Dear All,
I'm new to this forum and I'm really glad to have found it because many of my thoughts seemed to exactly match the information that I've read here. I'll start my meditation experiences.
I'm currently a 23-year-old medical student in Australia and all my life since I was young, I've been thinking that everyone around me seemed to act a little like zombies - if not, puppets on strings attached to conditions. I don't know why, but I felt like the whole world seemed a little rigid of sorts, as if things were already set in motion and all the actors were playing out their own scripts.
I kept asking everyone around me if they thought that way and they would just ask me to hush and just work hard to earn my keep. I even questioned the religions that I was exposed to such as the practice of praying to deities as a form of "Buddhism". It really got me thinking - Does this praying really work? Since nobody could answer me, I decided to find the answers myself. Thank goodness for the Internet. This then spiralled all the way to all my "adventures" in discovering my spirituality.
At one point I was deeply interested at the prospect of self-hypnosis. I was reading all the literature on how people could be placed into a trance and then suggested to do things. This got me thinking - the conscious mind that we think we all have really does not have that much of a control over what we do. It turns out that neuroscience research validated it later, saying that unconscious decisions are made far before a conscious decision can be reached.
I also then delved into courses that had these self-hypnosis tapes. It all started with the Silva Method. I managed to buy the tapes of the original course and at one point of the Alpha meditation (with the three fingers anchoring technique) tape, I grew mindful of my whole body pulsing. This suddenly gave way to a bright shining light. At this point I was a little afraid of the phenomena, so I withdrew. I realized that I couldn't get back that experience no matter how hard I tried after that.
Later on, I got into the wave of the "Law of Attraction" fad. I was thinking, "Could it be possible that our thoughts do create our reality?" I found it a little absurd when the movie The Secret claimed that every thought in a physical brain spiralled to exactly what you'd want. As I investigated further, I realized that it could be possible for the sub/unconscious mind to influence the health of the body and its attitude/habits. In a way, it did influence reality... but only the body, and reality? Certainly not to the point the movie claimed. I was quite dismissive at this point, until I stumbled on Magick.
There is huge literature on Magick itself, so I started out with the Wiccans and traced the origin back to Aleister Crowley. Man, the stories of this man were evil to a new degree. I didn't think much of it at first as I didn't know, but I came across his works. Crowley was a very smart individual apparently and had studied and practiced many different religions, including Buddhism and Taoism. His works were quite interesting - See
The Book of the Law &
Magick Without Tears. However, due to the nature of secrecy within the "society" he was in, a lot of his work takes time to unravel and decipher. I actually tried some of these practices and it did give me a sense of "euphoria" - such as the Kabbalistic Cross ritual or Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
Then I moved on to the Qabbalah, following the lead of Magick. This then brought me to the Jewish Kabbalah, a study of the Torah. What really intrigued me was that while it was closely related to Christianity, they supported ideas of reincarnation (I do believe reincarnation was in early Christianity itself though). This particular concept intrigued me: The Kabbalah's Tree of Life and how it can be linked node to node to show a transition between four realms (World of Emanation, World of Creation, World of Formation and World of Action).
See this diagram to get an idea. The lower few "nodes" on the Tree also correspond to the idea of
Chakras on the human body (
this with some labels and
this too).
Then the problem with Qabbalah, which I was sure had a deeper understanding, is that most of the texts were kept within circles and missing pieces of the puzzle were not given. It was too cryptic. Following another lead in Magick, I went on to Hermeticism. This brought me to the following works:
Initiation into Hermetics by Franz Bardon,
The Emerald Tablet of Hermes,
The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
Corpus Hermeticum, etc. Sure, I learnt a lot, but I wasn't actually getting to the states that Franz Bardon had described.
