Meditation can open up possibilities for spiritual experiences, almost as if the subconscious mind is itself the gateway to the eternal dimension. This gateway is never wide open, and there usually aren’t any signs above it advising us where the road will lead at any given moment. Opening this gate isn’t merely a matter of finding a key or saying some magic word—it’s more like the idea that guided the ancient alchemists: the process of transforming and being transformed. Another way of looking at it is to say that the mind becomes a passage, and the person meditating turns into an individual who’s able to recognize the passage and move through it into deeper, more transcendent states.
At times, this path we’re on might bring us to a heightened awareness of our spiritual essence and to a state of profound ecstasy, lightness, satisfaction, and well-being, which represent contact with our deepest dimension. It may spread through us when we’re contemplating something that gives us pleasure, or it may be intermittent, brief, and somewhat unspectacular. No matter the duration, the effect is the same: Heightened spiritual awareness glows on enlightened faces, reflecting joy and serenity.
One sure characteristic of spiritual illumination is that the person experiencing it radiates compassion and love to others without expecting anything in return. The enlightened person feels a oneness with every other person and being, with all there is. For instance, you can often see this effect in children at play or in people in love, for such individuals are directly experiencing the joy of the altered state. I’ve also witnessed this in some of my patients who have gained transcendent insights during a particularly powerful therapy session.
The many ways of achieving this feeling, or of letting oneself be touched by it, quite naturally vary from person to person. And although I’ve gained much knowledge and wisdom through my patients, I feel that it’s been necessary for me to develop my own channels to receive this heightened awareness. For example, meditation has helped me receive messages, transcendent thoughts, intuition . . . and it’s also helped me encounter my own past lives.
My first experience with a vivid past-life recollection came to me when I went to an acupressure (shiatsu) therapist because of chronic back and neck pain. The sessions were conducted in silence, and I used this quiet time to meditate. About an hour into my third session, I had reached a very deep state of relaxation when I was startled by a crystal-clear image of myself from another time.
In this scene, I was taller and thinner, with a small dark pointed beard, and I was wearing a multicolored robe. I realized that I was a priest, an extremely powerful member of the religious hierarchy of the time. The building in which I found myself had a strange design that I had never seen before. It was distinctly geometric—flat on top with a larger, wide bottom and sloping sides. There were seven or eight levels, with plants growing on and over the sides, and wide stairs connecting the levels at certain points. Gradually, I became aware of a word in my mind: ziggurat. I had no idea what this word meant, and decided to put it out of my mind for the time being.
While I flipped back and forth between the outlook and vision of the priest and to an outside, detached, overall perspective, I became intimately aware of this person’s life. I knew that the priest’s earlier idealism and spirituality had given way to material values as he ascended to a position of great power and authority—he even had the ear of the royal family. But instead of using his position to promote spiritual values, brotherhood, and peacefulness in his people, he abused his position to obtain wealth, sex, and even more power.
The priest died a very old man, and never recaptured the virtues and idealism of his youth. He had to leave behind his fortune, power, position, and body, all of which he had been so obsessed with. I felt a terrible sadness, for it seemed to me that this man had wasted his life.
Later that evening, I remembered the word ziggurat. I researched it in the encyclopedia and found out that a ziggurat is a temple of the same geometric shape that I had visualized. These temples originated from the Babylonian-Assyrian era, and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon is an example of such a structure. In this way, I was able to help narrow down the time period of my past life.
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Ultimately, becoming aware of the priest’s experiences induced a transient sadness in me, since he had squandered his opportunities for teaching about love and compassion. Experiences such as these can provide explanations (or at least clues) to why we run into certain situations and opportunities in our current lives—it’s as though the spiritual lessons we encountered in the past are still there for us to learn from today.
Most of my patients are able to recall past lives during actual regression therapy. However, the regular practice of meditation may lead to past-life memories as well. This is because the constant practice of meditation takes us to increasingly deeper levels of our inner selves. If you should find yourself experiencing past-life memories, don’t try to determine if they’re actual recollections or if they’re metaphors, symbols, or simply products of your imagination. Just go with it. If you’re uncomfortable, simply open your eyes and end the meditation. Exploring past lives through meditation is actually quite safe, because the unconscious mind is very wise and won’t let anything harmful move through to your memory.
The possibility of spiritual development offered by meditation isn’t limited to revisiting past lives. In fact, some of my patients have undergone the experience of seeming to detach from their physical bodies during meditation. It’s as if they float above the place where their body is, and they watch themselves. This is called an out-of-body experience (OBE). An OBE is important because it’s a demonstration that there’s more to “life” than what the physical body and the brain experience. An OBE is not at all dangerous, because the person will always be able to safely find their way back to their body.
An OBE is quite similar to what people who have undergone a near-death experience (NDE) describe. In these situations, usually due to illness or trauma, consciousness detaches from the physical body, and some people become aware of a brilliant light that seems to have tremendous spiritual significance for them. However, the person having the NDE quickly finds out that it’s not yet time for them to die, and they soon return to their bodies.
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Intuition is another type of spiritual experience that regular meditation enhances. It’s almost as if knowledge, wisdom, and other significant revelations are whispered to our consciousness by an inner voice, and the more we open ourselves to this intuitional wisdom, the clearer the message becomes. It’s important to learn to listen to this voice and trust its guidance. Personally speaking, I find that my strongest thoughts, images, and ideas often come to me when I’m deeply relaxed or meditating. I often remember the words a Master once said to me: “The intellect is important in the three dimensional world, but intuition is even more crucial.”
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Meditation can also open us up to receive messages from people in other dimensions. Following is an example of this.
Several years ago, I conducted a two-day seminar in Puerto Rico, which was attended by nearly 500 people. Many individuals experienced early childhood, in utero, and past-life memories. One participant, a highly regarded forensic psychiatrist, experienced even more.
During a guided meditation on the second day of the conference, his inner eye perceived the shadowy figure of a young woman, who approached him and said, “Tell them I am well. Tell them Natasha is well.”
As he related his experience to the group, the psychiatrist said he felt “very silly.” After all, he didn’t know anybody named Natasha—the name itself is a rarity in Puerto Rico. And the message related by the ghostlike girl had no connection to anything happening in the conference or in his personal life.
“Does this message have any meaning to anybody here?” the puzzled psychiatrist asked the audience.
Suddenly, from the back of the auditorium, a woman screamed: “My daughter, my daughter!”
This woman’s daughter was a young lady in her early 20s who had died suddenly only six months previously. The young woman’s name was Ana Natalia, but her mother—and only her mother—called her “Natasha.”
The psychiatrist had never met or even heard of Natasha or her mother, and was as unnerved by this extraordinary experience as the mother was. When both had regained their composure, Natasha’s mother showed him a photo of her daughter. The psychiatrist grew pale, for this was indeed the same young woman whose spectral figure had approached him with her amazing message.
I want to encourage you to meditate so that you, too, can discover and develop spiritual experiences—but remember to keep your mind open to whatever may occur. The experiences may take the form of feelings, images, memories of this life or of past lives, intuitional advice and wisdom, or even more transcendent states. Remember that there’s a reason and a meaning for everything in your life—for living, for reliving, for each existence that you’ve had, for the gift of recalling that existence. There’s always a higher plan or project under way . . . or, at the very least, an opportunity for you to learn. Finally, don’t forget that all of this tends to take time and practice, so be patient with the process and yourself.
