Space Chair

I have a “Space Chair.”  Do you?

Everyone needs a Space Chair.  Virginia Woolf claimed every woman needed a room of her own. I don’t really need a room, all I need is my Space Chair.

My Space Chair isn’t something I ordered from Brookstone. It doesn’t give me a Shiatsu massage. It doesn’t vibrate me to orgasm. It doesn’t have speakers built into the headrest.

My Space Chair has a lot of dog hair on it. I bought it at Pier 1 for $80. It’s a papasan chair, –you know, one of those bowl-like chairs college kids buy for their first apartments.  I bought the ottoman, too (always get the ottoman.)

It’s in my bedroom. I sit in it to meditate. The dog likes to sleep on it at night so before I go to bed I lay a beach towel on it for her.  In the morning I take off the furry beach towel, and it magically transforms back into my Space Chair.

I call it a Space Chair because it’s the place where I go to access “space consciousness.”

“Space consciousness” is an Eckhart Tolle-ism. It’s short for that head space you get into when you ask yourself: “Who is watching this effed up “movie of me” that’s running nonstop in my brain?”

The answer?  “I am.”

“And who, pray tell, is this “I am” who is watching?”

And that is the question that short- circuits the brain, and blows up the movie.

That’s the question that doesn’t have an answer. That’s the question that starts the experience.

And it is this experience that Tolle calls “space consciousness.”

So that’s why I call his pet-hair-infested chair from Pier 1, my “Space Chair.”  It’s my teleportation device into space consciousness, and as such it’s the most magical piece of furniture in my house.

My friend Joan Tollifson who I used to sit Zen with a long time ago, has a chair in her house she calls a ‘Bliss Chair.”  (She describes it in one of her books.  I think it’s this one.)

It was her only piece of furniture for a long time when she moved to Chicago from New York. She placed this chair in front of her living room window and sat in it and just stared out the window.  Eventually the staring morphed into the “Bliss” state.

You see, it’s not really the furniture that brings on these altered states (though the orgasmic shiatsu massage chair from Brookstone might), but it’s rather the ritual activities that are performed in these chairs.

Joanie sits and stares and finds bliss. I put on headphones and listen to state-of-the-art brainwave technology to access my space consciousness.

It’s all the same, and it’s all good.

Everybody needs a Space Chair, I think.  Everybody needs a place to go and sit and ask the important question about who is responsible for this crappy head movie.

And everybody needs the brain blow-up that results.

Call this experience “Space,” call it “Bliss.”  Everybody, every day, needs to pull the plug.

Don’t you think?