Thursday, January 13
One of my meditation students came to see me privately today. We spoke of many things, including the emotions. My student said she would rather forget about the personality entirely and concentrate only on the soul. This concentration on the soul is a valuable exercise on the spiritual Path - most often an essential exercise. However; we also cannot run from our thoughts and emotions, from our personality, from our personal history and from our special human destiny. We cannot skip steps if we are to become truly transparent and pure.
We all also must strive to live the simple act of being; to achieve this we must live and express ourselves purely and honestly - and also remember that we are the soul. Even as we feel and express the deepest thoughts and emotions, we must remember that we are the soul. All that we are while incarnate must line up, be one: the personality, the ego - and the soul. They are connected, they are not separate entities. And we must all become the pure and transparent vehicle for the soul ...
Even Christ shed tears while He was incarnate on earth, became angry when His Father’s House was defiled. And yet Our Lord never forgot who is truly IS, and looked always toward the Father. Jesus lived purely in every sense of the word "pure", and we are for that reason to imitate Him in all things.
After our discussion I went into the kitchen to get something, and on the way make into the living room my student’s Light was the strongest I have ever seen shining through her. Clairvoyants are not given a handbook explaining their experiences and perceptions - but I have noticed that in meditation class the students often truly do shine with radiant Light. Sometimes I think our aspirations and striving create a sort of vacuum in us, so that the Divine Light comes into and through us. Perhaps it is this Grace that I see. It could also be that in those times when we think of the soul and God with such striving and aspiration - the soul itself shines brighter in us. Or perhaps we become more transparent as we abandon our negative thoughts and emotions in thinking about the soul and God’s Will for us. Possibly it is a combination of all of those.
Saturday, January 14
M. and I went to the Community Choir concert tonight. They performed Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was so beautiful and so powerful that I was thrown into an incredible meditation for the entire performance. At times I felt as though I was standing on the edge of the universe, swathed in brilliant Light ... The Ithaca Community choir and a small orchestra of local musicians ... My violinist for the Images CD, William Hurley, was the solo violinist; he teaches at the Community school. His playing was breathtaking. Simply stated, I have never heard anything like what I heard tonight.
My friend Richard was there, we met in the lobby during Intermission. He wrote the poems in the Journal entry Poems for the Dying - one of his rare times out, and I sat with him for the second half.
Came home in a light, fluffy snow and then practiced the Ravel and the Liszt for some hours.
Tuesday, January 18
Another meditator came to see me: she asked about receiving a new mantra, i.e. new words to say while meditating. I probed a bit, asked some questions, and it turns out that she had reached samadhi, or a bliss state while meditating during Mass after hearing Father Leo’s sermon. Father Leo had been speaking about the poor miners that were trapped in Chile for so many days, in the darkness, and what a glimmer of light meant to them in terms of their rescue. For whatever reason, that image - or Father Leo’s energy, or angels or other Divine Beings in the Church - had thrown my meditator into a high bliss state filled with brilliant Light. And she thought she could recreate that state if she found the right mantra.
I chuckled a bit and told her that it wasn’t just a nice meditation she had experienced, it was a high mystical state and the result of Grace. And that we cannot produce it ourselves, not with a mantra or any other practice. But that we should try to remember the experience, reimagine it, and try to stand there again in that inner imaginative way - and also cherish it deeply.
On the one hand she was delighted that she had achieved a samadhi, or bliss state, something we often speak about in class - and on the other hand she was disappointed that changing her mantra would not automatically replicate it.
Anyone who has been given such an experience of Light and Bliss naturally wants to always live there, always experience it. And in time, and with perseverance and Grace - it does become easier and more frequent in our meditations. But the true Goal of Life is not the ecstasies and bliss states. The high Mystical Experiences are all the means to an End, and that Goal is in conscious waking state, not in trance state - and in our daily Lives. I am capitalizing "Life" here, because true Life is when we are still here incarnate on Earth - but it is not the life or the thoughts or the nature of the emotions we humans ordinarily live. And in this new Life the world around us does not change - we do. And unless we are Paul on the way to Damascus, this transformation is the result of our own aspiration and spiritual practices ...
Friday, January 21
4 a.m.
Just got in from shoveling the sidewalks and driveway. It has been snowing since early evening, a beautiful, complicated, fluffy snow, like a veil in the wind ... The snow was so deep I couldn’t see where the sidewalks were; sparkles everywhere in the lamplight, in the moonlight ... Not a soul out; even the snow plows were waiting for the snow to stop. It was falling so fast that by the time I finished I had to begin again, an inch or two of new snow had added on. Came in and made myself some tea; the wind was very cold. It will be below zero again for a few days ... When the world is so white and so quiet I cannot help but think of the soul ...