I would like to ask anyone who meditates to share their experiences with me.

I am interested in what techniques you use and where you can get to, i'm thinking in terms of Patanjalis levels of single object meditation:
examination, discrimination, joyfull peace, and simple awareness, however any experiences had while meditating are welcome.

To start things rolling i'll tell you about an experience I had last night:

I can basically meditate to the examination level only, and last night i was meditating on my grandad, he was a great man and was cut down in his prime. So i used his name as a mantra and off i went...

I stilled my brainwaves, my breathing was deep and controlled, and i believe i reached the examination level. Then I started seeing images, faces, and they weren't very nice ones, they were twisted and contorted, oh and they turned to look at me when they noticed me! I couldn't see the face of my grandad among them and eventually gave up, feeling a little scared to be honest.

I've no idea what happened or who this lot were, the only thing I can think of, apart from many bad horror films was that I was among the dead ???

here's an interesting article that may have something to do with my experience:

Mirror meditation.

 This is a Third Eye exercise, designed to open the Third Eye, and it is useful for enhancing the process of integrating the collective consciousness. It will give you an opportunity to give love to the aspects of your greater, collective Self, as faces that are not your own, appear as your reflection in the mirror. Some of these faces will probably scare you, it is an opportunity to give love despite fear. If you become really spooked by it, then stop, turn the lights on and get grounded. If you have a tendency to paranoia, then this meditation is not for you!
I call this meditation "The Mirror Game", and enjoy it as a "Kundalini party trick." Fun to do with other people, at parties! All of us gathered in a darkened bathroom, meeting alternate aspects of each other, or facing each other in a circle, with the lights dimmed. As you do this game, you will become unified with the other people you are doing it with, and you will actually start seeing the same things.

In the twilight, when it's dim, it's very easy for your eyes to play tricks on you and that's what we want. We want tricks.

I have fun with it, I treat it lightly, because I find a casual approach is less intimidating and scary to people... but the use of mirrors and similar exercises have been used for serious magic, for thousands of years. There is quite some power and history behind this game. The oldest Celtic burials show that each person was buried with a scrying mirror, not clear enough to actually use for examining your physical appearance, but cloudy for scrying to see and communicate with one's patron diety or spirit guides.

It's fun to do solo, and it's also fun to do it with other people, so long as none of them are too easily frightened. Don't use it to scare people! Ask for the protection and assistance of your guardian Angels, before you begin, and remember to get grounded, and stay grounded. If you can manage to get into the Witness state, so much the better!

To play the game, you need a dark room, a lit candle and a mirror. Preferably a wall mirror, so you do not have to hold it. By light of a single candle that's placed somewhere behind you or well off to one side, in a very dark room, gaze into a mirror. Look into your own eyes, or focus on the third eye spot between your eyebrows, on your forehead. Because of the light being very dim, you'll find that your eyes keep going out of focus. Let them. Avoid blinking to refocus your eyes, because it is the soft focus that will reveal the faces. When your eyes go out of focus, don't try to blink to clear them, let them go out of focus, but keep looking.

When your eyes go out of focus, your Third Eye will kick in, and it will start to show you other faces. Other aspects of yourself, past lives, faces from the collective, aliens, faeries, people of other races and other times, all kinds of faces. Some of them may be faces of old Gods, like Hecate or Thor. Some of them may be your Divine Beloved showing up to say hello. Often with people who are just doing this for the first time, the faces will flash by so quickly that you can't see them completely. Sometimes a face will linger so you can get a good look at it. I have seen a grey alien in my mirror, so steady and clear that I could turn my head and see the sides of it's head, and examine the tiny wrinkles in the dove grey skin around its large black eyes.

Some of the faces will probably be very scary looking. This is to challenge you to give unconditional love to All That Is. The grey alien usually freaks people when they first see it, because it is so strange, so very alien and unemotional. The old God archetype of Hecate, for example often appears with one side of her face a skull, and the other a cat! Yet, Hecate is a Mother Goddess, of hearth, home and patron of childbirth. Benevolent. So don't get scared of the faces you see, no matter how horrific they are. Just pretend you're Stephen King, and you're looking for material for a good novel. As long as you stay grounded, the faces won't scare you. It's very important to do this exercise when you're grounded.

Again, it's very simple. A completely dark room, a mirror, like a bathroom mirror, if you can sit comfortably in front of it, or you can do it standing. One candle, not in front of you, but behind you or off to the side somewhere. The room should be dim enough so that you can just barely can make out your features. You can just barely see yourself as your eyes adjust to the light. Set the candle down, be grounded, relax, allow your eyes to go out of focus, and stare into the mirror.

