Entering the Void: Awareness Beyond Fear

Sharing: Staying Aware in Meditation

Sharing meditation experiences within the group allows everyone to hear them and explore the teaching that comes from them. A conversation can open into a process. The group setting offers more room for that than an informal conversation over a meal.

Sharing: There was some hesitation about the meditation at first, alongside a decision to take part. Understanding the experiences and finding words for them was helpful. While lying down, heat arose, followed by relaxation. A small light appeared near the third eye and became a point of focus. A question arose about the gong heard during the meditation.

The meditation uses a small click every fifteen minutes during the first hour. The click helps maintain alertness and gives a sense of where you are, even while moving into timelessness. It can be a simple reminder: I am here. I am present.

Taking the first hour in fifteen-minute intervals can make it easier to enter timelessness. There is no need to keep thinking about the click. It simply arrives. Sometimes not much seems to happen during that first hour, and the deeper experience begins in the second.

It can also happen in the first hour, especially as the practice becomes familiar and you understand what you are moving toward. When beginning, the pattern of sounds helps maintain presence. The gong sounds after the first hour. That hour is complete; now there is room to relax, and sometimes this is where the magic begins.

The Senses and the Second Body

Sharing: The gong brought awareness back, and the experience was more pleasant than expected. Later, there was a vivid, dreamlike interaction with the group, including smell and touch. It seemed that the meditation had finished and conversation had begun, although it had not. Experiencing the group in this way was unfamiliar and surprising. Afterward, there was a return to relaxation and breathing.

A mask reduces distraction from other lights in the room. When light appears during meditation, it can become a focus for attention. Light is not the only way an experience may arise. There may be sound, smell or vibration.

The five senses are familiar ways of experiencing this dimension. When one sense is absent, another can become more sensitive. Without sight, for example, hearing may become more finely attuned and able to distinguish more through sound.

Within this teaching, those five senses are mirrored in the second body, also called the astral body or dream body. A dream may mimic familiar sensory experience because that is what feels comfortable. Yet the second body does not have to follow that pattern.

There could be twenty other senses. The possibilities are not confined to the five senses used here. Feeling limited to those senses in this dimension can carry that same limitation into the astral body.

Seeing an inner light and focusing on it can help sustain attention. The purpose is to keep awareness, to remain awake within the experience.

Awareness Within Theta

As awareness remains awake while dropping into theta and delta, the experience can be absolute bliss. This awake awareness is what many people call enlightenment.

First comes awareness within theta. Theta can be full of images, a kind of fairyland, a land of flowers and fairies. There can be all kinds of enjoyment and exploration there.

The experience may be personal theta, your own personal creation. It may also be collective theta, in which you enter other people’s worlds.

There are many layers to explore. The experience may extend into extraterrestrial worlds and many other kinds of worlds. Keep the distinction clear: in personal theta, all of this can also be created without involvement in anyone else’s creation.