to cleanse and get used to it. I am still focusing on the Spiritual Heart, closing my eyes from time to time. I notice the radio that my father has turned on. No one was listening, so I got up and turned it off. I went to bed at about 19:40.

21:13: I continue meditating lying down. My attention wanders from time to time to thoughts, but each time I keep my focus centered on the Spiritual Heart. I don’t feel any hunger. I promised a friend I saw on the way that I would probably stop by after iftar. I’ll go to her. July 15, 2015 21:15.

10:28 I didn’t meet my friend, but I sat next to another acquaintance of mine. He talked for a long time about his troubles. I listened, focusing on the Spiritual Heart. Finally she said that she felt relieved when she shared her troubles with people and we said goodbye and parted. She told me that her life had been filled with grief for a very long time and that she was in a lot of trouble. I said almost nothing, I just tried to focus on love, because she needed space, she needed space to feel this energy, for her distress to pass. I made space for her just by listening and feeling love. Sometimes I thought of advice, but this time I didn’t interrupt like I did in the past. Because the energy of love was stronger than advice. I am not saying that advice is useless, but sometimes the best advice is to show love, because in order for the other person’s troubles to pass, he or she needs to find love… and even if he or she is not aware of it, an example is being shown to him or her so that he or she can discover love.

Now I am calm, and my mind is calm. My nose is a little more runny from what I ate yesterday, and I sneezed a few more times, and I expectorated a little bit, but the system has cleared up quite a bit. I’ve been eating more and more clean in recent years, although I still have the habit of eating junk food occasionally. So the junk food I’ve been eating lately is being eliminated in the next couple of days. If I don’t overdo it, I haven’t been overdoing it lately. I will say, today has been a fasting day where I only drank water, and I think and feel that this has also had an effect on the calmness of my mind.

I’ll close today’s post now. And I will add an introduction to the article, as an introduction. In the following days, I hope I will continue these articles. I gave up, the text at the beginning of the article introduces it well enough. But I added the prefix: Towards Enlightenment to the title. Good night.