Mind/Body/Spirit

Just lately there doesn't seem to have been as much interest in the M/B/S section except on the internet. That is surprising living as I do close to the Findhorn Foundation, but maybe they just circualte the books around themselves. There is a definate 'fashion' for the books that spin off from the healing systems and therapies that arise and wane in their turn. So many books come out in that genre that just reinvent the wheel so to speak - going over and over the same stuff, giving it a new twist or simply a new name. I have become somewhat cynical over the years but don't deny what it has given me, or what it gave me when I first entered that world nearly thirty years ago.

It took a long perod of illness to start the excursion into the New Age and adventures in consciousness.

At a certain point in my life I had recurring dreams of being entombed in a stone sarcophagus, trapped with my child in my arms. I knew that to struggle would take me faster into death; that survival lay in stillness. Struggle would lead to panic; panic would lead to destruction. The way out was to escape my body through - not my mind but that level of consciousnes beyond mind which I had no name for.

In the daytime I thought about the dream. It was a metaphor, I could see that. I was trapped without hope of escape. I was running short of oxygen and that was no more than the truth as I lived with chronic asthma. Not the kind that comes and goes in ‘attacks’ but the kind that is always present making it hard to walk across the room, waking me in the night to face suffocation, with no assurance that another breath would ever make it's way into my lungs. I needed constant medication, which itself did strange things to my vision and divorced me from the world.

There was another cause for the dream imagery so cleverly put togeher for me by my brain. As a child I spent a lot of time ill and my favourite browse was through a set of Brown’s encyclopaedia in which I found photos of old archaeological digs showing men in plus fours digging up sarcophagi. In one photo the archaeologist was standing by a tomb within a tomb within which lay the mummified corpse, like a set of Russian dolls. The body lay in the last stone cell and the person once entombed in the body had escaped.

I began to read. Unable to leave my bedroom, with a baby, a toddler, a four year old and a crippling lack of oxygen, I relied on my husband for my choice of reading. He brought me Jane Roberts and Seth. For the first time I read the channelling of a discarnate being. It didn’t matter to me whether or not I believed in the Seth personality, what he said was fascinating: There are other levels beyond the material and this is how it works. This is how your soul comes into being and this is how you are attached to an oversoul which has far greater capacity to understand and see than you do from this single focus point in space/time.

Even the pocket psychology course at college hadn’t given me any glimpses of these levels of consciousness (no transpersonal psychology in those days, or if there were it wasn’t allowed to disrupt our thinkng.) Christian religion had, if anything, stifled such possibilities in shallow history, moralising and vague allegory.

None of it was entirely new, there was an innate knowledge I remembered from being very small that the visible material world was not the whole truth. I suppose we all have ths knowledge but like many childhood gifts it usually goes unnoticed. If noticed in my day it would most probably have been discredited. The paramormal was dangerous land; the territory of the Devil, no less. Strictly speaking it wasn’t the paranormal I had discovered, it was a form of meditation but it certainly separated me from my body. When I had asthma in the days before inhalers I lay on my bedroom floor and ‘went inside.’ Of course I didn’t know that’s what I was doing, I had no words for it, but the difficulty, almost impossibility, of breathing put me in that place from which no escape was possible except in stillness and reaching beyond the body which I instinctively understood was fine left to itself. It had a enough oxygen to survive. Panic would have made heavy demands on the system but stillness meant it could tick over and slowly recover whilst I floated free, sometimes in nothingness - I remember the strange pull of that ‘nothingness.’ Sometimes I roamed in places I had never seen where I could run and play unhampered by the material form.

Now I discovered there was a word for what I had been doing - in fact several from which I could take my pick. Meditation. Out-of-Body experience. Samadhi. The Oceanic state. I read a book written by a women who had had experiences of meditation in different cultures. I wanted to follow this path myself although it sounded more goal-directed than my childhood moments. I began to want the mind-opening, consciousness awakening flashes of which she wrote. As a young woman in the 60’s I had never tried LSD. Drugs had hardly come my way and apart from a few puffs of marijuana which took me into my body rather than out of it and heightened my physical senses. I had never had any of the wild trips which others had been through, nor, to be honest, had I wanted them because I was something of a pragmatist (some might say coward) and Ididn’t want to let go of reality in such an uncontrolled way.

Mainly I wanted to escape the present. At that period of my life when my physical movements where so constricted I began meditating again and one day discovered the nothingness state which as a child I had found so welcoming. This time it frightened me. I’ve no explanation for the change except that maybe I was more ‘in’ my body, more fully incarnate than I had been at six and the need to feel my attachment to the material was linked to the primary survival drive. Who knows? I changed my meditation technique to keep myself from the abyss..
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I also read further. So many books by so many wise people. A few remain in my memory now, the others have presumably been assimilated and given me the belief system that keeps me more or less sane.