Friday, November 25, 2005
Baptisms of Light
I belong to a small (closed) internet discussion group which is focused on personal kundalini experiences. This circle is a remarkable band of gifted and extremely articulate people. We are now friends who follow each other's lives with interest. Here are two recent posts to our group. I am simply posting them here as they were originally written, with no attempt at editing or corrections (other than minor spelling errors).
Dorothy and Fellow Light Beings,
Your "Ceremonies of Light" project prompted me to write something in a bit more depth about last evening's Fidelio experience. I don't know how well the rest of you know Beethoven's opera, but during the closing scene, Florestan is protected by his patient undercover lover, Leonore (aka. Fidelio), from being stabbed to death by the evil Don Pizarro (played by someone from Texas named Bush).
The entire opera pits freedom as light and proximity to G-D versus darkness and the forces of deception and evil. The closing scene is of liberating the Bastille, essentially, as Don Fernando, the King's magistrate, arrives to investigate intimations of wrong doing. (We don't always get things right. Beethoven, a kind of liberal Romantic modernist, by Baroque and Rocco standards, initially supported Napoleon. He later tore up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to the little big man.)
The music at that moment is right out of the Ninth Symphony, and the Choral Equivalent of "Ode to Joy." It is beyond resplendent. It is overwhelmingly powerful for the likes of a political being like me, who is drawn to illuminate darkness.
As the scene built and built, I felt myself dropping more and more into my disappearing heart. I began feeling a rising sense of heat and formlessness occurring at my heart chakra.
I soon began losing all touch with everything around me, save for a kind of fantastic core meltdown. Closing my eyes, I felt as though I was an atomic pile reactor (under the grandstands at the University of Chicago?). Where would this end up, I remember having wondered to myself, at the time? Perhaps in spontaneous human combustion?
As the crescendo built, my vibrations dropped me into a heart-centric state of ecstatic emotional formlessness. Like my Kundalini initiation, I dropped in to ride an emotional cadenza that propelled me beyond my everyday body. Beethoven's crescendo was playing my heart like a kettle drum, and spiritual ecstasy and freedom were the heartfelt derivatives.
At some point into the experience, I opened my eyes, not knowing where this was taking me? Partially it was out of curiosity, for I wondered whether others could see what I was experiencing? What I saw was the same scene, all right, but with several crucial twists.
For one thing, brilliant white light washed everything around me. It was as though my heart had become a broad floodlight, casting rays of brilliant illumination outward in a vertical wedge, covering about a 45 degree arc.
Those around me were bathed in exquisite white light, while the aura the light cast exploded upward into space, like a great oceanic wave crashing over a rock. At the virtual edges of the light field, the aura suddenly became uneven, giving the light waves the character of water that sometimes stopped, and sometimes continued, in something resembling droplets.
I could see people through the light field, but it was as though I was looking at a strange kind of negative. They each appeared engulfed in a kind of brilliant fog (definitely not the kind I'm used to seeing here in Pacifica).
Looking up at the stage, the lowermost third of it was also engulfed in brilliant white light. Here I clearly saw that the edges of the light field were uneven or jagged, reminding me of wildly splashing--yet curiously controlled--water.
My conscious mind sought to reassert "control" coincident with the closing reverberations of music.
I could not begin clapping for the longest time, caught as the former "I" remained in a samadhiesque reverie.
Blessings and Light,
Michael
And here is Jeannine's account of her own powerful mystical experience. Hers, like Michael's, took place very recently. Is something special going one just now?
Today in dance class we were experimenting with the evolution of dance and how that affected the various chakras and hence reflected the evolution of consciousness. As we took different positions I could feel the energy so clearly shift to the various chakras. When we were working with the heart chakra I distinctly felt a new petal open up over my heart at which time I burst into tears. All afternoon I was in a state of great joy. Streams of sweet smelling energy coming through the crown chakra. However, a bill from Sprint ( a company I have hated with great passion for years) and the resulting phone call kind of interrupted the spell. Still it was wonderful while it lasted.
