My Initiations into the Overself
(1) A force welled up in the heart, rose to the head, then passed forwards into space. As it left the body, I knew I was not the body. I saw the mass of human beings struggling in the misery and strife because of their greed, desire, and selfishness. I saw hands holding the globe. They belonged to a figure whose face I could not see but whom I named "The Master." He said, "Free yourself." I moved on in space and saw on the horizon a coloured sunset glow of half-light which was my destination. I then knew I was not the personal self. But I did not continue and complete my journey. This was because fear entered me--perhaps fear of the unknown. So I returned to the body.
(2) A great love towards all things rises in me at times since the experience.
(3) Since the experience I have been so eager to return to it that I feel frustrated.
(4) The Consciousness first remained with me throughout every day and every night. Then it slowly remained for shorter and shorter periods--one hour less at a time. By the end of a few weeks it had totally disappeared.
(5) In that deep silence the ego was integrated with the Overself. The operation was almost wholly done through the power of Grace. It descended in overwhelming force and crushed out the ego's tyrannical rule.
(6) I found that I could fully enter this transcendental state at any time and at will simply by reorienting my attention upon the idea of turning inwards in the way that a hatha yogi who rolls up his eyeballs and crosses them detaches his attention from the remainder of his physical body. In order to bring about this change of awareness, a certain object of concentration had to be used. Generally it was a simple and short declarative phrase, either an affirmation or the pictorial memory of my most outstanding experience. When the change was effected I found myself at the centre of my being. It was the real "I." Time was then brought to a standstill.
(7) During the illumination there was no jubilant ecstasy, no emotional excitement, no unbalancing rapture. It was a happy peace, a calm abidance in beauty, love, wisdom.
(8) There was no desire to play the missionary and spread the knowledge of it far and wide. On the contrary, I told no one about it but kept it secret.
(9) I found I could go on thinking, or not thinking, while still remaining in the higher awareness.
(10) The period of elementary training was completed, its experience finished.
(11) As this presence held me, it gave me an invulnerable peace and a strange detachment from personal matters or outer happenings.
(12) A new insight of this kind cannot be got by those who refuse to enlarge their visionless academic learning, those whose experience of the world is in the end mostly an experience of pages in books.
(13) I was overpowered by a peculiar feeling of being unreal, and for once even unsure of my own identity.
(14) No psychic voice came into my hearing, no psychic vision unrolled before my eyes. The spiritual and mystical life may be fulfilled completely without entering such a dubious realm.
(15) There was no one whom I met who was unimportant. My interest in everyone, however short or transitory our meeting, was full and complete.
(16) To sit down every day at my writing table and put this experience into words on the paper that lies in front of me, is itself heartening and inspiring. But the fact that there are other people in the world, unknown to me, who feel the same spiritual need that I once felt and who might find some hope or stimulation in such a record of personal experience, also induces me to create this little heap of manuscript.
(17) Although there had been experiences in the past of what purported to be fragmentary visions of former reincarnations, I now saw that those experiences did not belong to any level beyond the higher psychic. From the present level the entire process of reincarnation now seemed to be illusory because it belonged to the realm of illusion itself. The true Self did not reincarnate at all.
(18) This technique of combined deep breathing and energy-raising was discovered quite accidentally--or so it seemed at the time. Certainly nobody taught it to me and no book revealed it to me. I was convinced then as a matter of faith, and today as a matter of knowledge, that it was picked up afresh out of the subconscious memory of former reincarnations.
(19) I saw that every little detail is predestined, even the fact that I am to write at this very moment, and to write just these particular words. All that has happened to me in the past has brought me to this point, which makes the act a fated one. I am not free to do anything else than write, nor to write anything different from what I am writing.
(20) I saw that everything which happens does so in conformity with the World-Idea. The entire planetary situation, which includes the situation of each being within it, is providentially arranged.
-- Notebooks Category 12: Reflections > Chapter 3 : Encounter With Destiny > # 60
