Back to "Guided Expriences"

Suggestions:

While this Guided Experience can be done by oneself, it strongly recommended that, initially, one works with this Guided Experience with an orientor and with others in the context of a Formative Meeting of Ang Kommunidad (The Community).

Before proceeding with this experience, one must be in a state of complete physical, internal and mental relax (see associated materials).

A reader reads the following for the others, in a calm and neutral voice, pausing for several seconds where an asterisk (*) is indicated.If no one volunteers to read, an .mp3 file may be launched by selecting radio button below. It will launch your computer's native media player and playback the Guided Experience. Adequate speakers or audio monitors must be connected to the computer for everyone to hear this well.

The Festival*

Lying in a bed, I gradually become aware that I’m in a hospital room. Faintly I hear the dripping of a faucet. I try to move my arms and legs and then my head, but they don’t respond. It’s an effort just to keep my eyes open.

I seem to hear someone at my bedside saying that fortunately I’m out of danger, and now it’s only a matter of resting. Though confusing, these words bring me great relief. My body feels heavy and drowsy, and grows more and more relaxed.

The ceiling is smooth and white. As each drop of water drips from the faucet, a ray of light flashes across the ceiling. One drop, one ray. Then another. Then many rays, and after this I see waves of light. The ceiling keeps on changing with the rhythm of my heart, perhaps an effect of the arteries in my head as blood pulses through them.

Now the rhythm outlines the face of a young person, who speaks to me saying, “Hey you, why don’t you come with me?”

“Sure,” I think, “why not?”

Up ahead is a music festival, and the sound of instruments floods with light a vast space carpeted with green grass and flowers.

Lying in the meadow facing the stage, I’m surrounded by an enormous sea of people. Happily there is plenty of space, so that no one is crowded. In the distance I see some childhood friends, and I can tell they are truly enjoying themselves.

I fix my attention on a flower, connected to its stem by a slender stalk that, within transparent skin, gleams a deep green. I reach out my hand, lightly running my finger along the polished fresh stem, barely disturbed by tiny knobs. Moving up through emerald leaves, I come to the petals, which open in a multicolored explosion. Petals like stained glass in a solemn cathedral, petals like rubies, petals like embers awakening into flame—and in this dance of hues, I feel the flower lives as if a part of me. (*)

The flower, disturbed by my touch, releases a sleepy drop of dew, barely clinging to the tip of a leaf. As it falls the drop vibrates, forming an oval, then it lengthens, and now in the emptiness it flattens out, only to become round again . . . falling in endless time, falling, falling through endless space . . . finally landing on a mushroom’s cap, the drop rolls like heavy mercury, sliding to the edge. There, in a spasm of freedom, it hurls itself into a tiny pool, raising a tempest of waves that bathe an island of marble. (*)

Looking up, I see a golden bee coming to sip from the flower, and in this intense spiral of life I withdraw my disrespectful hand, removing it from that dazzling perfection.

My hand—I look at it astonished, as if seeing it for the first time. Turning it over, opening and closing its fingers, I see the crossroads on my palm. And I comprehend that in those many lines all the roads of the world converge. I feel that this hand and its deep lines do not belong to me, and I give thanks within myself for this feeling of not possessing my body.

Ahead the festival continues, and I know that this music connects me with that young woman gazing at her clothes, and that young man leaning against a tree petting a blue cat.

I know that I have lived all this before, and I have known the tree’s jagged outline, and the sharply defined volume of each thing. Once before I have seen the soft shapes of these ochre clouds, set like cardboard cutouts against the immaculate blue of the sky.

And I have also lived before this timeless feeling in which my eyes seem not to exist, for they see everything so clearly, as if they were not the eyes of everyday seeing, eyes that cloud reality. I feel that everything is alive and all is well, and that the music and the things have no names, and nothing can ever truly name the. (*)

In the velvet butterflies that flutter around me, I recognize the warmth of lips and the fragility of sweet dreams.

The blue cat comes toward me, and suddenly I become aware of something obvious—the cat moves by itself, without cables, without remote control. The cat does everything by itself, and this amazes me. In its perfect movements, behind its beautiful yellow eyes, I know there is a life, and that everything else is a disguise, like the bark of the tree, the butterflies, the flower, the mercurial dewdrop, the clouds like cutouts, the hand with its converging roads. For a moment I seem to communicate with something universal. (*)

But then a soft voice interrupts me just before I pass into another state of consciousness. “Do you believe this is how things really are?” whispers the stranger. “I tell you that things are not this way, nor the other way either. Soon you will return to your grey world—without depth, without joy, without volume. And you will believe that you have lost your freedom. For now you do not understand me because you lack the capacity to think as you wish. Your apparent state of freedom is only the result of the natural chemical processes in your brain. This happens to thousands of people, who all receive my advice. And now, good-bye.”

With this the kindly stranger disappears, and the whole landscape begins to spin into a light grey spiral, until the wavy ceiling appears once more. I hear the water dripping from the faucet, and realize that I’m lying in the hospital room. I feel the dullness in my senses dissolving and try to move my head, and this time it responds, and so do my arms and legs. I stretch, and realize that I’m completely well. Leaping out of bed, I feel altogether refreshed, as though I have rested for years.

I go to the door of the room, open it, and stepping into the hallway walk quickly to the exit of the building. There I see a large open doorway, with many people passing through in both directions. I go down the steps and out onto the street.

 

 - END -

• Participants discuss their experiences.

*Note on this Experience:

In Heaven and Hell, Huxley remarked:

For most of us most of the time, the world of everyday experience seems rather dim and drab. But for a few people often, and for a fair number occasionally, some of the brightness of visionary experience spills over, as it were, into common seeing, and the everyday universe is transfigured.

What follows is the point of view of a psychologist who delved deeply into this guided experience, meditating on it while another person read it aloud: “I saw that a state of ‘heightened perception’ could be induced without resorting to drugs or other more or less dissociative procedures like sleep deprivation, fasting or very low-calorie diets, hyperventilation, sensory deprivation in isolation tanks where you’re immersed in darkness and immobility, experimentally or religiously induced trances, and so forth. To me this represents a great advance, both because of how innocuous it is and because of the possibilities it offers the researcher investigating special states of consciousness.

“Furthermore, why couldn’t we make use of the guided experiences as therapeutic tools in professional practice? Although it has been explained to me that they were not conceived with this intention, I would hope that this possibility is not overlooked. Moreover, in the field of social psychology, perhaps an important number of people who now resort to drugs or alcohol as a panacea could find guidance through making use of the guided experiences.

“These are my professional concerns. As for me personally, perhaps because this guided experience had such a strong impact on me, this material has opened a new area of study about myself that wouldn’t have occurred to me only a few hours ago.”