So I've been meditating on my brain. Thinking about it, contemplating it, keeping it in as sharp focus as possible. Grey matter, curved and looped, wrinkly, squishy, encased in my skull, in my cranium. Trillions, or in my case billions, of simultaneous electrical impulses, buzzing with life, like ants, to organize perception and reality.

I've been meditating on consciousness. Focusing on thoughts, the nature of thoughts, what are thoughts?, of perceptions, sensations. What is their reality? I don't want to take this for granted, I want to know. Or at least think about it or die trying.

I've been meditating on memory. Take an old photograph of, oh I don't know, let's say Amina. In my memory I recall the elements of the photo, what it looks like, but can I actually visualize it from this information in my mind? No, I can't. I can't close my eyes, and in the darkness see the photograph floating there, but then I draw on memory to recall the photograph, and I know precisely what it looks like, down to the moment I took it.

How about sound? Um, I've been listening to ELO's masterpiece "Out of the Blue" lately, so let's try the song "Turn to Stone". Queue it up in my memory and press play. Fade in, flanged synth, Jeff Lynne's trademark crisp acoustic guitar, hi-hat shuffling, enter vocals. That's interesting, it's all there. Vocals are loud and clear. The mid-range is a bit muddy with the guitars, but it's there. The bass is a little indistinct, and since bass below 70hz or so, I think, is more something you feel than can recall from memory, that's completely gone.

Well, that was an interesting, if inconclusive experiment.

Back to consciousness, I'm re-reading the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, Robert Thurman's translation with oodles of interesting background information. Try to get at consciousness by meditating on ultimately losing it. So many ways to die. A peaceful dying in sleep is the easiest to imagine reading the book.

I also entertain a gunshot wound to the head like Kurt Cobain, drowning after jumping off the Staten Island Ferry like Spalding Gray, having flesh flayed from bones like Hypatia, being in an unfortunate city targeted for a live human nuclear bomb experiment in the waning days of a war, being bled to death in a Khmer Rouge prison hospital, being mauled by a neighbor's Presa Canario dogs, and this can go on for a while, but that's about as long as I want this paragraph to go.

Death, the final loss of consciousness only occurs when some vital part of our physical mechanism fails to sustain what it's supposed to, fundamentally coming down to the brain, the heart, the lungs, or blood. I wonder what happens to time when we die. The so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead delineates a specific progression in the final loss of consciousness to death, but is it affected by the speed or violence of the interruption to the brain, heart, lungs, or blood?

What is it that I've had my entire waking life that fades and leaves? I used to look at my legs and toes and muse about how far away they looked. I wiggle my toes, and I just did that. What just did that? What was the connection from up here to down there?, what identifies that as my leg? This is when I still lived in New Jersey.

Now, what exactly was my point? Oh yea, fuck meditation. OMG, did I just use ELO in a meditation?!