Finding the Source

For the last few years, I've been practicing meditation. And initially, I had such profound experiences with it that it fundamentally changed my perspective on many things. It was so transformational that it led to my abandonment of the religion in which I grew up. That's a pretty big deal for me because that religion was a huge influence on my life for about 40 years.

But in the last couple of years, that meditation practice has come and gone. And my experiences have been less powerful. And my character has become ... less noble than I would like. In meditation, I found I had the ability to bring a profound sense of peace, joy, and love into my everyday life. And at one point near the beginning of my journey, I felt like I had infinite patience. Nothing was able to rattle me, and I responded to every situation with incredible love and kindness. For anyone who knows me well, that's a big deal because I am often impatient with little, insignificant things. Somehow, meditation transformed me at a very deep level. But lately, that impatience has resurfaced.

A few months ago, I got sick of the man I was becoming, and I began to search for new ideas and new methods to enhance, stabilize, and deepen my spiritual practice. Among other things, I came across a book called "The Surrender Experiment" by Michael (Mickey) Singer. It's a beautiful book, but I won't attempt a full review here. Among other things, it reminded me of some things I had once known, but forgotten. It reminded me of meditation's ability to draw me out of myself. By focusing on the breath, I found myself able to separate my awareness from the chatter of my mind. I have found this separation to be a very useful first step toward deeper states of awareness.

Building on this and other ideas, I began to feel hope that I had rediscovered the path - whatever that means. And I began to go ballistic on my meditation practice. I was obsessed with moving beyond the man I had become and recapturing some of the magic I had found in my initial work with meditation, but had somehow lost. Over the course of several weeks, I spent hours each day in meditation, and I began to catch glimpses of that magic once more.

My practice has since lessened in its intensity, but I am still on that quest to recapture the magic. Recently, I have begun to see that what I had lost was the ability to go deep within myself. I believe one of the things that tripped me up was getting caught in mental models of the process. The mind weaves intricate webs of thoughts, ideas, and feelings, to help us make sense of the world. And as wonderful as that is, it can also prevent us from truly experiencing the world. Our reality becomes the mental model we have created rather than the thing itself.

In my meditation recently, I have been practicing gently moving beyond thoughts, words, emotions, sensations - letting go of each as it comes. And as I empty myself of all of that stuff, I seem to enter into a place beyond thoughts and words. It's a quiet place. It feels like I've gone somewhere else. Almost like sleep. It's not sleep, but it is very relaxing. And I get the sense that I've gone somewhere deep inside of myself, to a place that is deeper than the mind. As I penetrate this place, I sense the love, peace, and joy I previously had, but have somehow lost. It's like I've tapped into a vast ocean of the stuff, and the more time I spend down there, the more of it I can bring back with me when I come out of my meditation.

At the risk of generating more mental models that will prevent me from actually experiencing this ocean of love, I wanted to document what my recent experiences have felt like. I want to do this both for myself, to remind myself when I get lost and forgot how to find the magic, and for others who may be curious about this path. Here's what it feels like to me:

It feels like I am a wave on the ocean. My ego and my thoughts keep me rooted in the reality above the surface of the water. In my normal life, I tend to think of myself as separate and distinct, and I am insulated from the deep ocean beneath me. But when I move beyond my thoughts, emotions, etc., it's like I poke a hole in some insulating barrier under me. I sink into the ocean and realize -- I am not the wave.

I am part of something deeper and more vast than I can imagine in my typical waking moments. And I soak in that sense of awareness of connectivity ... and other things. Things like joy, peace, love, kindness, etc. When I first began to meditate, I was craving peace. And I found it more deeply than I had ever done before. But what I think I'm craving now is love. The love that allows me, at a fundamental level, to seek for what is best for everyone around me, including myself. I had a feeling from my initial practice that love might be the essence of all things - the fundamental building block of all life. My recent excursions into the ocean have reminded me of that feeling, and I think that vast ocean beneath us might just be made of love. In these experiences, I have often been reminded of the Bible's statement that "God is love" (1 John 4:8,16).

As my meditation ends and I come back up into the wave, I bring a little bit of that awareness with me, and a little bit of that essence of life, light, and love. It begins to flow into my ordinary life, as if the hole I poked on my way down stays open for a while. I somehow become a little more patient, a little more kind, a little more loving. It's like I've turned on a light inside, and I can bring that light into the world to share with others.

I think that what I'm describing here touches the foundation of all great religions: 1) a direct experience of something beautiful and divine. Through that experience, there is 2) a transformation or elevation of the soul. And with that transformation comes an opportunity to 3) share with the rest of the world the light that was found. That sharing doesn't need to be proselytizing. Just by being in the world, these people make the world a better place. They can't help but shine.

I'm still working on it, but I feel like this path I'm on is going in a good direction. I feel like I was given a beautiful gift in the profound power of my early experiences with meditation. And now, having been given that vision of what could be, I have been set on a path to capture it a little more slowly, so that it can become a part of my nature. So that I can live in that ocean with a deep understanding of how I got there. And maybe with that understanding, I can help a few others find their way as well.