Feb 27 2018 was a Tuesday. Every Tuesday evening for the last 2 months I’ve attended a group meditation held at the Higher Self Bookstore in Traverse City. These 8 sessions had been my only exposure to meditation. I had a solid grounding of decades as a materialist skeptical engineer, much more convinced by physical data than the squishy unpredictable tendencies of humans. But I had a thirst for self-improvement and a friend urged me to try meditation. So I was here playing the game and trying it out, but still far from convinced.
Tuesday night’s group meditation was led by Mike, a new person I didn’t know before. He’s a young guy, the son of the bookstore owners. He created a meditation session based around 6 pieces of classical music. Each musical piece was associated with one of the Chakras. We were supposed to listen to the music, think of the associated Chakra, and allow related visions to enter our mind. After each piece we would stop and talk about our experiences, then start the next piece.
Great, I thought, here we go with the chakras again … it still seemed like a fuzzy poorly-supported idea. New Age hippies playing with their chakras and mandalas and patchouli and funny clothes. But I’ll go along with the game, I’m here to play. So I close my eyes and the music starts.
BOOM – THE WORLD ENDS, THE ROOM IS GONE, MY BODY IS GONE, EARTH IS GONE
It was immediate, overwhelming me within a second or two. My body was gone, the bookstore was gone, the present moment was gone. I did not recognize it at the time, but also gone was my ego or the combined set of personality, world view, and assumptions through which I had always seen everything.
Instead I perceived a world entirely new to me, an infinitely complex fractal construction. In addition to perceiving as sight there is perceiving as knowledge, the direct apprehension of knowledge without involvement of mind.
Visions? Should I call these visions? it was as real as the world around you, as real as what you’re standing or sitting on right now. I still have the visions clearly in my mind, but they’re not really ‘visions’, they’re views of another aspect of this reality that we can’t usually see. It seems silly for me to wonder if it was ‘real’ or not. If a butterfly comes and lands on my shoulder, then takes off and leaves, do I wonder if it was real? No, I saw it, it was here, that seems real enough. In the same way, what I saw in these visions is an inseparable part of my reality now. (edit: it remains exactly this way years later.)
Here’s what I saw:
1. The Solo Dance. The music rises and falls; there are light happy notes and heavy somber notes, but a grace and beauty in how they flow together, in how the patterns unfold. It suddenly became my daughter (edit: she was a young and accomplished ballet dancer at the time), the Dance of her life, the unfolding majesty of how she followed her Muse without doubt or worry, confident that the Universe is unfolding as it should. Her confidence is appropriate, for her moves are exquisite. Perfect timing, and every move of the Dance follows the Music.
2. The Big Dance. There’s an underlying rhythm to the music now, a larger pattern. Within it are smaller variations, variations within variations, fractally complex down to the smallest scale, and up to the largest scale. The Dance Floor is enormous. Is it infinite? It contains all of us. It stretches out as far as you can see on a level dance floor. But it’s not just 2-dimensional, somehow the dance floor extends up and down, and in other dimensions. Past and Future? Up and Down? Happy and Sad? Right and Wrong? This partner or that partner? They’re all different directions in different dimensions, different ways in which we can move our Dance.
I see most everybody dancing together, most dancers are moving in unison. They dance together in small groups, small groups join together, individuals change groups. Occasionally an opening appears, and one individual or group takes ‘center stage’ and is the focus for a moment. Gradually I notice more and more dancers who aren’t in sync; they don’t make appropriate moves; they bump into others; they don’t move with the music.
What’s going on? Why is the dance falling apart in places?
I realize that not everyone can hear the music. No wonder some dancers are out of sync! Then it gets more interesting: These aren’t all human beings — it’s the dance of ALL life. The dancers who can’t hear the music are all human beings. Some people dance well, but so many are out of sync. Always the humans.
3. The Illusion of Time. The movements of the previous dances come into a new focus. They form a coherent pattern, when the dancers are in step. The pattern stepped out over time becomes a visual pattern, a pattern in another dimension. Just like a 1-dimensional pattern might look like ‘ .. .. .. .. .. .. ‘; a 2-dimensional pattern like a painting, a 3-dimensional pattern like a sculpture. Patterns in Time are similar.
Suddenly Time reveals its true self. The ‘Past’, ‘Present’, and ‘Future’ are just different areas in this pattern, but it all fits together. The Past and Future become just as real and visible as the Present; they’re just different places in the pattern. I broaden my perspective on my own life, and the events of the Past and Future suddenly make more sense, they fit together into a beautiful pattern. The future life of this person is laid out clearly, written into the pattern of my entire life. As is the pattern of all of our lives.
4. The Source. The view zooms out, away from the finer patterns of life, zooming out to planetary, interplanetary, galactic, universal scale. The entire universe appears as if it’s laid out on a flat sheet in front of me. Immense impossibly vast darkness, dotted with the tiniest specks of light.
The specks of light are twinkling, and I zoom in. First I zoom in on Earth. The twinkling lights are coming from each human being, emanating from the center, just underneath the sternum. Twinkling white light, different in everybody but so similar. Eventually I notice the twinkling light comes from animals also and all the beings of this planet. And from many other places besides just this little tiny speck of a planet. The universe is full of specks of this twinkling light.
I zoom back out to universal scale, and reach for the corner of the flat sheet of this universe. I can peel back the corner, lift it up, lifting up the entire space-time continuum of the universe. I can look behind the universe.
There’s something there, behind the universe, in the black emptiness of not-space-not-time. A glowing ball of white light, like a sun that’s infinitely large, dwarfing the entire universe and not at all a part of it. Those twinkling lights I saw, all of them, they were pinpricks through the fabric of the universe, through which shines the infinite light of this Source. The same light shining through each being. The light which is the magic animating energy that makes us into a living being and not a pile of rotting food. It is Source Energy, the Divine, that which people call God. It shines through every living being, it is the light shining on everything in the universe.
…
Yanked back into my body, back into the room, suddenly. It’s quiet. Breathing heavily, I realize I’m covered in sweat and tears. The other dozen people in the meditation circle looking at me with great curiosity and concern. I can’t even talk, I can only cry.
I realize my entire perspective of the world has been radically shifted. The world isn’t what I thought it was, not even close. Neither am I what I thought I was, or anyone else. Everything has changed. Everything. I don’t understand this new world, but one thing is undeniable and clear:
Now It Begins. This is Day 1
Somehow I made the drive home and sat down and wrote this description of my experience. It’s here above mostly unedited, as it was first written that night.