HIM Blog #1: The awakening that meditation brings.

My name is Sam Breslauer. I am a born-again Christian man with a wife and three children. I was a primary PE teacher for fifteen years until it became too difficult to teach under the secular school system, where teaching about the reality of God’s love for all who choose to turn to Him is completely off-limits. My love for God and my relationship with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was calling me towards a life still in a teaching context but with adults as well as children. The Lord was communicating His desire to see me helping others form an authentic personal relationship with Him. Fortunately, the way in which to do this was perfectly clear.

Back in 2017 I was having a conversation with a mate about lucid dreaming. At this point in my life, I was not religious but agnostic. I was confident there was some sort of great knowing ‘power’ or ‘force’ behind the happenings of the universe but I was convinced that our feeble finite human minds could never know the deep truths of why we existed or why existence itself existed. However, I did believe that we could explore the universe and find out more about it by travelling inwardly, as my intuitive belief was that the inner universe within us is just as vast as the outer universe. This conversation completely intrigued me, as lucid dreaming seemed to be a way in which one can literally explore the depths of our inner reality. As a result, I did some research and began practicing some strategies that help ready oneself to enter the world of lucid dreaming. One of those strategies was learning how to meditate, which I had never done before. Although I had some interesting experiences on my lucid dreaming pathway, it was ruining my sleeping patterns, which I didn’t like at all. However, I was really enjoying the practice of meditation.

I learnt how to meditate by borrowing a book from my local library called ‘Natural Meditation: A Guide to Effortless Meditative Practice’ by Dean Sluyter. This book taught a secular version of meditation and focused on the basic principles of attending to the present moment as an unaffected background experiencer to all that actualises within one’s experience. I learnt how to be aware of the emergence of my thoughts from a position of pure observation. I meditated every night before going to bed and was awe struck with the types of experiences I was having within my own mind. I was noticing that, over time, I was able to sit in mental silence and stillness for longer and longer periods which were accompanied by a deep sense of relaxation and security. Every so often I would enter a deep state of concentration and experience a heavy sensation of forwards momentum falling deeper and deeper into a void of blackness that would increasingly become thicker with darkness and density. These intense meditation experiences were profoundly moving and deeply meaningful but could be a bit unsettling at times. As long as I remembered guidance given by Sluyter’s book, that nothing that appears in the field of perception can affect the perceiver, I would be grounded by a sense of confidence and calmness.

One night I sat and enjoyed a meditation where the stillness and peace were very blissful and easy, almost as if the thoughts that wanted to emerge in my consciousness didn’t even bother as they knew I wouldn’t pay them any attention. After concluding my meditation, I stood up from my couch and pure silence continued to saturate my entire experience. Usually once the meditation ended, my mind would go back to its normal operational setting, with thoughts naturally entering my conscious mind. But not this time. For the first time in my life, I was perceiving the world around me in absolute perpetual silence. It was as if the meditation, upon its own accord, simply continued into the experience of my normal life. The increased resolution of my sense-based experience, especially visual, meant that everything had a ‘liveliness’ to it, as I could consciously notice how everything was ‘being’; that is to say I became very aware of how the ‘material’ world around me is in a constant state of unfoldment, which essentially creates the present moment. The silence that had enshrouded my perception meant that my attention remained fixed on the experience of the ‘present moment’. Things were now seen as non-material in the sense that nothing was ‘solid’ and unchanging anymore, but instead were in a constant state of ‘flux’, buzzing as pure possibilities collapsing and actualising within the perceptual field created by my own consciousness in the background, as it silently observed all. This was the experience of being purely present. This experience was absolutely fascinating, and I was even more in awe of its persistence. It didn’t go away. The ease of entering this state, as my attention fixated on the noticing of everything in my perception constantly unfolding, has in fact never left me since that day. Thoughts once dominated control over my attention and shaped finite ideas about my identity. However, this moment marked the awakening of a new identity, a new deeper set of values, determined to rise-up and disempower false ego-beliefs in limited worth.

