MEDITATION
Many
people left the School when meditation was introduced. Some thought it was a lot of
mumbo-jumbo, others disapproved of having to pay money for it, although what we
were being offered was priceless.
The
initiation ceremony was conducted by an organization known as the Study
Society, which existed alongside the School of Philosophy in London at that
time and still does. Its aim was
to propagate the knowledge and practice of meditation and was, in fact, based on transcendental meditation,
known as TM, which had been brought to the West in the sixties and popularized
by the Beatles and other celebrities.
Nowadays
meditation is known worldwide and has become a global phenomenon. Strangely enough, apart from the
Catholics, it is the Christian Church which has resisted it, being still very
suspicious of anything coming from the East, which includes yoga. The old adage ‘East is East and West is
West and ne’er the twain shall meet’ still holds, although this attitude is
slowly crumbling, especially on the part of Roman Catholic theologians.
There
are many, many different ways to meditate these days, given to us by Buddhist
and Zen teachers, Hindu teachers and other spiritual leaders, which can be
based on the breath or visualization, or again a word or ‘mantra’.
I
had not been conditioned by Christian teachings and so I embraced this form of
meditation fully, and the ceremony seemed to me beautiful and symbolic. I still practice and use the same
‘mantra’ today.
I was
later to find my own way back to the Church and Christ’s teachings.
We
were told to meditate twice a day, preferably at dawn and dusk, the most
auspicious times, for twenty minutes.
At first we were regularly supervised by a tutor until we were finally able to continue
on our own.
I
had several experiences, some bad, some good, during the early stages of
meditation. One morning I woke up
early around 4 am. I went into the
kitchen to make myself a cup of tea.
I sat on the kitchen stool, sipping my tea, listening to a solitary bird
singing its sweet song. The next
moment I was that bird, or the bird was me, we were one. It is difficult to describe, but you
could call it bliss.
There
were bad experiences, moments when I woke up in terror, others when I seemed to
expand in size and felt myself to be huge, which made me think of Alice in
Wonderland. I would see newspapers
with huge printed headlines and get an apocalyptic feeling of the end of the
world. Sometimes my mind would
race and I seemed to be having the most brilliant insights, which reminded me
of the time when I had my nervous breakdown. I even suspected that Mrs Schoup was spiking our coffee with
LSD, though I kept this idea to myself.
On
another occasion I was in NATO waiting to donate blood. We were in a large room, there were
nurses and doctors, beds for the donors.
I was standing in line, thinking of nothing, when suddenly I saw rays of
light streaming from different people, some were quite small, others
larger. I was particularly
interested to see rays about a foot long around a small Turkish handyman, who
did odd jobs around NATO. I always
looked at him with great respect after that!
One
morning I was walking along a corridor in NATO to go to the bar, thinking of
nothing, when I experienced a kind of shift in the time zone. It seemed to me as though I was in a
dance, and everyone else was too, almost as though we were being pulled on
strings in a web of infinite complexity, each of us at the exact point where we
were meant to be at that moment.
And then I was myself again, walking along the corridor for my coffee.
Shortly
afterwards, these experiences ceased and I was back in my own skin again, leading my
normal life. It was as though a
momentary shift had occurred in my brain and I had been taken into a different
level of consciousness.
My
mother was not at all happy with this new interest which seemed to be consuming
me. She would have preferred
something more normal, such as a
boyfriend. At times I think she
was even jealous of Mrs. Schoup, and unfortunately this began to create a rift
between us.
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