I have continued a meditation practice through to today, with a variety of interesting and, in some cases, significant results. However, the experiences I am about to describe were the most profound spiritual experiences of my lifetime.
I do not claim that the visions I am about to describe are the truth, definitely not the whole truth. But I do claim that they offer one perspective on the truth and that they warrant a careful look. They certainly transformed my life.
From one perspective, my Philosophy of Spiritual Realism is my third attempt (after Glimpses of a Revelation and Spiritual Democracy) to create a philosophy that incorporates and explicates the spiritual insights I am about to describe. This description comes from my book, In Search of a Revelation, which also includes Glimpses of a Revelation and Spiritual Democracy.
Meditation
A couple of years after I began my Aikido studies with Robert Nadeau, I joined a little meditation group that he led at the home of one of his students. Once a week I spent a couple of hours meditating with three long time students of his, and, about once a month, he would come and meditate with us. By then, after a few years of Aikido training, I had torn up my wrist and had to stop practicing Aikido, so meditation became my only connection with Bob.
The Upper Regions: Bob led us in an exploration and mapping process of the nine upper dimensions of the Universe. He and his students had been doing this for some time. I just got in on the last phase of it. We usually sat in a circle, closed our eyes, and then used the sensations of our physical bodies and the energy interpenetrating our bodies as a doorway through which to enter the various non-physical dimensions.
Often, we traveled by finding a central column of energy and then following that column up, pausing at one or another level to explore out from the center. When we finished, we traveled down the energy column and returned to our physical bodies to compare what we found.
In general, we found that the upper dimensions of the energy Universe held the fairies of myth and legend, the angels and gods and goddesses of the religious traditions, and, very far up, the homes of the fully realized Yogis and mystics. The further up we went, the lighter and finer the energy became. It almost stopped being energy at all, becoming rather the idea of energy. The upper also carried the feel of being, in some sense, masculine, the Creative, the Yang in the icon of the Tao.
Shortly after I joined them, we completed the exploration and mapping of the upper dimensions of the Universe and Bob encouraged us to go down and begin exploring the corresponding lower regions.
The Lower Realms: In the lower domains, we found a terribly forceful, fecund darkness, containing the Hells of the great religions, refining, transforming, and purifying what they received. The further down we went, the more palpably powerful the energy became. The lower realms offered the deep mystery of the feminine, the Receptive, the Yin in the Tao.
The upper and the lower halves of the Universal sphere pulsed in reciprocating rhythm. Each kingdom originated a spiral that transected the other kingdom. The spirals interlocked, forming a central core that offered the means of travel from one dimension to another. (This resembled the central icon in William Butler Yeats’ A Vision.)
Over the months, we went deep into the lower regions, receiving many experiences of water and strange watery creatures, images of prehistoric scenes with volcanos and deep vegetation and dinosaurs and caves and long tunnels to be followed deep within rock-like substances. Many times, we encountered a vast all-consuming fire.
The Scroll: One evening, Bob led us further into the fire. Toward the end of the sitting, I received a presentation. I saw a tall powerful male figure standing upright on some kind of dividing plane, mirrored by a beautiful equally powerful female figure on the other side of the plane standing upside down. Still in the mediation reality, I described what I had gotten, and Bob asked if the figures were offering me anything. I looked more closely and found that the upper figure held out a scroll and the lower figure presented a sword.
I heard a woman’s voice say, “Cut the scroll.” I felt great resistance at this suggestion and indicated that to Bob, who said, “Try it both ways.” I asked what would happen if the scroll weren’t cut. As I watched, the scroll began to unroll and unroll. I realized that it was endless. It began piling up, filling the whole range of my sight, unendingly unrolling. I thought of the flood that the Sorcerer’s Apprentice had evoked and been unable to stop in the movie.
“Okay, okay, cut the scroll,” I yelled in my consciousness. But, the voice replied, “It’s too late. You had your chance.” The scroll kept unrolling. “Come on, you’ve got to be kidding, cut it,” I shouted in my mind. “Alright,” the voice replied, and the lower figure reached up with the sword and cut through the scroll in a single stroke.
That reality then dissolved in on itself and in its place a beautiful clear whole sphere emerged. My awareness rested easily in that sphere, enjoying, soaking up the fine, light, gentle yet profoundly powerful energy. I emerged feeling peaceful and much more unified.
I realized that I had spent most of my life rolling out that scroll, the world of idea, of purity, of the envisioned but as yet untried. It was fine for what it was, crucial, irreplaceable, yet, by itself, quite sterile. It lacked the substance and the power of the sword of the lower realm.
