The Crystalline Light

I find this light by first quieting my mind, by using the cranial vault technique that is found in the skillful means handbook and is taught on site and online by Rudy and Sharon Bauer.  This is one of the methods I use.  You may have your own way that guides you into meditation, the expansive and vast space of openness or pure consciousness within.  Using a mantra like Guru Om, or the Boddhichitta Mantra, for example, can effortless lead one into the state of meditation.  Another effective means is to “Identify with the Guru” (teacher, master) that Swami Muktananda teaches in "The Play of Consciousness."  You can use this technique with any human being with whom you feel represents the embodiment of divinity for you, ie., from any religious or spiritual tradition.  Nature is also very conducive to finding stillness or a peaceful place in which to meditate.

The following is an experience, and is not meant to be a technique. I’m just describing what happens for me and where I am now in my practice.  My meditation practice has evolved over the course of the past 38 years.  The  health and life challenges I've had have at times been the catalyst, the beneficiary, as well as the motivation, behind the discipline and committment to continue on during times of difficulty.  It definitely has brought comfort, clarity, and inspiration during times when hardship and aloneness were front and center in my life.

My personal and spiritual evolution greets me when I sit to meditate. Everything I’ve been through is present; the path I’ve taken, although invisible in the present, unfolds.  My body is my ship and I navigate using the winds and my intuition to guide me.  There is no part of me that is not involved in this inner pilgrimage.  I am grateful for the steps and the grace, the difficult times and struggles, the tears of pain and tears of joy, that have brought me here, now.

After finding a meditative place of openness and stillness, I begin the process of refining my attunement to bliss, consciousness and knowledge, Satchitananda, or simply put, pure light.  This light is deeply penetrating and all encompassing.  It is within me and all around me.  It is everywhere and is the source of all.  It is the spanda, the shiva lingam. the buddha nature, the holy spirit. It’s the energy of pure creativity, or the sunlight of one’s spirit.  It is a continual and eternal combustion of Shiva and Shakti, in yogic terms, the divine union of the male and female;  Samatrabhadri and Samatrabhadra, or Vajrasatva. It is givenness.  It is a movable feast; nurturing, sustaining, completing;  recreating, birthing and destroying, all contained within the vase of my body.  Ultimately, when all is said and done,  this light is nothing, save the essence and wellspring of pure compassion.

In the most subtle and most infinitesimal movement, I lean a little forward, a little backward, like the distance between two specks of dust, as I investigate a deeper alignment of my relationship to this divine light, or the source of my own true Self, i.e.., the Self that existed before I entered this world.  I move to merge completely, to fully unite with my own inherent divinity.  This is the space of the heart essence, the pure and vital essence of the heart.  Here, I find the opening and then explore a little further into the soft center, the soft column of radiant and luminous light moving down into the earth through the perineum and up through the crown center and beyond, this ever expanding experience of a realm of light, of sambhogakaya, or Crystalline Light.  As I continue to align myself  using grace and self effort skillful means, I open and surrender and soften into this light, and allow it to infuse me on it's own accord.  I surrender bit by bit, this individual identity of me, myself, and mine.  Then, in a magically timeless moment, I am fully engulfed by this light, as a combustion of humanity and divinity occurs.  I remember Swami Muktananda saying as he guided us into meditation once, "Go ahead, lose yourself.  I will find you."  It is like an ambrosia filled fountain of the most pristine and divine love in which I am simmering and floating.  It is elemental, like air, like ether, like space, but I am earth, I am sound and water, and I am connected with all elements within my body.

There is no endpoint to this pure potential space.  One can only become more and more infused, and this play is seen, this Play of Consciousness, embodied, ever openning , as the whole world, as Nirmanakaya, and finally as the all embraced, pure space of Dharmakaya, of God.   As a great being I know said, “Buddhahood is the whole world”.  ”God Dwells with you as you”, Muktananda , or as Jesus Christ said, “ I and my Father are one” and "Never be afraid to be alone, for I will always be with you".  "The Heart is the Hub of all Sacred Places, Go there and roam." Bhagawan Nityananda.

Oneness.  This is an invitation to bathe in this fountain of love, this exquisite Crystalline Light of the Heart.  My path to enlightenment in this lifetime is my life as it presents itself to me.  The truth of my life, like the planet Saturn which beckons one to use the reality of one’s own life to focus on the highest truth, leads me home.  Sometimes, it’s eating an ice cream cone sitting on a park bench on a gorgeous summer day.  And, sometimes, it’s taking whatever else life has in store.  Possibly, Realization doesn’t wait for a sunny day.



written by Karen Ferguson