I’ve been meditating for years. While once it was a formal variation of transcendental meditation I began back in 1976, my methodology now isn’t formal, but quiet, mindful thinking . I conduct it while walking (which is especially conducive), sitting, laying, whatever. Sometimes I’ll meditate when my sleep is disturbed. The meditation process puts me back to sleep.

My focus in recent years was about finding balance and not being negative. I considered being imbalanced and negative as by-products of working for IBM, so I meditated not to be angry, bitter, frustrated, despairing…you know, negative stuff. But nature doesn’t like a vacuum. Something needed to be injected in the place of those negative energies, otherwise they rushed back in. So I sought balance, trying to bring in positive energies, mostly through being more mindful about my reactions, decisions and behavior. I vowed not to permit others, including bosses and co-workers, to master me, but that I would master myself.

It’s been a challenge.

More recently, writing science fiction and thinking about time, reality and existence, I explored energy. It was also related to a modern mystery I was penning. Trapped, a person believes she is facing death, and examines her life, preparing herself to address her death. That pushed me to think about myself in terms of life and death, and how energy plays into being and consciousness. I figured, I have physical energy, but I also have mental and emotional energy. Of course, everyone says. Isn’t that obvious?

Oh, yeah, and creative energy. Yes, right, right.

And healing energy.

I can’t forget psychic energy.

And spiritual energy.

And actually, there are several types of mental energy…right…?

Thinking of spiritual energy diverted me into thoughts of God and religion. Ranging from agnostic to atheistic, but thinking there is something out there, just not a person or creature so many religions espouse, I accept I can have spiritual energy without worshiping a God or practicing a religion.

My meditations became about healing, repairing and restoring my energy. I decided while addressing the energies, I’d also attend to my third eye, figuring it had something to do with these energies, and also worked on cleansing my aura. I discovered that physical energy breaks down into more disparate types of energy. It probably won’t surprise you that as I conceptualized these energies, I thought of chakras and began exploring them.

Not having previous experience with chakras, but having some inkling about what they were (at least from posters, book covers and websites), naturally, I thought, the chakras are probably all about channeling, managing and coordinating these energies. Asking, why re-invent something if it already exists, I searched and read about chakras.

Chakras aren’t as straightforward as I believed. First, from what I’ve read, there are commonalities among chakras but not ‘standard’ chakras. But what I read resonated with my philosophy. I think of life, reality and my being as an individual as systems within systems, and that, from my opening examinations, is a large part of what the chakras are about.

All of this naturally extends from simple observations of life. Think of light, for instance. When considering light, we think of the visible light that we, as humans, see. But light visible to human is just one sort of light. Light has properties. The properties affect how we interact with that light, and how it interacts with us. Consider the sources of light, and how different each are, from the sun to a light bulb (which type of light bulb, you might respond) to your television and computer screens.

Fun thinking about such things. Add in thoughts about time (are you sure there’s just one kind of time, and that it’s uniform through everyone’s existence?), and you got yourself a par-tay.

But it’s a meditation party, and sort of quiet and introspective.

Time for coffee, and to write like crazy.