The Harvester of Universes: Later, in a sitting alone at home, my awareness moved up and down the central column of energy in the Universe. Then I started going up. I could see into each level with a different kind of sight. At each level vista upon vista opened, exhibiting great lands, strange beings, and extraordinary events. At each level, I felt drawn into exploring and participating, but an imperial voice commanded, “No, you are making a mistake.”
At last, my awareness reversed itself and began moving down. I flew down faster and further than I had ever gone before. Multitudes of levels flashed past. After quite a long time, I emerged out the bottom of the central column and paused for quite a while in thick, pure blackness. Out of the blackness, I heard a drum beating, which swelled into a full music and out of the music a great and powerful being emerged, configured in my awareness as an Old Man.
The Old Man walked some distance, gathering lesser beings, who seemed like students, about him and they sat down in a circle. As the music reached up and out, the Old Man took a stick and began to draw in the medium beneath him. He drew a circle and then a diameter from top to bottom and another from left to right and then many more diameters so that a whole nexus of lines intersected in the center of the circle.
Then the Old Man reached his stick into the medium at his feet, upon which he had drawn the circle and began to stir. Suddenly, he swung the stick over his head, carrying the circle up with him. As the circle moved, it expanded out into a column of many levels. First one section of the column came alight and then another section. The column glowed and flashed with lovely color.
As I watched, the column changed into a sphere and back into a column. I discovered that my awareness could enter the column and still, at the same time, experience it at a distance. I entered and found that the center, running up through it, was the same central source from which I had come. I went to the appropriate level and looked out from the center through the clear medium at the region that contained the place from which I had come. I re-entered that realm and descended through it to glimpse my own many dimensioned spherical home, from which my awareness had begun its journeys.
Amazed, I returned to continue watching the Old Man. He took his stick away and the column became a sphere and hung where he left it. He then reached deeper into the medium at his feet with his stick and drew up another sphere.
The inside of the second sphere did not have such a crystallized formal structure as the first one. The colors whirled and flowed and shimmered within it. I realized that I was being shown a whole Universe that operated on a different principle and was somehow more evolved than the one I came from. He set the second sphere up next to the first, and then he and his students began to dance and chant, and eventually they dissolved back into the general music from which they had come.
In a subsequent sitting, I found the Old Man again. This time he reached into the medium below him with two sticks and came up with a flashing spherical domain that vibrated much more rapidly than the first two. As he held it between the two sticks, other spherical domains like it flew off from it in every direction. I suddenly realized that there was no end to the number of domains he could reach in and isolate and pull forth.
My awareness moved in and blended with the Old Man. I saw countless Universes of different kinds, each a complete reality. I experienced how they formed great shapes and figures and events, each made up of complete realities, each complete in itself, each a part of an even more vast something.
The enormity of the mystery touched me with the challenge that I could go on and on and wherever my awareness rested, it would catch but a small glimpse, a taste, a little bite of the great mystery. Yet, in friendship, the mystery assured me with the peace of knowing that I could commune with whatever I touched and learn from it and rest easy in its embrace.
The Planter of Seeds: A couple of weeks later I went down to the region of the dark being who had drawn out the spheres, but a voice said, “No, no you’re in the wrong place.” “Well, show me the right place then, would you please.” I moved laterally for a bit, but the voice came back with another, “No.” Finally, I began to move up very rapidly. My vision opened up to reveal a huge spiral that I rode up.
At last, I emerged in a realm that seemed in some sense as high and above the Universe as the realm of the dark being had seemed low and below the Universe. Sure enough, a light, clear, white entity emerged. It took the spiral I had ridden up and guided it into winding in on itself to form a tighter and tighter little sphere until it became what looked like a small seed.
Then the white entity planted that seed in a thick dark viscous medium that seemed to be related to the medium out of which the dark being had drawn its spheres. I looked up and out and saw an amazing and magnificent garden stretching out through a valley to join an extraordinarily lovely stand of trees. I realized that the light entity and the dark being worked together, with one planting and the other harvesting, and out of their cooperation came the creation of the Universes.
The Protector of Souls: Soon after that, in another sitting, I encountered a tall profound figure upon a great throne. My awareness moved around, up and behind the figure and then slid down to blend with it. Within it, I experienced it extending its hands and I saw what seemed like billions of thin threads of light extending out from its hands. I realized that each thread connected with a life, and that this being nourished each life that it was connected to, and that it could withdraw that nourishment at the end of that life. A voice said, “It is an amazing responsibility.”
In a subsequent sitting with Bob’s students, my awareness moved rapidly down through a variety of dimensions and eventually emerged above a freeway with a vast number of cars moving along it. I suddenly realized that a crash was about to happen, in which someone would be killed. For a while, I fought this, trying to communicate to the drivers to be careful, but there were too many of them, so I just gave up and watched.