Jeannine
Note: In a later conversation Jeannine told me that what she felt was like a deep opening "about the size of a pea" near her heart. I remembered that some Eastern spiritual systems hold that there is, in fact, another "heart" , often described as about the size of a thumb, near the physical heart. And I also recalled that I was once told that the opening of the heart chakra was "the most exquisite of all."
Dorothy and Fellow Light Beings,
Your "Ceremonies of Light" project prompted me to write something in a bit more depth about last evening's Fidelio experience. I don't know how well the rest of you know Beethoven's opera, but during the closing scene, Florestan is protected by his patient undercover lover, Leonore (aka. Fidelio), from being stabbed to death by the evil Don Pizarro (played by someone from Texas named Bush).
The entire opera pits freedom as light and proximity to G-D versus darkness and the forces of deception and evil. The closing scene is of liberating the Bastille, essentially, as Don Fernando, the King's magistrate, arrives to investigate intimations of wrong doing. (We don't always get things right. Beethoven, a kind of liberal Romantic modernist, by Baroque and Rocco standards, initially supported Napoleon. He later tore up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to the little big man.)
The music at that moment is right out of the Ninth Symphony, and the Choral Equivalent of "Ode to Joy." It is beyond resplendent. It is overwhelmingly powerful for the likes of a political being like me, who is drawn to illuminate darkness.
As the scene built and built, I felt myself dropping more and more into my disappearing heart. I began feeling a rising sense of heat and formlessness occurring at my heart chakra.
I soon began losing all touch with everything around me, save for a kind of fantastic core meltdown. Closing my eyes, I felt as though I was an atomic pile reactor (under the grandstands at the University of Chicago?). Where would this end up, I remember having wondered to myself, at the time? Perhaps in spontaneous human combustion?
As the crescendo built, my vibrations dropped me into a heart-centric state of ecstatic emotional formlessness. Like my Kundalini initiation, I dropped in to ride an emotional cadenza that propelled me beyond my everyday body. Beethoven's crescendo was playing my heart like a kettle drum, and spiritual ecstasy and freedom were the heartfelt derivatives.
At some point into the experience, I opened my eyes, not knowing where this was taking me? Partially it was out of curiosity, for I wondered whether others could see what I was experiencing? What I saw was the same scene, all right, but with several crucial twists.
For one thing, brilliant white light washed everything around me. It was as though my heart had become a broad floodlight, casting rays of brilliant illumination outward in a vertical wedge, covering about a 45 degree arc.
Those around me were bathed in exquisite white light, while the aura the light cast exploded upward into space, like a great oceanic wave crashing over a rock. At the virtual edges of the light field, the aura suddenly became uneven, giving the light waves the character of water that sometimes stopped, and sometimes continued, in something resembling droplets.
I could see people through the light field, but it was as though I was looking at a strange kind of negative. They each appeared engulfed in a kind of brilliant fog (definitely not the kind I'm used to seeing here in Pacifica).
Looking up at the stage, the lowermost third of it was also engulfed in brilliant white light. Here I clearly saw that the edges of the light field were uneven or jagged, reminding me of wildly splashing--yet curiously controlled--water.
My conscious mind sought to reassert "control" coincident with the closing reverberations of music.
I could not begin clapping for the longest time, caught as the former "I" remained in a samadhiesque reverie.
Blessings and Light,
Michael
And here is Jeannine's account of her own powerful mystical experience. Hers, like Michael's, took place very recently. Is something special going one just now?
Today in dance class we were experimenting with the evolution of dance and how that affected the various chakras and hence reflected the evolution of consciousness. As we took different positions I could feel the energy so clearly shift to the various chakras. When we were working with the heart chakra I distinctly felt a new petal open up over my heart at which time I burst into tears. All afternoon I was in a state of great joy. Streams of sweet smelling energy coming through the crown chakra. However, a bill from Sprint ( a company I have hated with great passion for years) and the resulting phone call kind of interrupted the spell. Still it was wonderful while it lasted.
Jeannine
Note: In a later conversation Jeannine told me that what she felt was like a deep opening "about the size of a pea" near her heart. I remembered that some Eastern spiritual systems hold that there is, in fact, another "heart" , often described as about the size of a thumb, near the physical heart. And I also recalled that I was once told that the opening of the heart chakra was "the most exquisite of all."
