・DISCOVERING WHO AND WHAT WE ARE・
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The story of a boy in Louisiana who had memories of being a US Navy fighter pilot in the Second World War is possibly the best documented case of reincarnation in the West.
The websites Channel Higher Self and Satsang with the Self feature videos by a young spiritual teacher from Sedona, Arizona, called Lincoln. The videos are channelled teachings, and what Lincoln channels he refers to simply as Higher Self.
I haven’t even begun to go through all 199 videos. I was struck, however, by the title of this particular session: The Personality’s Place in Spiritual Practice. The synopsis poses a number of questions:
When I first saw an ad for an Enlightenment Intensive back in 1991, I was pretty sceptical. “An opportunity to experience the change in state of consciousness traditionally known as enlightenment” it said—and in just three days? There had to be a catch! I thought it was supposed to take decades, lifetimes even, to reach such a state.
Someone pointed me to this fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine (23 April). It’s about a 63-year old academic who has spent much of his life as a dedicated Zen practitioner – now a Zen master – but who has in recent years undergone a personality crisis. He went into therapy with Jeffrey Rubin, author of Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward an Integration, and had a breakthrough.
Basically, he realised that he had used the Buddhist concept of no-self to evade his inner process and unconscious traumas. All his ‘stuff’ came back to him, and with his owning it came a joyful rediscovery of self.
It is fashionable at the moment to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth. There is, the argument goes, only relative truth—which is to say, “truth” depends on how you look at it.
23 October 2008
Thursday afternoon, after work, I was sitting on the train as usual and decided to meditate. I do this quite often on the train but sometimes it just doesn’t work, either because it’s too crowded and noisy or because my head isn’t quite right. This time, however, it went very well—somehow I got everything “right”.
I was expecting to move gently into my usual blissful space but evidently I somehow went a step further. All I can remember doing differently was taking the technique to the limit, allowing the flow to the max, saying to myself something like “What if I let go of all resistance, totally? What if I could be a completely allowing being? What if, right now, my whole body and mind could be in perfect alignment with this flow of energy?”
10 December 2007
My meditation has been up and down, the downs essentially being due to life disruptions causing me to occasionally miss my daily slot. (The main disruption being the fact that we have moved house.)
Whenever I miss meditation, even just for a day, it seems to take up to a week to get back where I was. Tonight was an odd one in that I first moved the chair I use into a different position in the room … and then spent the next half hour not quite feeling right.
There have, however, been some extremely deep and fulfilling meditations of late. Typically, I feel the great ‘hum’ of my being – my body and mind seem to fall into a natural resonance with this core hum – and it feels quite exquisitely peaceful and blissful.
2 October 2007
I have been gradually moving away from that difficult place I mentioned back towards more expanded and blissful states.
One of the fascinating aspects of meditation is the way the very process of meditating somehow teaches you about meditation. I get into a kind of dialogue with “the spirit of meditation” in that I ask myself, or the universe, what needs to happen in me in order for me to become more at one, more in alignment, more open, more at peace, and so on. The answer is an intuitive sense of how better to focus my intention or open my awareness.
20 September 2007
A few days ago I was feeling a bit grotty and achy. I decided to stop drinking alcohol for a while and let my body get its energy back.
Yesterday I was feeling physically much better, though by the end of the day I had niggling back pain and was feeling impatient for a rest. So I wasn’t expecting much out of my evening meditation other than a bit of relaxation. But it turned into one of the most extraordinary meditations I’ve ever had.
18 August 2007
Over the last year I have had long phases of being more or less constantly high, alternating with shorter phases of feeling flat and occasionally rough, grouchy and irritable.
My highs are characterised by a wonderful sensation of being charged up internally, as though my cells were all magnetised into alignment. This sense of alignment is particularly marked in my head and face – my skin is stretched smooth, my nerves seem to be tingling with light, and in the vertical core of my entire upper body there seemed to be a constant, exquisite glow.