An old truck came along. The driver in it seemed to lose some sort of concentration and the truck crashed head on into the base of an overpass, smashing and killing the driver instantly. As my awareness watched, an elongated sphere floated up from the truck. A luminescent core of some sort still attached the sphere to the body inside the truck. I could see many layers or domains clearly etched within the transparent boundaries of the sphere.
My awareness moved down next to the sphere, and I found myself trying to communicate to it. I realized that it was a soul with an awareness within it. Somehow, I knew that awareness had a choice to make. It could go out beyond the space it occupied to become bigger or it could shrink to some level within the space it already inhabited.
I realized that this soul had been unable to cope with the dimension it had been on, which in fact ultimately caused the crash of its truck. Now it reacted with intense fear. It was so frightened that I had no chance of contacting it to help it to emerge. It reacted to its fear by shrinking down to a level within its sphere that was much smaller.6
I followed it as it shrank through a series of successively smaller grid works, until we emerged in a tiny realm, which suddenly seemed infinite once we popped in and adjusted to it. In this realm, I saw another freeway with another stream of cars moving along. The soul I had been following slipped into the body of one of the drivers and continued on, doing what it was doing before the crash, but on a much, much smaller scale.
The Universe: In another sitting I descended the column of energy and emerged below the Universe I was from and moved back to engage with a great center connected to a network of many Universes, many spheres. I could clearly make out the sphere from which I had come because it existed in a sort of crimp in the network, out of direct contact with the center. I could see off in the distance, among the multitude, a few other spheres that shared a similar semi-isolated status.
As I watched, I noticed that the center was pulsing out a fine tracery of soft golden light intermingled with its great waves of pulsing energy. The golden traceries did not spread out evenly. They sought out the semi-isolated spheres, contacted them, and surrounded them.
Some sort of fluidic substance flowed out from the tracery into the sphere I had come from. That sphere shuddered and reacted in what seemed like an almost sullen fashion and then finally seemed to acquiesce in the contact. Everything shifted slightly and the sphere I came from gently began to settle into its rightful place in the network, and its contact with the center steadily increased.
The realization came to me that the Universe I came from had suffered some mistake. It seemed that it had crystallized too soon and in rather the wrong place. From the perspective of the center this was a minor mistake, like a deviation in one cell in a large many celled body.
However, from the perspective of our Universe, the mistake had produced enormous consequences. Our Universe had been partially shut off, isolated, out of complete contact with its source. That initial split had ramified down throughout all of the dimensions of our Universe. It appeared that, now, the split was being rectified.
In the light of this perspective, much that I never understood before suddenly made better sense. I got the feeling that our Universe had originally moved prematurely and willfully in a kind of exuberance of self-confident affirmation. When it apprehended the mistake, it reacted with a sort of defiance and sought to close itself off and kind of go it alone. It did its best to forget that the larger reality existed, yet it was itself embedded in that larger reality.
This essential ambivalence about its connection to the great center led to the pre-eminence of duality as the central constituting principle of our Universe. The over-riding spiritual intelligence of our Universe, on the one hand, secretly sought to submit and almost abase itself before the energies of the central source, but, on the other hand, it overtly sought to maintain and even increase its separation.
The central source allowed this all to continue as a kind of experiment, which it watched over with a benevolent interest, until the experiment ripened, at which time the source sent out a special dispensation to begin the process of returning our Universe to its rightful relationship to the whole. This understanding came all of a piece at virtually the same instant that I saw the golden tracery engage with our Universe.
Completion: A couple of weeks later, Bob met with our little group. Contrary to our usual practice, we had a long discussion before doing any meditating. Bob said that we had reached the end of the line. He indicated that, as usual, the words were tricky, but that currently he was referring to the territory inside the realm that generated our Universe and the other Universes as the realm of illusion and the territory beyond that domain as the realm of reality. He told us that we wouldn’t need to go any farther than the realm of reality. It had been a major accomplishment to get that far.
He went on to say that he had been meeting with some of the spiritual big guns just under the realm of illusion and that they were impressed with our work and some of them had begun to utilize it. Many used similar words, and many caught glimpses of the realm of reality, but, to his knowledge, this was the first time that any group had fully moved into it. It might be difficult to communicate the difference to some who were used to meditating and entering pretty large spaces, but that was where the map would prove useful.
Most people who meditated only got as far as the upper reaches of the Universe. Bob said that he had enjoyed being there, but that he really entered his element when it got communicated to him that he should go down and explore the lower regions. He said that, in a sense, we were close to reality when we left the sphere of our Universe and fully experienced both the top and the bottom – the idea and the energy – linked to the central core surrounded by the spirals.
