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William Butler Yeats, arguably one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, went to great lengths to visit spirit mediums, automatic writers and mystics of any reputation, and studied the works of Swedenborg and William Blake, as well as many others, all in the attempt to explain to himself the experiences of life he had had, and that he wished to have.
Bill Wilson and other of the original founders of Alcoholics Anonymous attended numerous seances in the early days of their organization, trying to contact spirits for guidance, and to find some way of understanding the universe that encompassed more than the mundane. Also in the book, Alcoholics Anonymous, the authors quote from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, the pages of which are full of men seeking an experience other than that available to the five senses. (As an interesting side note, many of the experiences cited by James were had under the influence of ether or nitrous oxide--laughing gas.)
I personally know several people who have travelled to South America to take ayahuasca in the attempt to contact something "other."
Why do we go to such great lengths to find God? To find "evidence of things not seen?" And by "we," I mean many, if not all, of we humans.
We seek these other experiences because we are designed to be at-one-with. We are meant to experience connectedness to all things and all people. This is our natural state; and somewhere along the line we began to train ourselves away from it. Society, religions, economies, ideas, have insisted, for various reasons, that we are separate, we always will be separate, and that suffering is the essence of life. From this perspective, our souls, or whatever you choose to call the deepest part of yourself, must cry out, must insist that we find something more than this separation and suffering. We seek more, because more is what we know, inherently, at the core of our being. More is what we are, in our least excited state.
Meditation gives us the tool to drop out of the relative world and into the Absolute. All of the gyres and spirits and faeries of Yeats, the hallucinations of the ayahuasca, all of these ideas and experiences are just stop on the way to the Absolute. Expressions and experiences, real or imagined, of levels between here and there. In meditation, we drop through to the deepest place possible, and if we wish to explore, we explore from there, from a place of knowing the truth of our being.
In the Absolute we are as if bathed in healing waters. Suffering ceases, the illusion of separation disappears. We know ourselves as nature knows us. As God knows us, if you will. We know ourselves as pure expressions of the Absolute, and as such, joy is the order of the day, the insistence from within. It's absolutely free for the taking, available always, requiring no travel, no danger, no advanced cogitation. Requiring only our decision to sit, quietly, eyes closed, with our mantra.
Today I will ask of the universe to show me something special, something magical, that I may be absolutely sure of the direction I am taking.
Skies over Studio City
All material copyright Jeff Kober
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