Resonance in Meditation

Encounter with a Spirit through Nature

Entranced by a cloud this morning, I encountered an invisible person.

The cloud rolled majestically. Some trailing wisps evaporated while others emerged. If music had accompanied it, the sound would have resembled a thousand monks chanting a single long syllable. The bright white of this solitary dancer celebrated his pattern against the vivid blue of an adoring sky. He celebrated life with gratitude and grace.

Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I doubt that I am describing an encounter with a nature spirit but rather a spirit in tune with nature. In my view, the invisible person was neither of the sky nor of supernatural origin. He continued to exist after the cloud dissipated. My theory is that I encountered him through resonance.

Resonance is simple. Remember the red alert on the bridge of the Enterprise? The flashing light matched the blaring noise. As you observed it, your visual field matched your audio field.

Heaven resonates when one sings wholeheartedly.

― Toba Beta

The cloud resonated with the invisible person. My eyes resonated with my heart. I am so accustomed to thinking in this odd way, that I hardly know how to make it sound normal to normal people.

Pull your mother up in memory. If you breastfed as a baby, you experienced her in every field: visual, audio, olfactory, taste, touch, cognitive and emotional. You would know her perfectly well if you were deaf and blind. You would not know her at all without a heart.

Forget everything the modern world taught you about the difference between your emotional field and your visual field. Forget the idea that you observe internally with the one and externally with the other. That distinction is wrong.

A neuroscientist with the right equipment can locate your visual field inside your brain. Your brain is internal. The field is a map. Its relationship to the external world is like the bright pink Pennsylvania-to-New-Jersey border, which you will never see from your car on Route 80.

Another example. The redness of a red Camaro is not in the Camaro. Red is in your head. If you don’t believe me, approach the same Camaro near the speed of light. You will see a blue Camaro. The external world did not change. You changed.

The redness in your head resonates with electromagnetic wavelengths coming from the external world. The flavor of the resonance depends on your relationship to the car including relative speed. State borders are as real as a car even if they are only visible on a paper map and not a perceptual map of the roadside. They lead to consequences like taxation and death penalty status.

Your emotional field works the same way. It is an internal pattern that responds to an external reality. The main difference between it and the five perceptual fields is that normal space-time does not apply.

It shares this characteristic with the cognitive field, which is the only place you have ever observed a triangle. No “triangle” drawn in the sand consists of one-dimensional line segments. Waves can wash fake triangles away. Only real triangles endure. Real triangles in the mind resonate with the sight of fake triangles in the sand. Aliens in distant galaxies will discover them and learn the Pythagorean theorem from them a billion years from now. Plato was right.

A real person only appears as a person in your heart.

To awaken spiritual unity, and to spread to others the love that is our inherent nature, is the true goal of human life.

— Mata Amritanandamayi

You may wonder how the sight of a cloud led me to emote the presence of a person. We can walk through it step by step, starting with my theology. I could be wrong. Please share your agreement or protest.

I strongly suspect that all people in the multiverse share a connection through what Plotinus called The One, what I call the Ultimate Presence. Since we can’t observe ten gazillion people at once without going crazy, we use the five senses to focus our emotional observation.

This life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

― Plotinus

Some focusing techniques work better than others. Music, for instance, always evokes emotional patterns. Good music goes deep. Resistance to suffering calls up intestinal fortitude. You feel it in your gut.

I encountered the wonderful cloud-resonant person when my meditation routine got messed up. Most days I meditate inside. This morning, after reciting my usual morning lines to the sky from my deck, I seated myself outside.

It started off, as always, with prayer. I declared, “I recognize your presence in my life.” Four more declarations followed, then I scanned my visual field and audio field before intently focusing on my emotional field.

I floundered in my attempt to leave the visual and audio fields behind. A brilliant sky penetrated my closed eyelids. Birds sang much more crisply without a double-pane window separating them from me.

I opened my eyes in wonder. When the birds sat still, I could not see them. They blended into tree branches. Their movements revealed their presences. They only resonated with my awareness when in motion.

Failure to leave sights and sounds entirely out of my focus meant failure to achieve trance. Even so, I partly achieved the goal of concentrating on the sacred aspects of emotional reality. The cloud-resonant person connected with me on that level.

I rarely experience such encounters with such vivid clarity as happened this morning. Usually I can notice through a dim sense that, just beneath the surface, a throng of glorious hearts is stirring. Other times I feel nothing.

In catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.

― Charlotte Brontë

It gladdens me to have failed to achieve trance this morning. Priming for trance laid the groundwork for vivid resonance. The failure was a success, just like the Apollo Thirteen mission. Thank you, Darcy Thiel, for that metaphor.

Thanks also to Jean Carfantan for his excellent, detailed analysis of the difference between map and territory in the opera of life.

I met a mysterious person today. Do you meet people this way? Do you feel resonance in your life?