One thing I've discovered in meditating is that experience can present itself in different geometrical forms. Sometimes there's a feeling that I am the center of my experience -- the commonplace idea we call having a point of view. Sometimes, in contrast, I am not the center of my experience. Somehow, the experience contains a center, but that center is experienced as being somewhere else. This might be part of what people mean when they say they have an "out of body" experience. Even more strangely, an out of body experience is really just the tip of the iceberg. That experience still conforms in every respect to our typical unified self-centered (I don't mean this term in a judgmental sense) everyday experience. It's like an exact double of that experience, just with the location shifted somewhere else.
Things can get much weirder, it turns out. Consider a patchwork of experience with multiple centers, none of which coincide, and which don't together constitute a space. An out of body experience often still contains a reference to the initial position of the body. As in, "I was floating above myself". An experience that contains multiple centers may lack this reference completely. "I" may not necessarily be any of the centers, nor a point located by some sort of triangulation of them. The centers can each define a separate patch of space, but these patches may not exist in any relation to one another. There is no single unified space in which they can be embedded. You can't even call this an out of body experience because there's simple no reference left to the body.
Or is there? Multiple centers that can't be unified explodes (literally) our normal concept of the body. But there are still centers here. Each center unifies something, even if they are irreducibly multiple and can't be put together. Each center still functions as a body. Call it an "out of the three body problem" experience. I've even had an odd experience that is best described as being "out of someone else's body". Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
The next question is obvious. And the answer is yes.
You can have an experience that lacks a center entirely. How might you go about describing this experience that lacks all of the reference points we usually use to describe our world? As a set of waves folded within waves? As an infinitely fast movement that traverses every point and fills all of space? Would "space" then be the center of the experience? What makes this "an" experience? If it doesn't have a center in space, does it at least have a center in time, presumably halfway between when it starts and stops?
I don't really know how to answer these questions, but I think Deleuze is getting at something like this experience when he talks about the Eternal Return. It's an experience that breaks open the universe and has no center to its repetition. It's an experience that dissolves all identity and constitutes a world of pure difference. It's very difficult to describe. And as a result, I think a lot of Deleuze's writing style is dedicated to trying to trace this experience out, so that as you follow along with him, you have the experience for yourself. He's not just trying to tell you what the experience is like, or ask whether it is "true" (whatever that would mean in the context of an experience). He's trying to show you how to have the experience. You have to follow the words and images and the movement of the concepts, tracing them again and again, practicing the pattern, till you have some sort of epiphany where now you sorta know what he means because you've had some new experience yourself. His whole theory of pedagogy, and his whole literary style rest on this technique because the type of experience he's trying to get at requires this approach.
We learn nothing from those who say: 'Do as I do'. Our only teachers are those who tell us to 'do with me', and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce.
Is there any better description of the difficulty inherent in teaching someone how to meditate?
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