The Third Gateway of the Tau, the Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns.

The Third Gateway of the Tau, the Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns.

Everyday consciousness is only minimally mindful. Awareness of a moment is mostly anticipation of a said moment, or remembering said moment after it is past. The mind continually darts between remembering the past and anticipating the future.

The mind is designed to do function continuously in the past, present and future. One cannot prepare Haggis without keeping constant track of the past and future as it relates to the actions of the present.

As a side effect, the mind’s perception of time is easily confused.

In The First Gateway, learning how to drink coffee, we learn how to contract our perception of time, blocking out the distractions of remembering and anticipating.

In The Second Gateway, learning how to drink tea, we expand upon that mindfulness. In the ceremonial preparation of tea we can learn how to expand our perception of time. We are in effect expanding those moments, which we can more deeply experience and better recall.

Having mastered as least these rudiments of the contracting and expanding the perception of time, we might be ready for The Third Gateway, The Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns.

Caverns feel like places beyond time.

Deep underground, far from anything familiar to use for time cues, is when most people first discover how tenuous their personal time orientation is.

Most visitors to caverns are usually pre-occupied with exploring and other needful matters, and spend only a couple hours, or at most the better part of the day, much too short a period to notice the past and future merging into an eternal present. Most visitors also have time cues such as a watch, or the fuel in their lanterns running low, which count as external cues.

Leaving time telling devices behind and far removed from the other familiar time cues such as the position of sun, or the movements of the planets, moons, or stars; the sense of the passage of time is quickly lost.

The Stillness Caverns are deep enough that even the faint indirect glow of the suns or moons is beyond sight. The change in the temperature is beyond our sense of touch.

The Stillness Caverns are deep enough that you only hear only your own pulse, breathing, a roaring sound I am told is like the ocean in your ears, and perhaps some lingering ringing in your ears you were unaware of, and only the intermittent dripping of water deeper down in the cavern as moisture occasionally condenses.

The tempo of outside world quickly fades away.

When you look at a bat of unknown size in flight, you cannot gauge its distance, because the air provides you with no cues to work from; so too do we lose our orientation in time when deep in the Stillness Caverns as we have no usable external time cues.

The Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns is an extended period of time, weeks to months, without time telling devices or access to external time cues.

Two hundred meters deep into the mountainside, with enough supplies to last months, and a battery operated lamp with enough light so as to be able to walk around and take notes. Field comms are set up to record when you get up, when you go to bed, and to record how long you think the times between waking and sleeping and other matters lasted. Some hardcore subjects go without the field comms at all, and simply rely on their notes.

Left alone, one is quickly overwhelmed by the sense of a kind of temporal motionlessness, but also the overwhelming feeling of being pulled along by the flow of time. It is futility to try to hold it, it always escapes your grasp. All alone with canned goods and the full weight of undifferentiated eternity.

In the perpetual darkness, morning, afternoon, evening, and night have no meaning. The sense of the rhythm of life feels lost. What one estimates is ten minutes can be a half hour or even more. What felt like a brief nap was sometime eight hours. In total darkness, it was not always clear whether one was awake or asleep.

Feeling the passage of time is itself exhausting.

The disorientation and confusion about the passage of time exists almost entirely in the consciousness. Absent any actual pathology or malady, the body maintains a fairly reliable rhythm. Most subjects keep a day cycle of about 24.5 hours a day, and are awake about 16 hours of it. Our body time modulates our blood pressure, hormones, gastric juices, and mostly decides when we grow tired, and when to reawaken, and does so quite reliably.

My own personal experience, I experienced what I thought was 30 days, but was in fact closer to 60. This is about typical. By around six months, people become more attuned to the body cycles. Half of the total 60 lost days occurs in the first two months. Those who have gone thru extreme long duration experiments tend to lose 1 day per 7 weeks.

Some people never get attuned to their body rhythms and cycles, and continue to lose the awareness of time at a rate of 1 day per 2, with dire results.

The Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns might seem trivial, but many never fully recover from it, mostly the unprepared. Those who rush into it unprepared, or with some undiagnosed pathology or malady, sometimes succumb to clinic depression which has on tragic occasion resulted in self harming and even suicide, not to mention persistent phobias and neurosis, and on rare occasion recurring hallucinations.

Sounds are different in the deep caverns, scents are different, and what little there is to see appears as irregular shadows. The stream of events that normally pour over us seems diluted in the extreme. For minutes on end, sometimes close to an hour, nothing happens whatsoever, then a drop of water can be heard because it condensed somewhere, then the silence returns. The accustomed means of calculating intervals which work so well in the surface world, are doomed to failure.

Thru Ordeal of the Stillness Caverns, one can liberate the conscious awareness of time from external cues, and instead tie it directly to the body’s innate awareness of time.

Thru the first three gateways, we have learned how to focus our mindfulness to contract time, to use that mindfulness to be able to expand time, and then finally to be able to have a reliable gauge of that time. With these tools firmly established, one is then ready to explore the gateways of consciousness.