At 21 years old, I took a Vipassana Meditation course in the Japanese mountains. Vipassana Meditation is a lovely ten-day meditation retreat, where you make a vow of silence, receive instructions 3 times a day and just meditate. It simulates a monastic life where rules are simple and you just focus on yourself, not socializing. You are given your own room and meals are cooked for you, often by volunteers that have taken the course before. It is always free, but you can make donations of money, food or volunteering time. I highly recommend it.
It was there that I had my first experience of expanded consciousness. In other words, after meditating for a few days, all of my senses expanded. For example, my hearing was strengthened, as I could hear leaves falling outside. I could suddenly control my own pain level, body temperature, and interestingly, I could hear everyone’s minds in the room. It’s like when you realize that you are so much more than this tiny body and you have to squeeze tight to fit inside. In the process of trying to fit in this small body, you make all your senses smaller too.
While I was there, I could dream while awake or while sleeping. One day I was meditating in my room, looking at the wall and images started forming. The next thing I knew, I was looking into a living Mandala on the wall… a Mandala of my entire life. There was my birth, marriages, a child, traveling to faraway lands, a variety of jobs, and after many convoluted bending roads, there was a mountain top and the culmination of the end of life. It looked like a monastery with golden columns and I saw myself sitting there becoming a ball of light.
As I was 21 years old at the time, I just looked at it and said, “cool” and promptly forgot all about it. After all, I was focusing on learning meditation and I was told that everything else was just a product of the mind trying to distract me. Ha! How I wish now, at 53 years old, that I could remember every little detail.
Another day as I was waking up before meditation, I was shown that time was actually just “movements.” As I woke up, sat up, looked at the clock and followed a series of slow movements, I actually woke up and observed that I had just dreamt that entire sequence of the next 20 minutes. I then learned that consciousness can move in any direction.
Meditating helps you step out of everyday monkey mind, and then expand and become more in tune with our true nature. My next thought: what if all of us can do this, but we are so wrapped up in our minds? It’s as if everything here conspires to keep us distracted – media, phones, gaming, shopping, work… we don’t realize our full potential…