Then I got into Theosophy, meaning "divine wisdom". One has to be careful in Theosophy because the original founder is Madame Helena P Blavatsky, and there were frauds such as Leadbeater and Annie Besant who claimed all sorts of things that ruined the original concepts presented in Blavatsky's books. I first picked up
The Secret Doctrine and tried to go through it but it was TOO complicated for me to understand. It talked about Cosmogenesis and Anthropogenesis. The concepts of reincarnation inside were very complicated, such as Root-races and sorts. I used this
website as a guide. A good introduction book was "The Ocean of Theosophy" by her good associate William Quan Judge. What I really found interesting about Blavatsky's material was particular in the book "
The Voice of the Silence" where Higher and Lower kundalini was talked about (relationship between chakras, etc). Link is
here.
This is when a curious twist brought me back to Buddhism. One guy I met on the web told me to get a copy of his master's works (who is quite unknown in the Western world). His name is Nan Huai-Jin. He was verified to be enlightened by several masters of varying schools and really is quite a genius as well as a polymath in many things. I got his books Tao and Longevity and he described strange meditation phenomena such as diseases coming out to the Tee, as well as things like lights, aches, sounds, etc. In his other book Working Towards Enlightenment, he talked about all the various states of Jhana. He also gave a commentary on the diamond sutra in Diamond Sutra Explained. According to the person I met and many other people who met him, they said that Master Nan's voice had a very strange quality that could sound like waterfalls. I don't know if it's true and all. But he was the one who helped me reconcile all of the various religions, like Taoism, Buddhism and Zen together.
Following his practice, I then used the Kasina meditation shared to me by another one of his students. (Note that I've never actually seen it in his works, but it is something that many of his students said he recommended.)
I would visualize white bones starting from the left toe and all the way up until the whole skeleton is lighted up and dazzling (This certainly reminds me of self-hypnosis). Then I would visualize "death" so that my flesh liquefies and I give away my flesh and internal organs to spiritual entities. I was to then have joy while giving my flesh and everything away. Strangely, I really felt joy while giving them away. It sounds weird but it really worked. By this time, I would have a skeleton left. I couldn't actually think or do anything since I was after-all, just a stack of bones. Then the instruction was to dissolve the bones completely so that it cannot be located in space.
By the time I reached the skull, I felt like I didn't have a certain location in space. I was... lost. Then it just came. The joyfulness suddenly exponentially surged from my heart and filled up my whole body. Instantly, it was as if light came down from on top. By this time I didn't really have the sense of a body already (or my body was too relaxed). The light washed over me and I just got sucked into this light. After a while of that brilliant joy, suddenly the joy seemed to become lesser. There wasn't much light here, but I felt a little dizzy sometimes. I felt quite a bit of calmness.
It was so strange. I remember I used to combine relaxation techniques with anapansati meditation a few years back and I accidentally got into the bright light stage. But even so, both didn't have much of that joy. Also, when I was a child, I think I did go into a meditative stage while staring out of the window in my dad's car where things looked a little luminous and intangible. But none of them equalled what I experienced with it.
My second and subsequent meditations with the same technique all consistently got me to the same stage. If I had mindfulness throughout the whole day, the moment I sat down, I would slip into that state (or even deeper state). It usually takes about ten to fifteen minutes I think. My meditation sessions vary from fifteen minutes all the way to an hour because I cannot really tell the time. Am I practising correctly? Should I try something else?
But the thing now is that I'm quite afraid of advancing further because I do have commitments to my parents and helping to fund my young brother's education and all. I'm always afraid that if I go too deep by accident, I might never return. I also hear of things such as people going insane when down in side-paths or people having problems.
I also haven't experienced a marital life, so I've been carefully considering whether to lock myself in marriage (sadly) or to pursue the full spiritual life when I've finished my commitments. This has been a huge dilemma to me.
One thing I'm also quite interested to know about is the concept of the Bodhisattva. I'm quite confused as many seem to advocate becoming an Arahant, which in some Mahayana literature states it as a side-path. I'm not sure how a Bodhisattva works?
Have a happy new year too,
Winston
