July 23, 2025

 I was kind of dumb. For the past many months when I meditate, I’ve been pretending that I have no outside help, no teacher, no one to tell me what I’m experiencing or how to interpret it. It’s not a bad idea in principle but in practice it subtly reinforced my ego structure and I inadvertently was doing a quintessential American thing: Attempting to be a rugged individualist. You know the American myth of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps and soldiering on? That’s basically what my meditations became. 

I couldn’t figure out why my heart was feeling increasingly pinched. Finally, when I realized that I was blocking out the expansive field of my soul’s experience and allowed that awareness to permeate my meditation, things got a lot better. My heart no longer feels quite as pinched and my meditations are different. It is important not to do anything while meditating and forcing myself to narrow my focus was a kind of doing.

One thing that got blocked out as a result of my error was Griffin. I know how it sounds but I keep coming back to the inner knowing that my soul and Griffin’s are merged in some way. It’s more than just soulmates, we share the same inner space. We’re still distinct but also completely permeable to each other. 

Keeping him at bay was causing us both suffering and it feels much better to be open and allowing of all of my experiences, even the ones that seem too weird to believe. I still have no idea if Griffin is currently alive in a body somewhere or if we will ever meet physically again. In some sense, it doesn’t matter because we are already one soul. Our union feels so complete that I can’t see how we could ever be separate. But I also know that I don’t know very much and I have to be open to the possibility I’m making him up. It sure doesn’t feel like that, though. Griffin feels omnipresent in my awareness and has for the past four and half years since these bizarre journeys started.

Towards the end of the meditation, it’s probably not surprising that I was invited into another nonphysical realm. The theme was consistent with other times; i.e., I was led to a lost soul and brought them through the Black and to the Crossroads where the Woman in White was waiting.

Here are a few details: I found myself standing in a pine forest at night. There was a full moon in the deep blue sky overhead. Its light was silvery white. The trees rose up on either side of me, their shadows intensely black. The path before me, though, was limned in silvery light.

I turned and the black outline of the pines became the black of the Absolute. Within that depthless blackness was a depthless black entity. Don’t ask me how I knew this because there was no light, only utter blackness. I recognized him, though, and knew I’d met him before. The entity appeared like a panther or a lion. I was reminded of a ‘man’ I knew from long before I was human. I’ve met him one other time during these journeys and at that time he appeared to me as a black panther. It’s possible it was him.

I approached the lion/panther and was immediately drawn into the Absolute. It has the effect of canceling everything out, all awareness, all everything. And yet it feels so gentle, so tender, so loving, so intimate…it feels like my soul’s true home. 

On the other ‘side’ of the Absolute, I found a glowing white cocoon of sorts. There was something about it that reminded me of a hospital bed and I couldn’t help but think that I was peering down into a soul’s deathbed. The sheets glowed white and there was something almost pearly about them. 

I have no idea about the age, race or gender of the person lying in the bed but I got the sense they had attained some development of their soul. The pearliness was the evidence for this because, when I leaned over the bed, the being inside glowed like a luminous pearl. This indicated at least some development of the ‘Pearl Beyond Price,’ the true self. However, I’m guessing that this development was not sufficient for the soul to let go of its earthly bonds.

I didn’t get any sense that this soul of a deceased person was suffering or had experienced trauma. Instead, I think they just needed a little help moving on and I was more than happy to provide it. I picked them up, cradling them in my arms, and told them that we were going to pass through blackness. I informed them that moving through the blackness would change them so they would not be the same on the other side but they would be fine and they could trust me. I’m guessing this movement through the Absolute is a kind of forgetting whereby the soul, temporarily at least, forgets their previous life. This is repeated with pretty much every one of these journeys.

We emerged from the blackness back in the silvery pine forest. The soul was now a tiny, gleaming pearl in my hand. I wondered briefly how I would get to the Crossroads from here but all I had to do was look up at the moon. Its glow was the silvery white of the Crossroads and, just like that, I was there. (Distance means nothing in the nonphysical realms.)

At the Crossroads, the Woman in White was waiting and accepted the pearl from me. True to her unpredictable nature, she surprised me by popping it into her mouth. She spit it out right away, laughing at my reaction. Surely, this woman is the very representation of Crazy Wisdom! I am pretty sure she is a Bodhisattva and certainly behaves like one. Even though her actions are sometimes outrageous, she exudes compassion and love and there is never any trace of malice in her actions. She just has a very strange sense of humor and enjoys yanking my chain!

Almost as soon as she spit out the pearl, she was gone and the alarm on my meditation timer went off. That was it!

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