Stepping Stones
A Message for the Future of Humanity
My favorite phrase in all the spiritual teachings I have encountered comes from the Bhagavad Gita, the classical text of ancient India teaches “As It Is”. Observe and inquire into reality “As it is.”
We normally see the world as we ARE, not as it IS. To see reality as it is, we have to change the instrument we use to investigate, which is ourselves.
I am going to share with you a story about an encounter that happened one day during my meditation practice. It was an encounter with beings who identified themselves to me as the Seraphim, which for those unfamiliar is the name of the angels who are said to surround the throne of heaven in the Bible. Such encounters are a very prominent, but rarely discussed, feature of the perennial wisdom and are found in virtually all spiritual traditions.
Although the symbols and images change from one culture to another, there is an internal evolutionary mechanism or developmental process to which they point.
This experience was very humbling for me. For most of my life, my ego structure has had an aversion to people talking about angels, or any other other otherworldly being.
I had a lot of judgments and concepts around these things, but nevertheless I have a clear inner direction to report on my experience, so maybe this is a kind of karmic reckoning for me.
What I am going to talk about is not related to religion or beliefs, but has to do with encountering new dimensions of your own being. I am going to try to convey the experience in a precise way, without interpretations or concepts. I have some ideas that I will share at the end, but I think it is important that the description of the actual experience be neutral and unadorned.
This experience occurred during a period when I was doing a lot of meditation. I entered a state of samadhi or a turiya state which is described in the samadhi movies in detail. So this was a state of continuous presence, presence of primordial consciousness and it lasted for several days.
I have been doing meditation for over 20 years and have also been running a meditation retreat center, the Samadhi Centre in Canada, for several years. At the beginning of my practice I started using various techniques, particularly Buddhist techniques such as those related to Samatha, which is tranquility, Vipassana, which is insight meditation. And after exploring the techniques for more than a decade, I was attracted to the practices of not doing or not practicing. Self-enquiry, mahamudra, choiceless awareness, shikantaza or what they call in Zen “just sitting.”
I realized that the meditation that leads to samadhi is not an activity or a doing, but an awakening to the dimension of being, which is what I have called primordial awareness. On the day in question I was abiding as awareness allowing everything to be as it is and had stopped discriminating pain and pleasure. I was experiencing satchitananda, the bliss that comes when primordial awareness is present. One realizes a new level of awareness that both includes and transcends the senses.
The senses are essentially at their maximum and energy expands through them into the higher realms activating what Rudolph Steiner would call organs of higher perception. In this experience, an unknown but profoundly exquisite sensation arose within the energy body, like a new dimension of consciousness being awakened or a new faculty being activated.
This is not my usual language, but I felt that this feeling was placed in me by God. There is always a tendency within the ego to grasp and hold on to experiences, especially when beautiful experiences occur. But this day I did not hold on to it; I simply let it unfold without any thought arising, just having a full experience of it. At least at first it was like that.
I would describe it as a deeply sacred feeling and felt intuitively that it was an ancient form of prayer. This was prayer itself. Until that moment I had not known what true prayer was, if you had asked me before this, I would certainly have said that I did.
My ego, which is a highly spiritualized ego, likes to think it knows everything, but it is humbled time and time again. Now I know that I don’t know what I don’t know.
The phenomenon unfolding in the structure of the self was something different from what for 20 years I considered meditation to be. It was something totally unknown. I began to meditate or pray in this sacred way, although I can’t take credit for it happening,
it was just happening.
It was as if the body and energy structure were being “prayed”. Consciousness was purely conscious, non-local, omnipresent, but nowhere. Samadhi is not an experience, but a collapse of the duality of the experiencer and the experienced.
A luminous presence appeared interacting with my energy field in the third eye. At this point, there were actually several levels of phenomena unfolding simultaneously. I became aware of my gross physical body meditating, and through inner vision I perceived what appeared to be some sort of temple. There was a humanoid figure with wings and a bird’s tail, in my mind at the time I thought he looked like a Sufi.
He had a flat hat and a beard, and he wore a glowing ring. I felt an incredible power in this being and somehow I knew that the ring he wore was alive. Surrounding him were beings of angelic light who identified themselves as “the Seraphim”. As soon as I turned my attention to the beings of light, I no longer saw the man in the Sufi hat.
I could not focus on these light beings directly, they were indistinct, like fractals in motion; recursive patterns that held a general shape, but endlessly changed, like dancing energy They were beautiful and I wanted to focus on them, but I could not or they would begin to disappear. So I relaxed into a kind of blurred vision, accepting that I could not form a clear image of them.
There were three of them and they moved and spoke as one. These are their exact words, “We are the Seraphim, if you merge with our light there is much we can show you. To become like us you must burn only with love for the Creator, and his consuming fire will quickly transform you into the flaming likeness of the Seraphim. “They emphasized the word “only” and the word felt meaningful. Each of the three emanated the same sacred feeling or vibration . As the Bible says, they emanated “holy, holy, holy,” but it was not an auditory word or mantra.