In some ways, that had been the hardest step, but we still needed to pass through the vast territory beyond to reach the much larger sphere of the Creation that contained the myriad Universes and we had to move through much more than that to reach the boundary of the realm that contained the multitude of such Creations – which we now called the realm of the Creator, which was the realm of full reality.
We asked him why he thought that we had reached the end of the process. He replied that the process itself told him so. It told him that he didn’t need to go any further. It was the first time in more than 20 years of meditating that it said he could stop.
Bob mused that the most unique aspect of his approach to meditation was that he continually asked the process of the meditation to guide him, rather than following some tradition or some preconception. It had guided him throughout the long journey. For instance, at one point he was able to set up Aikido classes in such a way that he could meditate six or seven hours a day, but it told him not too, because that would tend to lock him into a realm that might be nice, but ultimately would prove much too limited.
Identity as an astral being or even as a Universal being still locates identity within the realm of illusion. It’s not much better than identity as a physical being and maybe even worse, because it’s quite expanded by comparison to physical reality and thereby it may become more difficult to recognize its limitations in order to move on. The goal had always been to go beyond all those illusory identities and recognize, and then experience participation in the realm of reality.
We asked Bob what he thought would happen now. He replied that he hadn’t gotten much information about that, but, whatever it was, he believed it would potentially be very powerful. But then sometimes people who made important discoveries and were good teachers developed a large following and sometimes they didn’t at all. It didn’t really matter. Often someone makes a discovery and then others ride out on that discovery and are propelled on further. The true impact from a discovery might come a generation or two later.9
The thing to do was to let the reality unfold itself and do what it wanted, rather than to try to guess or to try to move too soon. The danger was that one of our lesser identities would try to use some of the power, but from its own limited perspective.
A good test was to try to contemplate some action and see if one could still hold on to that action while participating in the realm of reality. If that was possible, then the action was probably all right.
If contemplation of the action brought about a shrinkage of identity into the realm of illusion, then the action was probably wrong for some reason. Bob said that he was really looking forward to returning through the territory that we left, in order to explore it more thoroughly from the reality perspective.
Good-bye: Soon after that conversation, I encountered Bob somewhere in the non-physical space. I was in what seemed to be a valley, practicing Aikido with some other folks, except that their arms stretched out and bent in some very strange ways. I was exploring the different ways their bodies worked in this space. They behaved more as if they were liquid rather than solid.
Bob walked up and watched me for a bit and then he said, “I’m being taken off of your case, but since you have shown an interest in the work, I’ll let you come all the way with me once.“ He told me, “Now that you know how to do it, I’m afraid that you won’t meditate.” I assured him that I would continue meditating. As we walked, I felt extraordinarily grateful to him and thanked him and said, “You were really smart to combine Aikido and meditation.” We came to a crossroads, and he went off one way and I went off the other.
The Creator: In a sitting with Bob’s group a short time later, I asked to visit the Creator. I floated below the bottom of the Universe, in heavy viscous blackness and, suddenly, something came loose, and the blackness dissolved, and I travelled very rapidly through the Creation of many Universes and finally came up to an extraordinary figure, a great and mighty person sitting on a magnificent throne towering above a mountain range. Countless streamers of light flowed out from its hands and feet.
I blended with this Creator just before it brought its hands together and separated them to reveal multitudes of spheres that were Creations emerging from its cupped hands, seemingly being created by its merely willing it. I knew that each Creation contained many smaller Universes, and each Universe was somewhat like the one I had come out through over the years of meditation. I knew that I was in the presence of the Creator, watching Creation after Creation after Creation. The Creator had only to extend its hands and countless Creations flew forth. The process occurred effortlessly, gracefully, as a manifestation of more power than I had ever imagined imagining.
After Aikido classes, Bob often went with a group of us over to Foster’s to have coffee and talk. One evening, I had asked him, “You talk about each of us having a space that is our own, but what is the relation between two different people’s spaces? If I run into someone while I’m meditating, is that really them?” He replied, “If you meet someone else while you are meditating, it’s usually them. What you should do is to try to blend with them completely and become them and learn what they have to teach.”
The evening after the meditation in which I had encountered the Creator, I met Bob in the non-physical space again. As I came closer, he became a brilliantly pure light within which whirled many images and facets of himself. I entered the light and whirled with him, off into a realm of transcendent beauty and power. In the last image I remember of him, I saw his hands extend and a little tree sprouted out of his fingers. He released it and it grew great and strong, rooted in the base of the Universe, growing up and out with its branches touching the highest realms.
Shortly after that, the central person in Bob’s San Francisco group moved and the group stopped meeting and I stopped seeing Bob. I felt like I had graduated from his very beneficent way of teaching and way of exploring. Since then, I have kept meditating and I have tried to follow his injunction to stay anchored in the realm of reality, the realm of the Creator, and I have tried to act guided by that connection.