There was another aspect to this experience of inner silence that I found completely baffling, as it was associated with a feeling of deep immovable security and intimate connection with the ‘outer’ world. Everything felt meaningful and each moment had a sense of untold significance, whilst I, as the observer of it all, knew, on a mysterious intuitive level, that I was playing a crucial role of the unfoldment of what I was witnessing. In other words, I felt like my true infinite worth had bubbled up to the surface of my consciousness. However, this worth seemed to be reflected throughout my whole perception of my ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ reality. As this experience continued to persist on for days, I quickly came to realise that the presence of God had to be behind all of this. It was as if God somehow opened my perceptive abilities up so that I could notice, not only His presence within me, but indeed His presence everywhere. This, of course, meant that I began to see others in a completely new light, as the understanding I had towards myself, as an embodied form of infinitely important and powerful reality-creating consciousness, applied equally to how I now perceived others.

Even though most people couldn’t see it within themselves, I could only now see them with the understanding that they were infinitely worthy expressions of this singular divine consciousness that we were all actualising our lives through.

However, although I was waking up to the reality of God, I was not framing this all through a Christian lens. I began having correspondence with Dean Sluyter, as I wanted him to know how his book helped me open my perception up to the silent truth that creation and all it contains is made by an unspeakable worth which our consciousness is somehow responsible for. He was very pleased to hear my story and recommended I continue seeking for answers by looking into Advaita Devanta and more specifically ‘non-duality’, which is a philosophy of Hinduism that believes the diversity of reality is an illusion and nothing but expressions of a singular non-dual (oneness) divine consciousness truly exists. Therefore, I began listening to some non-dual teachers such as Rupert Spira and Bentinho Massaro, which only fueled my fascination towards the nature, origin and true functionality of consciousness. This was a period where I was absorbing a huge amount of new information in relation to Hindu spirituality, whilst doing some scientific research on what we already know in the field of ‘consciousness studies’. At this time, I also began writing about my meditative encounters and insights that I was experiencing. I found writing to be extremely helpful in organising my thoughts and lines of logic at this stage in my life where my identity was going through a significant transformative process.

As I researched about consciousness, I was beginning to form insightful connections between the different scientific literature I was engaged in and the personal revelations of inner wisdom that would emerge from the meditative silence of my newfound identity as a worthy creation of infinite consciousness. It was clear that our understanding of consciousness as a collective on a scientific level is very poor and is arguably the area of study that we know least about. Quite naturally, I began to formulate a cosmic model of consciousness that blended ideas from Advaita Vedanta, leading scientific ideas and my own insights, which forced me to research widely and was accelerating my knowledge and understanding about how everything was fundamentally interconnected by an underlying field of consciousness that must be projected by an almighty all-knowing God that perceives all things via this all-penetrating field. I also knew this singular monotheistic God must create out of love, as this understanding was naturally understood via the blissful silence, stillness and undying love experienced during meditation.

I published my theory of consciousness called the Fractal of Self (FOS) model of consciousness in the ‘Journal of Consciousness Research’ in 2019 over two papers, which gave an in-depth explanation of the origin of consciousness existing beyond creation, how consciousness is responsible for the beginning and continual unfoldment of creation and how this backdrop of ultimate reality would inevitably give rise to embodied forms of biological consciousness (life). Having my ideas accepted and published in a reputable peer reviewed academic journal helped me see that I had been put on a ‘writing path’, which was pushing me to fulfill a level of potential I didn’t know existed within me and I could not wait to find out where this path would lead. This path encouraged me to keep reading, researching and writing in this direction that was established in my initial papers. My meditative life continued to evolve also as I had incorporated meditation into my exercise regime and found that this was a very powerful way to fall into God’s presence. The amount of insights I would experience while jogging was mind boggling, which helped fuel my writing in both an academic direction but also in regard to developing a manuscript about meditation on the inherent infinite worth of oneself bestowed upon us by our Creator.

For the next couple of years, I published four more papers in the JCER journal that either extended the model or drew comparisons with other consciousness-centred models of fundamental reality, whilst also refining my manuscript. However, I was feeling like something was missing within my writing and my life in general. My published papers were generally focused on how creation operates within an eternal unchanging field of consciousness, yet there was not much focus on the nature of the individual who this divine consciousness belonged to. Similarly, in my manuscript, although I knew that God was the source of consciousness itself, I kept reference towards Him out of the manuscript, as I was pitching this book to a secular audience and instead would refer to the source of consciousness as ‘the infinite within’ or the ‘your inner divine worth’ for example. I felt like I was lacking proper reverence for the one responsible for this whole creation because I indeed was.

Images used in this blog belong to Kreative Hexenkueche (pixaby) and Paul Ferrini (Three Stages of Consciousness - Paul Ferrini) respectfully.