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Guided Fantasy Meditation
This is a useful and unusual meditation that I first learned from Jack Schwarz’s book Voluntary Controls a long time ago, and developed through the years. I’m going to give my own version of it, without looking back at Jack’s teaching -- you’re certainly encouraged to get the book yourself and compare it to the original; you’ll find it an excellent source. The meditation is longer than five minutes, but not strenuous.
First assume a meditation posture and settle the mind down with about five minutes of long, slow breathing, counting the breaths up to ten on the outbreath, avoiding the thoughts of non-meditative mind. Then, in your imagination, leave your body in an imagination-world body, which is a duplicate of your real body.
Enter some woods, and walk down a long dirt road through the woods. You walk a long way until you come to a large lake, before which is an expanse of first clay, then sand. You find a shovel thrust into the clay, where someone has been digging.
Pick up the shovel and begin to make a pile of the almost-pure clay, until there’s enough to fashion a clay figure of yourself, full-sized and clothed. You work at the features of the clay form until it is quite perfect.
Then you sit down beside the figure and go into a meditation posture, settling the mind down as before, until you are in a mild trance. Then project your mind into the clay figure and come to life in it, rising in it and walking back up the dirt road.
About halfway up the length of the road to where your real body is, you spot the beginning of a faint pathway going off to the left. You turn onto it and walk along it through the woods for a long way, maybe three quarters of a mile.
You come to a clearing, and up ahead you see an old barn with big sliding barn doors in front, open just enough to go through. Inside the barn you pass by some rusty old farm equipment -- a tractor, a plow, an old harrow, a hay-baler. There’s an old car there too, from the 1930’s.
At the other end there is a doorway, but instead of a door, the doorway is filled by opaque, translucent, opaline light-stuff, in constant interweaving motion. You go to the doorway and begin to pass with some difficulty through this light-stuff, which seems to require that you move sometimes sideways, and you finally work through it, passing into a large stable-sized room, lit by a skylight. The floor is completely of sand -- no wood.
It is very quiet, and there is a shovel stuck into the sand. You take the shovel and begin to dig, and you dig down a foot or so until you hit something solid. Working with the shovel, you find it is a wooden chest, which you finally get clear enough to work it out of the hole. Undoing the snap-hinges, you open the chest to discover a large book, the size of an unabridged dictionary.
Lifting the book out, you open it to discover that it is a picture-book, each page a beautiful painting, and all of the paintings in random variation, of all different subjects. You begin to look at the first one, and you continue contemplating it as long as that pleases you, and then, if you wish, you pass on to the next.
Only keep on with this as long as you feel like it, then replace the book in the box, rebury it, and go out through the opalescent light-stuff again, out through the barn, past all the old, rusty equipment, out the big sliding doors, and return along the same path through the woods that you came in by, until you get to the dirt road.
Turn right, and walk down the dirt road until you come to the lake again. When you see your body sitting in meditation pose, begin to rise up into the air and float over to it. When you are in position with your feet touching its chest, reach up from your meditating self and grab your ankles, pulling the entire body slowly inside yourself, until finally you push the head firmly into your chest with your hand.
Get up and walk up the dirt road again, past the pathway on the left, all the way to where you entered the woods. Waft into the air and continue until you come to your real body, sitting in meditation posture. Position your feet against your real body’s chest, as before.
Pull this form into your real body in the same way. Then come out of meditation, noting that you have become quite energized by the exercise.
The area beginning at the clearing you reached by following the faint pathway, including the barn and its contents, is your guided fantasy world, which you may develop in any way you wish. You can put any number of buildings there, each having the rules that you designate.
Imagine a large, clear bubble over the entire fantasy world, consisting of the very substance of Godhead, which is Brahman. Instruct the bubble to admit no one but yourself. Renew and strengthen the bubble every time you visit your world.
I have found it useful to have a school there, with classrooms, in which you can sit at the traditional student’s desk and chair and receive lectures by invited persons from whom you desire to learn lessons.
It is also useful to have a house there of your own design, intended for the way only you are, with rooms for every activity you might want to develop.
One good sort of building is of the Dubist monastery type, circular in shape, with kitchen, bathroom, pantry, small and large group meeting rooms, one-on-one interview rooms, a gymnasium, etc. against the outside wall, and a circular corridor on the inside of these rooms. The other side of the corridor is a row of doors to the monastic cells, which are all alike.
Opening the door to your own cell, you find it oblong, with another door at the other end. If you pass through that door you enter a round room which is the common area, full of comfortable chairs.
Returning to your cell, you will note a ladder going up to the ceiling, where there is a trap-door. Passing through the trap-door, you find yourself in a small domed temple, with a cylindrical altar in the center. Your place in the circle is right beside your trap-door. Your chosen symbol of worship can go on the altar.
If you are going to invite other people into one of these buildings, you should make a rule that there are no doorways to the exterior of the building. Your invited guests can only enter and leave by teleportation, using a device that you give them, such as pressing their navels.
This will preserve the integument of your guided fantasy world, so that only your own individual imagination rules it.
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