 106. Meditation |
Saturday, August 26, 1950, 7:30 – 8:30 A.M.: "I saw a green color upon closing my eyes, then I saw the usual pyramid, then I saw what looked like my big toe and it was white, then the toe got huge. Then I saw the door swing wide open and all a person had to do was to walk across the threshold – and the strong shall carry the lame, that is, carry them over the threshold. The lame are those that cannot walk over the threshold by themselves. The brilliant white light bathed me several times and it was good."
One of the participants who claimed to pray daily, who had been taught to pray as a child, and who had read several books on prayer, was not so expressive in his reports. There were some physical sensations during the second week, including fullness and pressure in the top of the head and temples, throbbing in lower back and chest, twitching in fingers, and a sense of energy flowing in the body. A journal extract mentioned stimulation of boyhood memories and a peculiar soreness in heels and lower back. The physical sensations recorded in the journals seemed to follow a pattern with a few variations. Another of the participants described fullness in the head, excessive saliva flow, constricted breathing, pressure in the middle of the forehead, sickness of the stomach, sweating, throbbing in the chest, and movement from side to side. This young man's journal contained many entries of "no sensations." Nevertheless, he noted pressure or throbbing in endocrine gland areas, especially in the solar plexus and thymus areas, seventeen times. The frankness of the following entry written after a 2 A.M. meditation period is reassuring:
Pretty tired from wheeling Miss J. around. [Each of the participants spent at least three hours each week pushing a cripple's wheelchair on the Virginia Beach ocean walkway.] I got up in a daze. I lost my physical consciousness very quickly. I had all I could do to keep my mind focused, though. I was that close to sleep. I would focus on a word and my mind would just stay there – nothing would happen except that the concentration kept me awake. I would find myself off on a tangent and bring myself back with the greatest difficulty. My right nostril started running. My legs up to the hips fell asleep. I found discretion "was the better part of valor" at 2:50 – I went to sleep.
In contrast, examine the following description of a seven-thirty prayer period from the same person.
Used Lord's Prayer. Words repeated as at a distance. . . I decided to focus on the individual words, using the idea of the Christ's love. I pulled the words up as high as I ever had before. I continued to push them up via thinking of the Christ-love. Emotions of love started to generate in my own heart. The words went up and up. I used the music to send them higher. I felt fine and loved and was loved; was love. This was not entirely, but a very fine start at breaking down the block. . . at the very end I began to see sparks that popped around in my field of vision. (At various times during the meditation the sunlight was quite strong.) I came out feeling joyous. During the very latter part of the meditation I found myself breathing too quickly. Throbbing was continuous. It got more intense. I do not say that this was real love or anything else but it was a greater degree of feeling than I have possessed previously. There was a pulsing sensation in the thyroid, thymus, adrenals and gonads.
