With Everything
How does a person perceive a world she can't see?
I read The Celestine Prophecy in the mid-nineties like everyone else, and the one idea that stuck with me was this: there are no coincidences. From my perch today I see Jason Angel as a data point put in my path with purpose…not “proof” exactly (my skepticism was still alive and well) but more of a motivation to continue being open to receiving, to keep asking my bigger question: how does one perceive the unseen world? Can you see it with your eyes? Hear it, feel it? The books are no help. They say things like “you may feel a deepening awareness,” but what the heck does that mean, exactly?
One morning in late January, I found out. I now believe it was every energy that supports me declaring, “Tracey, this is how you do it.”
I picked a track: thirty minutes of chanting and singing meant to awaken gratitude for being here, in this body. But getting past that first five minutes was often the biggest challenge in those early days. Distracting myself with reading about the teacher, the track, quelling the “am I doing it wrong” narrative. Finally, finally getting quiet. Closing my eyes, I pushed away the doubts and settled on a mantra of “I am here.”
The response was immediate. Transported to the deck of our cabin in the Sierra foothills, I was looking out at the trees and a wave of gratitude came up through me so fast I started to cry. Not misty. Big crying. It went on for over a minute, just me and the gratitude…and then joy…and then love. Overwhelming. And then my conscious mind woke up. What if my wife hears me and thinks I’m being silly? That thought put me right back in my body, embarrassed. Bliss or self-consciousness. Ugh.
I wanted to get back to that ecstasy. Focus on breath, eyes, scalp, neck, hands. Mantra. Again. Breath, eyes, scalp, neck, hands. Mantra.
And then there was a ball of energy in my hands.
This is where the question of perception stops being abstract. I did not see a ball of energy, exactly. I felt it, the way you feel anything you’re holding. It had size and presence. Like a fiery basketball. And it wasn’t behaving the way energy had behaved in other meditations, where it flowed through me on its own schedule. This just sat there in my hands, waiting. I had to decide what to do with it.
So I squished it. I packed it like a snowball, and the energy went up into my arms. I squished and squished until all the energy was in me. I then looked up, if “looked” and “up” mean anything with your eyes closed on the floor of the spare bedroom, and I saw beams of light coming down the way sun comes through a break in clouds, through an opening in a ceiling that wasn’t there. I grabbed one like it was a rope and pulled it toward me. Piled it up, packed it, squished it, took in the energy. Did it again.
And then, instead of pulling the next beam down, I climbed it. Hand over hand, like the rope in gym class, which, for the record, I never made it to the top of. This time there was a top. I got to the edge and I could see that I was quite in the dark down below. I knew that represented the earth, the physical body, the ordinary. I could see glorious light above, as I grabbed the edge and pulled myself up into the light.
Here is what I can still describe in detail, five years later: standing up on a pedestal, rotating in this glorious, warm, healing, cleansing light. The mantra shifted on its own. I am cleansed. I am energy. I am the light. And when I noticed I’d gone nearly translucent, the light filling me from head to toe and my chest puffed out, the image that arrived was Superman. Not flying. Just standing there, lit up. That powerful. Possibly that good. I basked, taking it all in.
Then it faded, the way these things do, and I was back on the floor with the mantra I’d started with. I am here.
What that morning taught me, beyond the obvious lesson that the deep end is deeper than advertised, is how I receive.
Because look at what actually happened, sense by sense. There were images, detailed ones, but they lived in the mind’s eye, the same screen where memory plays. There was touch, and the touch was not in the mind’s eye at all. My hands were doing things. The tears were real and wet. And there was language, arriving rather than composed. I didn’t decide to change my mantra. It changed, and I noticed.
I’d been asking how a person perceives a world she can’t see, and the answer, at least for me, turned out to be: with everything. Inner sight for the pictures. The body for the energy. Some quiet channel underneath language for the words. Your equipment may be tuned differently. Some people get sound. Some get color. Some get nothing visual at all, just a feeling that arrives with more authority. The only way to find out what you’ve got is to lie down, turn it on, and pay attention.
Was any of it real? That probably depends on your definition of real. But I can tell you that I remember that morning the way I remember things that happened. Not like a dream, which is gone by lunch. Like an event. My hands still remember the weight of the light.