It is hard to describe, but somehow their very being was that sacred vibration or emanation. What was strange was that the Seraphim seemed somehow mechanical, This part I don’t really understand, they were conscious and interactive, but they seemed like a machine on, with an endless loop, like a message repeating endlessly. I saw their pattern, it seemed as if they were an ancient template groaning and creaking, blinking to life for this specific purpose. At first their energy was a bit subdued, but as I opened to the experience, it energized to a full glow.
My self-structure was in awe, but consciousness merely watched, impassive. I was told that when the Seraphim come, they are usually followed by a great upheaval, and at the time I wasn’t sure if they meant a great upheaval in my life or an upheaval on Earth.
“Through the Seraphim the soul can complete its journey to God and live.”
Those were the exact words given, “Through the Seraphim the soul is able to complete its journey to God and live.”
Sacred feelings began to grow and I began to feel a deep love, a love without discrimination, like a sun shining. There are no words for this. There was a deep letting go within my being and I really began to shift into light or emptiness or both. It was not a dream, but absolutely vivid and seemed amazingly real, happening on multiple levels of being. I began to burn with a living white flame starting at my feet and all of me was drawn to God. It was an atomic dissolution.
I have been through countless death experiences or letting go experiences during meditation practice or experiences with entheogens, breathing, yoga exercises, but this one seemed totally different. More real, hyper-real, and deeper; connected to the soul. It was a level of non-dual union and cessation of self that was absolute.
As this dissolution began to happen at one point my mind reconnected and asked “am I dying? Is this the end of my real life?”, and as soon as that happened I realized that I had identified myself. I had generated an egoic thought, a fearful thought, and the dissolution process stopped everything faded away. If what was happening had been completed, I honestly don’t know if I would be here to tell the tale. So that’s the description of the event itself.
Now I’m going to give a sort of commentary of what I think or feel about the event.
This was an amazing event for several reasons:
During this unique experience I confirmed without a doubt that the higher realms described by the spiritual masters are as real or more real than this world. It was also surprising that it happened to me, even though there was largely an abandonment of my self-identification. I am certainly not the strongest meditator, I am not prone to devotion and although I have done a lot of inner work and perhaps purified many attachments, I still fall into ego identifications and traps.
I am far from being any kind of saint, so my opinion or my intuition about this is that I have been given a preview of what is to come; of what is possible for human evolution for me to tell. Preparing the groundwork for those who will come in the future who will grow and evolve into union with source.
Through the coupling of the Seraphim, or one could say matching their vibration, humans can achieve the same unmediated union with God. We are meant to imitate them, to merge with their light, to resemble them, but not to worship them. They represent a latent possibility in ourselves.
It is important to abandon the experience so as not to add it to the structure of oneself, so that the ego does not cling to it and create an identity or a new closed view of the world. The paradox is that peak or mystical experiences tend to develop around Samadhi, but it is important not to confuse any experience with Samadhi itself.
There are a number of insights I have drawn from the experience:
When I came back to the world after this, a big insight was that we, as human beings, are completely ignorant of who we are and what our place is in the universe. Human beings are myopic creatures, filled with arrogance to a laughable degree. We have mastered the arts of distortion, deception and limitation; we have lost our sense of our place in the great chain of being.
Instead, we have cultivated an independent self that is an amazing creation in its own right, but this independent self has grown to a point that presents choices. We have the choice to serve the directions and desires of that egoic self or rejoin the spiral of life in alignment with the divine plan.
Realizing that samadhi is only the first step in an unfathomable journey; expanding the inner lotus to higher worlds or to the process of enlightenment, which is a path, not a destination. To awaken is to awaken to the immutable dimension of absolute being, pure consciousness, while enlightenment is the continuous dance of evolution and involution within the manifested world; the endless cycle of becoming. Being and becoming merge, dancing as one. Human play allows for the possibility of creating an expanded and purified human vessel, the problem is that we have to sacrifice egoic desires to allow for this divine connection.
That is why Jesus is called “Lamb of God”. Jesus the human person was sacrificed so that the Christ consciousness, the logos could live through the human form.
Many non-dual teachers will say that everything is perfect just as it is, the primordial consciousness is perfect just as it is. There is a sacred simplicity in this moment, a sacred perfection in this moment. And yet at the same time we are growing this ever unfolding lotus, with the possibility of offering the human vessel to be inhabited by these levels of consciousness.
The paradox is that everything is “YOU” in the grand sense of “you.”
This higher level of consciousness is not a foreign entity but you are THAT. An angel is simply a conscious field of fluctuating energy for the sole purpose of connecting us to the primordial source. This small human being connects to it and becomes what it can be; as in a bridge between the manifested and unmanifested world. In this sense, the Seraphim teach us what we can become.