If you focus on your Divine Beloved, it may show up so clearly that you can almost talk to it. Which is a very interesting experience, seeing the opposite gender version of yourself in your bathroom mirror. Let your eyes go out of focus, and just give unconditional love to all of these reflected images, and all the faces that come up. No matter how scary they may look, they can't hurt you. They're just showing up so you can love them.

By loving them, you reduce the separation and integrate them as part of your Self. Not in a bad way, simply in a way that we are taking the separate ego-mind, and we are bringing it down through the levels of the unconscious. At different levels of the unconscious, the past lives, and the archetypes, and the collective faces are available as information. As you move down through the collective, there will be more and more faces. And then finally, as you get closer to Unity, there will be fewer faces. They'll gradually reduce until you may see the same half dozen faces coming up again and again. Where before, you were seeing a thousand faces in an hour, or even more.

Eventually, you will vanish! Where your head used to be, there will be nothing, and you can see the wall behind it. This might freak you out the first time it happens, but it is very positive. The Buddha aspires to be nothingness.

This is perfectly normal. It's a good way to open and work on your Third Eye. All I have to caution you against is to be very grounded, and not to be afraid of what you see.

That is the challenge, to give unconditional love to All That IS, and accept it. The faces can't hurt you, but they're neat, they're fun to watch. Enjoy it! Blessings...

This was taken from:http://www.kundalini-teacher.com/meditatio...ons/mirror.html

I was pretty consistent with meditating up until a few months ago...I admit only doing it for a few months (concentrating on my breathing only) and then I kind of allowed myself to be distracted..  :-[ and I wasn't aware that there were different levels to be reached, but I do remember this one that you are referring to...I saw one bad face and I immediately stopped...I couldn't even close my eyes to sleep afterwards so I strayed for a few days after that also.  

That's an interesting technique that you posted, but I'm not sure I would be able to take it any further.

That's interesting elle, i'm glad someone else has seen this. Do you feel that your experience is the same thing described in the article?:

QUOTE

Third Eye will kick in, and it will start to show you other faces. Other aspects of yourself, past lives, faces from the collective, aliens, faeries, people of other races and other times, all kinds of faces

I have yet to try this technique out and to be honest, after my experience it bothers me a bit because that wasn't nice.

I'm not sure about that one Laz...but the face I saw resembled an alien....so I guess I should say it was a scary one for me, not necessarily bad.

Laz,
Would you reccomend this meditation exersize to beginner meditators? Because I'm a beginner and, this exersise interests me. Do you need to use a candle light? Can it be a night light? What kind of breathing exersises should I do during this mirror thing, if any?

How can I induce the proper state of mind in order to have these magical experiences?

Hi Karl,

I tried this meditation a little while ago, and saw some effects, however I fear that any alien faces or visual disturbances are false. It's like looking at clouds and seeing faces!

Hence I would not recomend this to anyone, it's a cheap, cult, scaremongering kind of meditation and i'm sure its just a fake; like saying candyman 7 times into a mirror.

However i would recommend the grounding technique from the kundalini-teacher.com website as a start to meditation. As with the mirror meditation, it is written in what I would call hippie speak, and is very "new age therapy" but if you can look past that, then you should be able to get something out of it.

I think I already posted a link to this site in another thread, but I will post the whole description here for your convenience

Thanks Laz, I'l print this out and practice it sometime. I think I'm still going to try that other one two but, only after I have gronded myself. I looked at that site and found it pretty interesting. Well, talk to you later.

Once, I meditated upon the mirror, and after twenty minutes, the whole room turned indigo blue, and all these hindu deities appeared along with the avatars of vishnu. What does that mean ? Anyone ??

Ahh what is real and what isn't. The age old perceptions of reality are always amusing don't ya think?
If there is a God and God does indeed Create, then is what God creates real or imaginary?
Of what in creation is not created from imagination?

Would the Hindu Gods be any more imaginary than say, Me!?.....

the distinction here is imagined vs. physical. If a perception of an object is based only in the imagination of a person then the perceived object is 'unreal', while if it exists physically then it is 'real'. 'Real' means physical. It seems that certain kinds of religious nuts have a real hard time with this distinction, probably because they interpret all of their perceptions as their personal imaginary property.

This topic always leads to some interesting ideas dontcha think?

