Progress or practice?

It’s easy to sit for 20 minutes and I have no trouble doing it twice during the day. This evening, I didn’t fully finished setting the alarm and after what seemed like an awfully long time, I checked the clock and found that I had been sitting for almost 30 minutes.

My mind wanders from breath to fantasy about traveling an interior world inside my body. In a self-guided tour, I imagine a crystal shaft, pocked with holes, connecting rooms that lie like apartment house floors at each of my seven charkas. I bring the moist rich earth energy into the tube from the root charkas and allow it to circulate and clear out the dust that lays over everything in those cavernous rooms. I bring energy down from my crown charkas to fill those inner places with light.

As I sat tonight, with thoughts of the day flitting in and out, I heard a suggestion to “merge with the universe.” It seemed like a protective message, perhaps in response to extending myself today in several meetings about issues at the school that left me feeling effective and vulnerable.

I sense a human attraction to our vulnerabilities and the embrace of systems that don’t go well. I sense a society of people content to accept limitations. I sense a culture that shrugs their shoulders in the face of mediocre outcomes.

Could the message to merge with the universe be a suggestion to become invisible to the self-imposed barriers that keep me separate from the living energy of the universe or merely an invitation to become less self-conscious?

Is there a difference between the two?