I think I have never seen a more compelling analogy for spiritual practice than this video above.

The footage used in the beginning of the video is taken from Cpt. Joseph Kittinger’s skydive from the Excelsior III, a gondola raised by balloons to 102,800 feet (a little over 19 miles) as part of Project Excelsior (a series of record-breaking dives from high-altitude).

Captain Kittinger fell for 14 minutes and 36 seconds, reaching a maximum speed of 614 mph before opening his parachute at 18,000 feet.

Kittinger describes his jump in a Time magazine article:

Then I found myself on my back watching the balloon recede above me. The sky was almost black. It was a beautiful thing to see. I had a sensation of lying still while the balloon raced away from me. I didn’t feel hot or cold, just the right temperature. There was very little spinning. At 18,000 ft., the regular chute opened automatically. Ten minutes from then I was down .

And later, in an interview, he reflects on the jump in retrospect:

After twenty years you analyze alot, You remember people who where with you. Many people come up to me and say that had they’d been there they surely would have died, it makes no sense, because until your in a situation like that, you you have no idea how you’d behave. Confronted by solitude without decadence or a single material thing to proselyte you or elevate you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now there is the God they taught me about in school, and there the God that’s hidden, by what surrounds us in this civilization. ‘That’s the God I met .

Beyond its poetic aspect, Joe Kittingers free fall from 100 000 feet is marked by the immense solitude of that first step, the highest step a man has ever made.

It makes me aware of how profoundly intertwined technological evolution, the search for the sublime, the transcendent and death is.

At the same time aloneness, in the sense of Kittingers decent to earth, reveals another example of how human endeavor contains within it its own opposite, its actual and allegorical downfall.

What kittinger states about his experience is also pointing to something universal. What is left is a feeling of experiencing the Other, as God, in a completely open, raw state. No human concerns, no “reason” is relevant, or seen as real. No affective states of consciousness, no sentimentality.

How much of our yearning to find our true nature is really contained in this quest for the Other, for the unknown, for the path that leads away from the familiar, into the dark territory. A place both without and within.

In any path that a human chooses to commit to, there comes this point of choice.

Are you going further, into the not-yet-known, the undefined, the mystery? This is really contained in all real living, not just spiritual practice. Ask any scientist, sportsman, pilot, climber, mother, priest, and if they have any degree of awareness say that they all stood confronted by this point. That step into nothing.

Its not really a step of faith. Its an irrational urge in us that needs to know. That wants to wipe out ignorance, that seeks truth, the living reality.

When faced with this point in meditation, where there is no language to grasp what is happening, or the description simply does not connect to what is experienced, there is this gap. And this gap is all there is to meditation, or reality for that matter.

Another film, “The Big Blue” has a scene where this theme is highlighted:


As this scene indicates, the main character, Jaques Mayol, and his obsession with the ocean, culminates with his urge to see what is there, in the darkness. Suspended between what is in the light, the life above, Mayols character yearns for that which is hidden, undefined, yet waiting to be felt, realized.

In a sense, both these examples indicate the same analogy to death, or any form of transformative experience. In many ways, I feel that most human struggle and pain surrounds the attempt to avoid this step into the unknown, and also to embody it. To not know.

Something needs to be left behind. There is always an element of grief contained within anything that challenges your preception of life. In this grieving or experience of loss, there is also the realization of impermanent existence of whatever is percieved.

So what does this have to do with my own experience of practice or meditation?

1. I tend to hold on to the familiar, to what I define as an ideal experience or state, or what indicates “success”.

But in reality, there is nowhere to go. And this is a form of resignation, as true surrender is the key element in any true meditative experience. So to truly let go, I need to forget about change.

2. I avoid the uncomfortable, the uncertain, the unsatisfying lack of substance as to what I “get” out of the process. To finally immerse myself in practice is to forget about pleasure and pain, and embrace suffering as much as staying detached from what is enjoyable.

3. Most importantly, I must learn how to die to the moment, and thus leave myself behind.