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Meditation – How It Can Open the Door to a New Life.

It’s a Saturday morning here, it’s been raining all night, and the sky is grey. I was sitting enjoying my cup of green tea after breakfast and wondering what I would write about today. My mind was drawn to illusion. Then I checked my email and received a wonderful message from Alex who’d been using my Chakra Meditation CD and finding it powerfully beneficial. Alex’s email lifted my spirits. It’s always so nice to hear how my work is benefiting other people. So, following the flow as it were, I started thinking about meditation and how it connects to the idea of illusion.

I’ve recently joined a group where we get together once a week and listen to a guided meditation, and then talk about matters spiritual. I use spiritual in a very broad sense to encompass life-purpose and how to make life work for you so that life becomes a pleasurable, satisfying, and fulfilling adventure rather than the drudgery of a daily visit to a place of employment you can’t wait to get home from. Anyway we chat about this and that and something weird happens. When I’m driving home I’m sort of buzzing. My ‘energy’ (I don’t know what else to call it) seems to have been increased and I just feel really good – and it’s a very nice feeling.

I’m not sure it’s the actual meditation that does it because I don’t feel any different when it ends. I think it’s being in the presence of people who understand some of the same things about life that I do. We share our thoughts and find them accepted rather than disagreed with. We hug hello and we hug goodbye and it feels so natural and normal. But this group, and the reason I mention them, understands ‘illusion’.

Let me move over to a more scientific standpoint. This is much easier because the evidence is there and undeniable.

Matter doesn’t exist.

By that I mean that no one has ever found anything solid that everything is made of. Most of us know about atoms and how they are the tiny particles that join together to make up all of the stuff we see around us. We know intellectually that everything is made of atoms. But what are atoms made of? When I was at school they were just made of protons, neutrons and electrons. Now it seems that the protons and neutrons are made up of all sorts of squirrelly little bits and pieces like quarks and muons, and leptons and god knows what else. It seems that as the scientists keep looking they find another weird behaviour that doesn’t fit in with their sums, then they invent a particle that makes the maths work out, then they build a big machine to look for the particle, then they find it, and then it starts all over again with the next particle. Talk about creating a job for yourself.

But what they’ve also discovered is that all these particles are just energy. They are not anything solid. In fact those well-known ones – the electrons – don’t even seem to be in our Universe all of the time. They are here and they are somewhere else. The best the physicists can do is offer probabilities that something will be somewhere often enough to pretend it’s real.

The upshot of all this is that nothing really exists in solid physical form, it’s all an illusion.

Yes I know it hurts when you walk into a wall, but the energy is there and that’s what you feel when you hit the wall. Your energy meets the walls energy and ouch!

Now let’s go inside your head. Consider that at this moment you are reading these words. You experience these words on some sort of electronic screen outside of you. If you close your eyelids the screen disappears. But if you reach out to where you remember the screen to be you will feel something that matches what you were seeing when your eyes were open. If you tap it with your fingernail you will also hear a sound consistent with your vision and your touch.

But what’s actually going on.

Photons (pure energy) of light move from the screen, interact with your cornea (atoms), your eye lens (more atoms), wander through some jelly (yet more atoms) in your eye, hit the squidgy cells at the back of your eye (retina) cause some chemical stuff to happen and then some more chemical stuff happens all the way along your optic nerve until that nerve terminates in some neurons which then nudge some chemicals across the synapses in tiny squidgy brain cells filled with chromosomes and other stuff. But what’s really happening is that the energy of the photon is causing energetic changes in other atoms from the cornea right through to the neuron.

The ‘seeing’ doesn’t take place until the neurons get involved. But the neurons can’t see! They are just grey electrochemical tiny little bits of stuff. They don’t project an image of these words onto a screen in the back of your skull. There is no image in your head – you make it all up out of some chemistry that takes place in the dark of your skull.

It’s just the same with all of your other senses. You make all of that up too.

That doesn’t mean that what you see, hear and feel isn’t real. It just means that you can never be sure.

It’s all very Matrix-like.

But the truth is that if you were dreaming a very real dream, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and reality.

Your world exists only in your mind.

So what’s all this got to do with meditation?

Well, when you listen to a guided meditation then you are generally taken by the hand and encouraged to use your imagination to create images that cause you to feel deeply relaxed and maybe view your future self living in improved circumstances. They may be focused on healing so that you focus your imagination on greater health. This activity separates you from your physical world and allows your body some space to heal.

When you do this on a regular basis (and by regular I mean daily or twice daily) you will begin to notice that it causes change to take place. It can bring about physical changes. There is plenty of research around to show that regular meditation lowers stress and blood pressure as well as lengthening life. Life becomes more peaceful. Not only that but it has an impact on the world outside of you too.

Research has shown that the presence of Transcendental Meditation centres in towns causes a significant lowering of the crime rate.

Now if you consider that meditating with a group of other people on a regular basis can improve the way that people relate to each other then you have something occurring where there is no connection between cause and effect. This is the nature of dreams, not reality. This is the nature of illusion.

Groups of people working with single-minded intent have brought about miraculous healing.

Again this is the stuff of dreams, not of a solid physical cause causes effect reality.

If you read The Field by Lynne McTaggart you will find details of a scientific experiment conducted by a professor at an American University where focused thought caused a change to take place in the past!!!!

The evidence for illusion is all around. If you just open your mind, you will begin to see how apparently random, predictive thoughts, insignificant wishes that manifest within hours, & strange coincidences, are all clues so that you can begin to unpick the true nature of reality and see it for very real illusion that it appears to be.

Michael