Meditation begins as most do. I feel as if I am a small stone sinking into an ocean of filtered light. The light seems to be coming from all directions. I slow, almost pause, at certain levels before my specific gravity increases again, and I sink deeper into this ocean of consciousness—no real experience of having entered this ocean—just being there and going deeper and deeper. It is beyond peaceful, beyond serene.
Many in the LDS Church may believe it was unique to Joseph Smith, but is it?
Ann invited me to write a guest post for her blog, Enlightenment is for Everyone: Exploring Potential From Every Angle. I did so, writing of Joseph Smith's First Vision experience from a mystical awakening universal divine grace perspective, using the various firsthand and secondhand accounts. My blog post is titled "The Divine Light of a Lowly Farmer Boy." You may read it on Ann's blog.
"Sometimes during meditation golden light pours into my head, as if squeezed through a cloth, filling my head with light. At times, I feel like a newborn baby entering a new dimension of reality made of infinite tenderness, purity, love, and divine wholeness, a heavenly domain."
"Sometimes in meditation I experience deep silence, being in an unbounded empty space. Sometimes I see light in that empty space like the sun."
"One day during my [meditation] my head became full of light and the room was full of sunlight (and yet it was totally cloudy outside). It was beautiful. I felt healed, safe and full of nature's forgiveness. After meditation I lay down for a few minutes and I felt as if I was lying gently in heaven's cradle."
My experience of stillness, or transcendental consciousness, has become vast and universal, often blazing with intensely brilliant, even blinding, light. Words cannot even begin to describe the intensity of bliss and the tenderness of emotions that not only swell in my heart, but penetrate into every pore of my being. Is this an experience of God?
During the first few years after I started meditating, the experience of deep silence was absorbing and charming. I would see a dark vastness in front of me. In time this darkness sometimes transformed into a field of brilliant light.