The Zen of freediving?
Well, well, well.
Until this very day, yours truly had never realised that static performance can differ not only by quantity, but by quality as well.
I was definitely sick of ending up opening my eyes, taking a peek at the thrice-damned timer and counting those last seconds. I've decided to make a bet against myself - and that being, not opening my eyes until the end of each and every hold. Including the five minute one.
The key to proper statics, as it appears, is concentrating without concentrating. When left without much sensory input within a body in comfortable position with some sort of factor prohibiting one from getting dozy, such as a need to hold one's breath, the mind tends to drift into itself, randomly unraveling images, ideas and discussions deemed long forgotten, without requiring me to invest any effort to recall and understand them. If I were a computer, I might say my hard drive was being defragmented. And yet, it didn't stop there.
Within this impenetrable world of my own, I was effectively reveling in the feeling of absolute, total freedom from objective reality. For a moment, I realized what was this very burden that I was bearing - the burden of being self, sustaining some sort of public image, glorificating my individuality with more or less pointless achievements. For I was surrounded by unconditional acceptance of myself the way I am, no longer having the need to prove anything to anyone. And I knew the sources of such acceptance were not within myself, but somewhere out there. Perhaps it was but an illusion caused by activating normally underused thought processes, yet some unknown sense told me that there never was anything more real than the feeling of pleasant warmth, freedom of all worries and, most importantly, being loved just for what you are.
And then the five-minute mark passed. For about ten more seconds I was just lying there, blinking my eyes and wondering just "what the heck have I been smoking", before I remembered to take a breath.
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Allow me to introduce a theory.
There are many that try to define what the freediver Zen is, but usually end up out of words. You may consider my hypothesis as unscientific as it is ugly, but I think that one's subjective reality,which normally constitutes a person's perception of the world, tends to expand spontaneously when pressure applied by the above mentioned outside world, the objective reality, is diminished. This usually occurs at times of relaxation combined with sensory deprivation and previously satisfied physical needs. At neither time, the consciousness is in complete control, not because it cannot regain such control, but rather because it prefers not to. Control is associated with actions and reactions, which are engraved within our instincts as a method of evading or disposing of threats. When the need to fight, run away, or call the lawyer suddenly disappears - if only for a few minutes - the dream that is the subjective reality starts taking place of the objective one.
You might compare the practical way of thought to a crude, yet sturdy tower, while the irrealistic aspect of a person's mind is similar to an infinitely complex and fragile structure of alien beauty, which is only capable of unfolding when someone turns off the gravity. And under such conditions, the capabilities of this seemingly unneeded aspect of human personality increase manyfold - from direct control over certain bodily processes to directly contacting the main residual product of civilization's mental processes - the collective unconscious (CU), which has no physical form and thus no limits. Some call it God; I call it a relay terminal, through which humans are capable to share their emotions and their will to understand each other.
Why is CU a relay point for positive emotional transmission, not negative? Because the connection itself requires readiness to reject the obvious. It can be compared to yoga, which, for instance, can indeed become a show of human capabilities, yet most yogi consider challenging the limits of human body to gain publicity a waste of time. During the very learning of Yogic capabilities and techniques one understands that there is truly no need to be goal-oriented and competitive about it. Yoga is not the goal, but the means to find the back door out of the rat race which many people consider to be their life.
It had been proven that water, despite being seemingly amorphous, posesses a capability to store information. Some actually hypotheticize that the physical appearance of CU is, in effect, the ocean. Perhaps this is why those who make contact with fluid medium in a state of tranquility of mind, which is precisely what defines freedivers, often form a bond that will last for the rest of their lives.
- Levi.
well a gruop of persons was set to train they're finger physically, and they of course gained 100% in strenght from the training. The next group was asked to visualize themselves training they're finger, and not do any real training with it. And they gained 35% in strength, with only the power of thinking!!! I just think this is remarkable. I allways belived it was like this. That the power of the mind was that important. But it was still funny to see it beeing said by doctors and scientists.
