Do You Trust Your Experience?

Frequently, we deny our own spiritual experiences. Or perhaps more often, our beliefs about what’s possible are so strong and rigid that they don’t even allow us to accept that we’re having a spiritual experience at all. It’s like sitting outside in the sun and not feeling the warmth because the forecast called for cold. Or perhaps the person next to us says “You’re crazy, it’s not warm! It’s cold.” Who do we trust? Our own experience of warmth? Or the others who deny it?

But no belief system or social pressure can actually revoke, or even diminish spiritual experience. Experiences persist, sometimes below the surface of what our conscious awareness will allow, sometimes poking through and challenging the status quo of our own belief systems. They persist because, as the saying goes, Truth will out. What is real cannot stay hidden forever. The evolution of consciousness naturally and organically widens our perspective to include more and more subjective possibilities.

When I sit at the Matrimandir Meditations with Guruji-Ma*, I feel the same quality of energy that I’ve felt while sitting in the Matrimandir itself. There is a palpable Light that descends from above the Earth, pouring into it, blessing and transforming creation. I feel this with my body – my nervous system, but also with my soul. There is a wisdom in me that is more comprehensive, more penetrating, more illumined than my mind. It can sense the wholeness behind collectives, the intention behind actions, the possibilities within circumstances. This faculty has become sensitized and articulate after years of carefully attending to it, listening, feeling, sensing with discernment and tracing the experiences through time, as premonition flowers into actuality. I have come to trust it, not rigidly or blindly, but with a kind of openness, curiosity, and fluidity that allows it room to breathe and express.

During the Matrimandir Meditations, I feel an energy of Light that is unique to the Matrimandir descending into my body. I feel it move through my head, and downward through my body, resonating and awakening my body’s inherent Light. And I feel it around me, penetrating through my skin and flowing into my in the currents of my inhaling breath. I also feel it and relate to it with something vaster than my body or my mind. And this something, this spiritual sense, offers context and understanding about what’s happening. I sense that the Light is magnetized to the Earth by Guruji-Ma’s* presence, by her profound surrender and self-giving, and by her unique being and dharma. Each of us who sits in these meditations participates in receiving and anchoring the Light, allowing it to absorb into the Earth and support transformation.

When I am near Guruji-Ma, I feel the power of her energetic field. There is a love that radiates from her, and it is as palpable to me as sunlight. This energy invites my heart to awaken and the deepest aspirations of my soul to step forward into my life, and it rearranges the energetic configuration of my own mind/body system to facilitate that. In the Matrimandir Meditations, something is added to her own field. I feel the energy that the Mother established as the foundation and container for the Matrimandir flowing into the space where we sit. Guruji-Ma’s own unique relationship to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother makes this possible, and furthers the manifestation of the Matrimandir itself. I sense a seamless flow of action, starting from the Mother’s original vision of the Matrimandir, through its more concrete conceptualization, its construction over several decades by loving and devoted Aurovilians, its radiance drawing to itself millions of visitors, and this manifestation in America, actualized by Guruji-Ma.

There are so many assertions contained here that cannot be verified, and that defy our culturally designated limits of acceptability. But I am giving myself permission to step outside of those limits and validate me own experience. And I share this all with you as an invitation, not to believe me, but to be curious, and to see what you experience. I invite you to suspend the pressing demands of social conformity and step out into the wild untamed land of your own experience. Restrain for a moment the belief structures that define the known, and let in the unknown. Bask in its infinitude. Revel in the erosion of impossibility. Set your soul free, and see what comes.

*My spiritual teacher Julie of Light Omega has recently received the name Guruji-Ma. It is a Sanskrit name that more accurately conveys her dharma as a teacher and servant of the Divine Mother.