Lets say you have a feeling. Someone hits you in the face and besides the physical pain there seems to be some emotional pain/trauma that accompanies it.
Seeing as how it is only in the mind and imaginary it wouldn't be real, for the imagination only takes its beliefs in its emotions and projects its point of origin to the physical source.
The problem here is that the emotional trauma can last longer than the physical source and beyond the duration of the physical reality of the action.
The choice to make it real exists within the mind.
What is real to the mind is real in the physical. Ask any hypochondriac, who has manifest the symptoms of the illness whether the physical symptoms are real as a result of the belief. This alone has led to some interesting studies of the power of the mind on physical realities.
Placebos have been used to study the effects of such power of suggestion, healing physical symptoms with the suggestive powers of the placebo has had dramatic effects on the body and the mind.

What the human mind negates as reality due to inexperience always creates controversy. Prejudice, fear and small thinking always leads to the labeling of the out of ordinary as superstition and illusion.

The basis of all systems of belief starts with the imagination of reality in its comaparatives with experience.
As the evolution of science follows the evolution of thought more is manifest into reality.
It is said that anything that can exist already exists within creation and waits for the mind to cognize it into physical reality.
It seems many wish to limit possibility to show me first and I will believe.
This type of thinking lacks any spiritual insight which always denies the point of origin of all thought, feeling and action, and limits reality to definitons that do not satisfy the heart which always preceeds the intellect.
The intellect will always focus on a static definition and the heart always searches for more, and when it finds it the intellect tries to squeeze it into the confines of the past definitions and experiences.
Breaking old paradigms and creating new ways to percieve reality is the expansion of Conscious awareness.
Trying to contain the universe in the old quart jar of the past is pretty much a waste of time.

it seems that I should clarify my real=physical definition. If a person imagines a physical object, the reality is only of an imaginary construct and not reflective of a true physical object. If a person imagines vishnu is in their room, but vishnu is in fact not physically in their room but is only imagined as being there, we say for clarity that vishnu was not 'really' in their room. Is this still too hard to understand?

Man You guys are harsh.
You make imagination sound like insanity, which would make all children and people of inspiration, delusional.
I just can't imagine limiting the universe to textbook and dictionary definitions because one cannot explain the subtle or the indefinable without blowing it off to delusion.

I have deleted my recent 3 posts because they were effectively so different in terms of opinions expressed c.f. those who posted before me!
I apologise sincerely for any indiscretion which may have been perceived.

A Teacher once said, "Let the dead bury the dead." I feel sorry for the children...

I can certainly see both points of view here, and I think that you just need to agree on where to draw the line between them.

Certainly nothing exists in our society without it first being a matter of mind and imagination. Things don't just materialise out of thin air, they have to be translated to actions and those actions into product.

The promise of spirituality is that you can skip the middle steps, and what you imagine just becomes real because you imagine it. Now this on the surface sounds rediculous in the context our society, but there's definately something about it.

It's like trying to prove you're conscious to someone, you can't. One test that could maybe help is the Turing test, but it doesn't help because is fataly flawed. A machine doesn't need to be conscious to mimick consiousness. You cannot prove to me that you are not a robot mimicking consciousness, and I am the only one truely alive, this is the old Solipsism thing.

It would be easy to suggest a believer prove it by imagining something to be real for someone else. I don't think it could ever be that easy though. The truth seems to only be true for the individual, anothers truth is another truth! A consencous of opinion is maybe enough for one to believe in the groups decision, but that doesn't do it for me I want to find my own truth.

What we need is a way to share consciouness, then we would have our proof, drugs could lead us to this and shouldn't be ruled out as escapism for those who can't cope with everyday living.

This sounds like a different tone from you, Joesus...., but language is such a limited and feeble mode of expression for our consciousness, and is utterly useless, it seems, for transcendent modes of consciousness. So what is the medium for communicating about higher states of consciousness? I agree with Laz and can think of nothing other than to somehow directly communicate the experience and state-of-mind to someone else, so that they may directly experience what you have, and to have the same state-of-mind.

Cool, I like this thread

I see my drug experiences as a quasi-scientific investigation, i'd like to do an Aldous Huxley and describe them in minute detail. By taking various drugs I am firstly trying to verify the things others have reported and then using that experience as a hook, latch on to and remember it in later meditations.

I believe certain drugs to be a short-cut to infinity, but for only a glimpse of it. To re-visit and reside there I will find another way

it's kind of like having someone explain a complex situation to you in words alone, it's difficult to understand. However if they draw a picture then you can visualise it and understand/remember that much more easily.

Drugs are the picture, meditation the understanding.

I'd love to see a picture of two people sharing a consciousness, because that's something I don't understand.

One other avenue I am trying to explore is dreaming, but I am having trouble. I would like to extend my request of Karl to all; if you find you are dreaming please come and wake me up as well. You can find me by finding a silver Volvo estate(station wagon)