Meditation

I am transcribing here something I wrote last January which I found and thought I’d include because you might find it interesting. I won’t edit, I’ll just copy. Excuse the swearing in advance!

22.1.2010

“I had an amazing experience while meditating tonight. I was lying on my back and stilling my breathing - breathing out all the stress and stuff and breathing in the Universe.

I can see it, see the energy of the universe, rushing into me, through me. And it feels like I have no boundaries.

I have my eyes closed but it’s not black. I have a vision of sizzling particles, buzzing energy and it forms a mandala around me. First I am looking at it, and as I breathe I merge with it until I am at it’s centre.

Now I am at the centre of the mandala. When I breathe in I have the sensation of reducing in on myself (except I feel no self). And when I breathe out I feel the energy expanding.

There are two things that always happen when I meditate. Almost simultaneously, as I relax into a medititive state, I see a light growing stronger behind my eyes. The light grows stronger the deeper I go until it fills my entire vision. 


At the same time (oh it’s 3 things) my head starts to lift involuntarily - weird. When I used to meditate sitting upright in a chair, I would start with my head falling forward relaxed. And as I meditated it would lift up until my face was tilting upwards.

And as if that wasn’t weird enough, at the same time as I’ve got the glowing bright light and the lifting head, I start to smile! Every time, totally involuntarily - how mad is that?!

I mean I can be doing my thing and not quite settled and there’re a few negative thoughts or problems flitting across my mind, and I start to smile. And I mean a big cheesy grin! It starts slowly - with the head lifting and the lightbulb behind the eyes stuff - and by the time I’ve finished, my head is tilted upwards and I’ve got this great big, open mouthed, beatific smile on my face. Mental!

Now I meditate in the dark lying down before I go to sleep. Which is just as well because anyone happening upon me in this state would get the fright of their life. Either that or they’d think I’d been up to some unmentionable act!

The other thing that always happens is that my body disappears. It’s a bit like a physical version of what I described earlier. Like my mind and self merging with the collective energy but in physical form. My body heats up very rapidly - a strange dry heat - hot enough that I should be sweating but instead it’s a prickly heat like static electricity - dry.

I can feel this buzzing, tingling heat but it doesn’t feel like it’s got any boundaries. I can feel the heat crackling around the surface of my body (I guess where the energy my body’s generating meets the energy around me) but I can’t define it. It feels as if my body has totally disappeared.

My breath becomes very shallow and incredibly slow. Sometimes, when I’m in the state I’m describing fully, I take a sudden breath and realise that I haven’t been breathing at all.

I love meditation. I spent a weekend in the basement of an Edinburgh townhouse when I was 14, learning to meditate, after a British Airways hostess friend of ours reccommended my mum and I try it. 
It was amazing, a revelation to me. The house inside was shabby and hippy. Incense burned and the residents all seemed to wear hessian and hemp (or so it seemed to me). 




Being a bit of a Hippy myself, I was delighted with it all - although way out of my comfort zone at 14. Anyway, that was my initiation into Transcendental Meditation a la Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of The Beatles fame.

When you are inducted you’re given a mantra which is unique to you. I can’t imagine it’s totally unique. Can you imagine having to think up millions of unique mantras, all with different sound combinations?! You’d end up with weird pig noises & swear words!! Oh that’s too funny - I’m having a fit of laughing now.

Just picture it - some poor bastard practising his meditation and his mantra is a barking sound or ”fuck”! Mind you, I’ve seen a few people audibly meditating then: “fuck, fuck ,fuck”... usually after falling over or dropping something! Oh I’ve made myself laugh again and lost my train of thought!

As I was saying, I love meditation. I haven’t done it religiously since the age of 14. I was diligent in my youth, right into my student years. It is an incredibly powerful state - healing and energising and empowering and inspiring and enriching.

When I was 19 and living in a student house in Edinburgh, I went back to my room one lunchtime to meditate (very diligent!) Anyway I didn’t meditate for very long. You’re supposed to increase from 20 minutes to however long you like but I generally last about 15 minutes. Any longer and my fidget-arse self gets bored and starts wriggling.

That probably explains why meditating suits me. I can go very quickly into it and pretty much anywhere. When I travelled a lot I used to meditate anywhere - on the Tube, on a park bench, with noise all around. But once I reach a certain state in that kind of environment the background fades out. It’s like an accute awareness and accute relaxation combined.

Sorry, back to my story: I’m a 19 year old student meditating in my sunny wee corner room in my student house one lunchtime. It must have been only 20 minutes but during that time I had a real Peak Experience. Now I understand the state better and the science behind it, I guess it was my first and most intense experience of the state I describe above.

But it was more than that: the light and boundlessness and the ecstatic feeling and the strength of the energy flowing through me were incredibly powerful. I was unable even to be aware that I felt that way. Awareness involves conscious thought and this was something else. I had no physical sense of who I was and no conscious awareness of the state I was in and yet I knew completely what it was and where I was and how it felt:

Boundless

Infinite

Like cosmic white noise

and yet defined

Understood

Remembered. 

It was the weirdest (and I’ve had some!) and most powerful experience I’d ever had (and have ever had) in my life.

When I came back to normality and left the house to meet my friends Scott and Jaime, I tried to explain it to them. But there were no words . The best I could manage through my smiling, breathless garblings, was that I now knew what death was like. The state we call death, that’s what I had experienced. Like a glimpse, a moment, of the state that is ours when we shuffle off this mortal coil.

Jaime was horrified. He’s a Spanish Catholic. (Come to think of it, he might’ve wangled me a Sainthood or something. I could’ve been venerated in a cave and people would pay to drink my bath water. Might’ve missed a trick there.)

But no, Jaime maintained his horror at my macabre “experience” and took me to see “Harold & Maude”. What a film - hilarious! An E Type Jaguar converted into a hearse because Harold’s obsessed with death. If you haven’t seen it - Harold’s about 18 and Maude’s 70ish - too funny.

So I’ve never been able to express what I experienced 23 years ago. Until tonight when it happened, in a different way, again.

It may have sounded morbid and I must’ve sounded nuts, but it changed my life. Well wouldn’t it? I had an experience of pure bliss and oneness with the universe, an experience that I know was real - because some things just are. 

That’s a good experience to have under your belt at the age of 19. My diligence paid off!"