Blue Pearl Part II

It was March 19th when I first accidentally stumbled on the blue pearl during my meditation (see my previous post). I have an update for those of you who may find it of interest.

I have had four insights, two changes in my behavior and one extremely puzzling and tantalizing type of experience directly as a result of this blue pearl meditation. For those of who are interested, the rest of this posting provided details.

The insights I had were first, that this experience of the blue pearl is pretty "robust". Thus after my first experience of it, I was afraid to meditate again for fear that the pearl wouldn't show up once more. The literature I had read on it suggested that its appearance was "outside of one's control" and so I thought it was "beginner's luck" and that it would not show up again. After a week, I convinced myself that it would not show up again and so lost my fear and started meditating once more. Within ten minutes, the pearl showed up...and it keeps showing up. Now I find that it shows up immediately, then five minutes or so into my meditation I lose it, but then after another five minutes or so, it is back, brighter than ever. Some times it is light blue, others deep blue and also on occasion, purple. On the rare occasions when it hasn't shown up, it has been mostly because I was too excited about something that may have happened during the day. In short, the pearl appears to be pretty "robust", showing up almost every time I meditate. It also shows up reliably when I do “yoga nidra” and once during yoga nidra, I also first saw a sparkling orange oval. Was this the “orange chakra”? See for ex. http://www.healer.ch/orangechakra.html

The second insight was that the feeling I get when I breathe “from” the blue pearl is that of imbibing a nectar...perhaps I should say a "drug", and that the fact my meditation is now something I do daily is perhaps more because I need my "daily fix" of this drug. I used to drink a lot of alcohol, but for the last seven years, I have not had a single drink. What I really mean is I am too familiar with over imbibing, but, the experience with the blue pearl and the self generated "blue pearl drug" is something else. It seems to have no negative side effects it seems, has positive effects (more on that later), and seems "deeper" and to have more "body" to it then alcohol. I have to conclude that it is indeed some kind of a drug, though a highly positive one.

The third insight is this: that perhaps a strong case could be made for the evolution of a "positive feelings drug" production system within human beings. My reasoning is simple, though some would probably say "simplistic". It is that of all the creatures in the world, only humans have enough brain capacity to make a decision to end their own lives. In the primitive past, life must have been pretty terrible, and so, people who did not have a built in system in their bodies to generate "optimistic" chemicals probably chose to kill themselves, gradually increasing the pool of people who did generate these chemicals. Most of our waking moments our minds are too busy to be aware of the effect of these chemicals, and perhaps stilling the mind by meditation, triggers off the intense awareness of these chemicals and possibly also their more intense generation. One way to test this would be to see to find out what these chemicals are, the physiology behind their generation, and whether other animals have this physiology.

The fourth and last insight is this--that emptying the mind can only be done if one has a deep internal relationship with oneself so that one is comfortable with ones life experiences and has resolved to ones own satisfaction any traumas or other psychic imbalances that live experience may have created. To have resolved the traumas of earlier life is not sufficient. Daily dialogue either with oneself or with a trusted other is required to wash away the accretions of daily life that reside in the mind. Unless this is done, "issues" keep surfacing when one is trying to empty ones mind. While Swami Rama claims that one can resolve ones own traumas on ones own, I personally doubt it--I think that the Swami may have been personally lucky and not experienced deep trauma--or that he in fact did not himself resolve his own traumas (hence a possible basis for his purported behavior before he left the US.) I feel that the best way to resolve these issues is to have a trusted person who can help you through the trauma in question. Once this is done, the mind can be emptied. The reduction in trauma and the mental baggage only needs be sufficient to where one can still the mind—i.e. it does not need to be 100% complete.

The two changes in my behavior are first that I mediate daily before going to bed, on my own volition and without a bit of compulsion. I suspect that what is behind this is mostly because my need to get my "optimistic drug" fix. My sleep quality seems to have increased, and as a result, I seem to sleep less--the ten minutes of meditation being paid back by 30 minutes less of sleep.

Second, a big change seems to have come over me. All my life I have tried to control my outbursts of irritability and grumpiness at home but for have failed, try as I might. I also used to go through bouts of pessimism and sadness, possibly depression. Since the advent of the blue pearl, all this seems to have simply washed away. I no longer am irritable, nor do I experience the moods I used to have before. I seem to be on the other hand, at my creative peak in my life, and the most positive I have ever been. My wife too acknowledges this change in behavior!

The extremely puzzling and tantalizing experience was this. Thrice in the first month of my blue pearl experiences, something happened in my head that I guess is what they call "bindu". What happened was I saw a tiny speck of bright light--about the size of the head of a pin like the one in the Sprint telephone ads. The first time it happened the speck was blue, the second time white and the third time yellowish. Each time it seemed to last a moment of time--a flash, thought it felt timeless. It would feel like as if a silent, painless hydrogen bomb had gone off and around it to seemingly infinity, it was lighted by the light from this speck. Concepts of time and space seemed to vanish though in reality, it probably lasted but a second.

I have been unable to reproduce this and I suspect that what happened is that in the beginning, my "route" to the blue pearl was not "set" i.e. I had no experience and so no set path that I consciously or unconsciously followed other than to close my eyes, try to empty my mind and look through my "third eye". Consequently, I may have accidentally touched upon an approach to "bindu". With more and more experience with attaining the blue pearl experience, sad to say, I may have become set in my "path", a path that for whatever reason is by passes what ever it is that triggers bindu.

This then remains my quest--to see if I can consciously attain and maintain the state of "bindu". Again, the thrust will be to identify a robust mechanism that is fact based and not "supernatural".