Using Msditation

When you have spent some time (maybe a lunar month) meditating, many things that people label "odd" may start to happen. The first: You will sense the presence of an entity: a discarnate being, let's say, who may be someone who has recently graduated ("deceased"). Such awarenesses are often called spirit guides. You may have heard people joke uneasily about their "fairy godmother" or their "guardian angel". Try to welcome your discarnate visitor(s) mentally and, when you get to know them, give them a name. If you live in a city large enough to support a Spiritualist church, seek out that church and attend some meetings: Sunday morning maybe, but do try to investigate the things they do on weeknights. You'll be surprised. Once a link is firmly established between you and your guide, you can stop using the protective salt circle and maybe the affirmation. Many of us, though, never stop affirming our intent and our gratitude with each sitting. Now is the time to decide what you want to use your meditation for. Just to update any incoming bulletin from the other Side? That's fine. Basically meditation relaxes everything and improves your health; but it can also serve for what is called astral travel: You leave your body idling while your spirit goes to a different level of awareness. For lack of a better comparison, it's as if you had double-parked outside the store and popped in to run a quick errand. The car is idling, ready for you to jump back in and drive away. Before you sit down to meditate, you need to think of something that we call an urgent necessity: something you need to know which is not easily looked up on the internet or easily determined by using your latest electronic gadget. When we taught a class on all this at a seminar; one attendee decided that her urgent necessity was to ascertain whether her cat was all right with the cat-sitter. She was actually able to travel on the astral plane and to see the cat and to be assured that it was doing well. It's fashionable right now to investigate your genealogy. Many people doing it have found that they can overcome gaps in their family line where they got stuck and were unable to progress through normal procedures. This often happens because records had been destroyed, and was especially prevalent in the post-Civil War period; example: when courthouses and all the records they held were burned. Southern records of emancipated slaves often do not include any specifics of past owner/slave histories. Slaves were regarded as property, not people; and they were described simply as "field hand" or "house slave" or the like. Such gaps can be filled in through astral travel: going back and "seeing" your ancestors. Astral travelers quite often notice that travel into the past eventually gives them pictures in sepia tones, and then fades out as they go further back in time. Further, the travelers can make no changes in the scene(s). This is reversed in travel into the future: There the colors of the scene brighten and the travelers' every thought makes changes in what they see. Here the Buddhist quiet mind is most important--vital, in fact. It's natural enough to feel confident that you can keep your mind quiet; but when you go into the future, if you think about a white bear standing in the corner, it will suddenly appear. This may be dangerous: When you get to that point in your future "real"--temporal--life, you may verily be faced with a white bear that you have unwittingly placed there. ... All of this may sound extremely weird--but when you try it, you'll find that instead of being weird, it's fact. And never forget about the Law of Attraction: When your intent is benevolent, good experiences will come to you. When it is negative ... need we get explicit?