What Meditation Has Taught Me

By Maurie D. Pressman, M.D.

---

I don’t know to what degree meditation is known in its very real and core essential. I do know that I used to understand it only superficially, but I have learned. Meditation is the gateway to a new world, a greater mind, a capacity we have that is infinite and divine in its essential.

     Years ago I had the privilege of having private darshan (audience) with Muktananda. I was very Westernized at the time, to say the least. In his presence, however, I felt an enormous surge of love in my heart and a huge dedication to helping the world through my profession. When I asked for advice as to my further development, he said, “Meditate, meditate, meditate.” While I thought that was superficial at the time, I have learned it is essential. It is The Essential.

     What is there about meditation that makes me say this?

     We are essentially Divinity (Spirit), precipitated as we descend from the creative heights into this material plane. We learn here, and we return. Meditation is learning here and return, both at the same time.

     When we meditate, we loosen the ties with our earthly home by removing attention from the body, from the emotions, and from the ordinary preoccupations of life. Then we are in a place of silence; we are at the cusp. We remain in contact with the earth, but we are open to reception from High Planes, from the Cosmic Wisdom. If we retain what we learn (if we remember it), we can weave it into life and grow progressively into the Spirit-beings that we are.

     With that in mind, I would like to transmit some of my meditations and their meaning for me. Not selfishly, but in the spirit that we are all essentially alike and that we can learn from each other. Here is the first ...

Revolution Evolution

We are in the midst of a rapidly developing revolution, a part of an accelerating evolution.

     The veil between the two worlds in which we live—the world of the five-sensory realm, the material world, the scientific world, the here and now “can-do” world, and the world of thought-spirit-love-imagination-subtle energy, of God!—is gradually growing thinner. But not too gradually, and perhaps at an accelerating pace.

     Heretofore, we have worshiped the physical-scientific way. Gradually society has become aware of the spiritual-thought world, its reality and its power. A whole host of new happenings are on the scene.

     • the popularity, yes, the popularity, of after death communication and after death experience;

     • the interest in past lives, as has been popularized by Brian Weiss;

     • the increasing interest in after death communication following upon Raymond Moody’s familiarizing us with near-death experiences;

     • the communication with the deceased, as part of Marc Macy’s research;

     • and the work of the late and wonderful spiritual psychiatrist John Mack, who gathered experiences with those he named “expriencers,” those who feel they have had experiences of being abducted by the UFO-ers. From these he deduced that the UFOs were here to help us to create a newer and better society.

     Now we have the latest work by Alan Botkin, IADC (induced after-death communication), involving after death communication brought about through the use of EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing).

     Experiences such as those of Botkin’s IADC-ers, and Raymond Moody’s near-death experiencers, the experiences of the Indigo children, a new breed of children who come into the world with knowledge and conviction of the after death realms and “goodness” of it all—all of this new knowledge brings us progressively into a higher world of subtle energies, the realm of higher consciousness and, indeed, Love

     This is a revolution-evolution, which in the West was started by Freud, who made introspection legitimate, and had us learn that the inside-self, the inner-directed self is important in our lives. We have learned that we are not just a bunch of outward-directed people. The inner-self is moving us in significant ways. The popularization of psychoanalysis has led us, and continues to lead us, into a veritable proliferation of ways of understanding ourselves, healing ourselves emotionally and mentally, and therefore of investigating ourselves.

     It was Alan Watts who brought this into our country, along with a whole host of others: Grof, Maslow, Pierrokis—all of this gathering as a revolution-evolution, bringing us closer and closer to the other side, and the other side closer and closer to us. Instead of a wall between the two worlds, we have a veil, a fog or a mist, which promises to become clearer and clearer, and as it does, we will integrate the goodness of God, which is the other side, into our lives and our culture and our society, and live in the Promised Land.

     And another ...

Personality Counts

Personality is that through which we live. If we are the expression of the soul which created us, we are not unlike the filter that changes the color of the light as it comes through the projector. So we, in our personalities, change the expression of the light from within; we color it, we distort it into something else.

     What is the importance of this? If we study ourselves and get to know ourselves better, we can locate our distortions and convey ourselves in a progressively purer way. Our light from within becomes progressively white and we become more of what we are in potential. We approach our divinity.

     I have noticed this, not only in my patients, but in many people of high achievement, many of whom I admire greatly.

     A researcher, well known for her contributions to the study of the higher mind, and one who has an extraordinary psychic gift, nevertheless is held back by the residues of an overly strict and compulsively moral upbringing. This has given rise to in a certain degree of shyness about promulgating her own contributions, a certain inhibition due to hypertrophied self-criticism. To relieve this would free her to put forth her very important contributions, and to do so more fully and more clearly—the expressions of a purer light.

     Since the early 1970s, I’ve been working with Olympic skaters. In the beginning, I noticed with great surprise that the skater’s personality “flows through the blade.” It is the inner self wanting to express itself. But the distortions, the learned inhibitions, the contaminations of learned personality, distort the pure expression of pure performance. One must be true to oneself. The skater who is afraid to communicate his or her true self neither completes the self or the performance. I remember one very gifted girl who was squashed by her coach who insisted on having her skate his way. Thus the inhibition of her own free flow, her gift of the beauty of her presentation, disappeared—as did she.

     We are at our best when we project the inner light harmoniously, with free flow and with the strength of a coherent laser. Pure expression comes when the skater (or we) are unafraid to express our individual style.

     Perhaps in this fast food society, where we are in such a rush, we have forgotten too much of the humanity that we are, and therefore we have imposed too many filters

---

Contact Dr. Pressman by writing to: Maurie D. Pressman, M.D., 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106, or call 215-922-0204, fax 215-922-3008, email: mauriedavid@earthlink.net, or visit his website, www.mauriepressman.com.

---

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to the Home Page