Meditation Experiences

Meditating with an enlightened being can be an awesome experience, as I found out in Los Angeles at a meeting about a month after my first meeting with Rama in San Francisco. I had heard stories of what it could be like to meditate with Rama--stories about the room dissolving in golden light--but I had not experienced it first hand before this particular evening. I had just spent a few days hiking in the Sierras, which had been an exhausting experience for me--it had been my first time backpacking. However, I arrived in L.A. refreshed and read for a new experience.

I was not to be disappointed. The meeting was held at a nice hotel in Beverley Hills, and it started out with a dinner with a Middle Eastern theme to it. The colors seemed to be the brightest that I have ever seen--colors always seem a lot brighter when Rama is around for some reason--and all the dinner tables were under large tent-like structures. Middle Eastern music played in the background, and pretty soon a group of three belly dancers started to circulate around the room. They were very attractive and certainly added to the sense of color and electricity that was in the air that evening.

One doesn't always realize it initially, but at any event with Rama, he is always transmuting people's consciousness on an inner level even before he begins to speak on a physical level. Thus, by the time he begins to speak, one is already in a very high state of mind--very clear, with few thoughts to block the experience of the Clear Light of Reality--and is ready to be sent completely over the top.

After awhile, he did begin to speak. I don't actually remember everything that he said, although I do remember that he talked a little bit about belly dancing and recommended the book The Sorcerer's Crossing by Taisha Abelar. However, at a certain point I became suddenly aware that Rama had changed form. Indeed, he no longer seemed to be human at all, but instead had merged into a brilliant aura of gold and white light at the front of the room. I thought for a second maybe there was something wrong with my eyes, so I rubbed my eyes. I also tried looking away from Rama--when I did things returned to "normal"--but whenever I looked back at Rama, all I could see were these pulsating waves of light.

More than anything else, this experience shaped my perception of Rama and made me aware at a deep level of his enlightenment. There are those who would say that this experience was only hypnosis. However, I've been hypnotized, and this was something far more. I felt great--better than I'd ever felt before in my life--for days afterward. There was an incredible sense of optimism about life that this experience produced in me, and gave me levels of energy I hadn't experienced in years, or perhaps ever. No mere hypnotist would have been able to do that. After this, I was convinced that Rama was the real thing.

Meditation, by the way, isn't something that Rama's students only do when Rama is in the room. We meditate twice a day--in the mornings and evenings--and usually have a lot of fun doing it. The energy levels are not quite as high as when he is physically in the room, but they can still be pretty intense. Rama can probably explain better than I could how to meditate--check out his book Snowboarding to Nirvana for more info!