Raw power replaced finesse at times, but it wasn't all jump 'n pump. The audience cheered as loud when the beats were sick and twisted. The opening chords, if you could call them that, shook the floorboards and the air itself, never mind all the cells of the seven chakras at least …

Towards the end the drunk young guys outnumbered the gyrating young girlies by about 2 to 1, and you contacted sticky flesh from every direction. The intimacies grew in fervor while the layers peeled away. We were almost throbbing as one.

You said hello to the few hard-core celebrants you'd met on Friday at the Sunset Room, but there wasn't room for many words in that space of mega-vibrations, rippling whatever parts of your clothing weren't by now stuck to your own flesh or someone else's, or lying in a heap in a forgotten corner of the room, over by where you set the last third of your grapefruit juice before the staff removed it in a likely ploy to get you to buy another.

They say the ticket prices are so high there ($27) because everyone's on E and not buying alcohol. What do you expect from the T-generation? Sex, drugs, r&r. Just like yer own yout'. Walking past the high school last week just after the bell, your faithful snitch overheard two snatches of conversation: "… the muscles of her vagina …" and "… sixty hits of acid." The third would-be conversation was replaced by a guy (or was it a girl?) with earphones plugged in, supplying the rock.

Where was I? Oh, right: think Rock n' Roll on Steroids … Big Beat, Sick and Twisted … Way Below the Baseline.

This ecstasy just won’t go away. In fact it’s building, building on itself and everything that has gone before. It is the coming of synchronicity as the norm, where you can’t get away from the interconnectedness of everyone and everything, no matter what you do or don’t do; yet in responding to the currents around you and within you naturally, like the 95% improvised classical Indian music concert tonight with tabla and sarod, you find that all choices are right, and the flow has carried you over 24 hours and more to your friend on the boat to give him the final push of recognition and acknowledgement of his own true genius, and in being there you recognize also the beauty of the bubble of the boat and its presence in the real world, i.e., the ocean ... and not only that but realizing that better than a swim in an artificial pool back in the city is a detour on the way home, to the summer swimming church where even today in late November the parking lot above the trail is full, and down by the water the sunny bluffs are taken with people sitting in homage, and there you find your spot before the shimmering silvery wavelets, and the luminous green moss, and the living rocks, and find your peace and stillness and knowing and oneness in presence of all this, and still it continues back up the trail on an ankle now suddenly free and healed, winged at heel ... on to town just in time for group practice, where again the immersion in music and waves has given you that frequency to hold, and it’s so big and so deep that everything is allowed, accepted into it, yet it’s also tight and focussed and dedicated enough to dance with clear measure in concert with the others, and of course now without effort, but simply attention and more knowing, and with that - but not too much - your eyes can close again for a moment and you can drift with it where it wants to go, and it drifts you where you want to go, which is everything in that ongoing flow ... so to the university where you zone out and refresh for ten minutes and then go to greet your friends there waiting, not only the two you were expecting but a handful more, and all saying midway between sets that we should have known to bring our other friends there, to share in that moment of joined creation.

Nothing New Under the Sun: A Musical Mystery Tour

In the moment, this is spiritual practice. That is, it can be if I let it, if I intend so. It can be also relationship if you let it, if you receive this intention. In the moment there is no emotion but the moment of breathing.

Are you at war with feeling? No, if you listen to the body. The body tells you what it needs. Really what it needs is relaxed breathing - fast, for exercise, or slow, for meditation. In relationship, there is also a matching of breath, a harmonizing of intention, a lifting of awareness from the single body to the dual body, to the all-body of love still greater than one or two.

Still, your focus begins with one. One love, inside, from inside, healing first the wholeness of self, freeing the feelings of past hurt and success to flow into and out of present time through the breathing body, the very form of time.

Did I say “healing success”? Yes, if success is the wound that takes a toll through stress and imbalance, compromising health for one-dimensional rewards. Pride used to be called a sin. Was that just church propaganda? It’s really just logic when the body’s inevitable demise is accounted for. The fall of pride is simply inescapable reality. Therefore to remain within the boundary of pride is to hide in denial. On the other hand a balance of pride and humility is only natural: a reflection of life’s urgency for full potential while the time is ripe.

You come back to present feeling. Are you feeling lonely, unwanted, weak, depressed? These are all conditional, and can be breathed away into the past from which they originated, or the future which is so feared or misunderstood. Are you feeling gladness and joy, anticipation and relief? Fine, while realizing also that these things if dependent on temporary causes, will pass away with the changing winds of time. If rather independent, or arising from life itself - gladness for the fresh breeze off the ocean, joy at seeing friends in a few minutes, anticipation over the promise tomorrow holds, relief in the overcoming of obstacles - these feelings are not yours because of personal circumstances, but rather scents of life itself, lent to you for the savoring.

The practice is the remembering, or the means of remembering, that there is more to life than your present feelings and preoccupations. Beyond your current emotional state is communion with others, sharing and harmonizing feelings you all have; and beyond and below this ground of relationship is the ground of being itself, which connects each of you not only to each other, but also to your more central self, the body breathing free, the soul liberated to larger life and the emotion of such liberation.