I had a breakthrough today. There were a couple of reasons why. One related to the Baha’i community where I live, turning a corner around some challenges. Another related to my visualizations during prayer over the last few months; something mysterious that was revealed today during meditation.
The prayer visualizations I came up with were just pictures in my head. I’ve been taking a Baha’i course about the nature of the soul (Ruhi Book 1), which addresses the subject of prayer thoroughly. Something emerging from the suggestions in the course is to focus one’s thoughts totally on God during prayer. This caused me to reconsider what I really do think about when I pray. Lots of thoughts typically go through my mind. Focusing on God seems like a good thing to do. Yet God is the “Unknowable Essence” so how do you focus on something that is unknowable? This apparently conflicting concept flowed in and out of my prayer visualizations as I attempted to focus on God.
When I say “prayer visualizations” I am referring to the movies I play or images I conjure in my mind’s eye as a way to have focus, go “elsewhere” in a state of peaceful meditation, and try to generate positive thoughts and feelings. Often such visualizations are powerfully evocative for me personally and relate to a sense of flying over a green landscape, like an eagle, or drifting through space and watching solar systems being born. I get a sense of release and wonder from such imagery. When I am done with a meditation where I have effectively “seen” and “gone somewhere,” I feel like I have connected with a spiritual reality.
When I began to deliberately focus on God during prayer, I found myself with new imagery that I returned to repeatedly. Time and again, I pictured the hands an All-Loving Being in a limitless black space. The hands were occupied, the first several times I saw them, with holding a large orb. The hands were wrapping the orb in layers upon layers of wide, beige-colored gauze. Occasionally during these visualizations I saw light emanating from behind the hands. Dominating my vision were the hands, and the orb, and the gauze. Every time I returned to a state of prayer, I returned to this image.
Recently, the visualizations changed—the orb was fully wrapped—the Being was now hugging the orb to Its chest. There was a sense of deep love and protection for this orb. Over and over again I saw this vision in my mind during prayer.
I did not try to make too much sense of this. Somehow it was reassuring and I took it to mean that God is simply the All-Loving, the All-Healing, the Provider—those kinds of concepts would flood through me when I saw this imagery during meditation.
Today I attended an important and much-anticipated meeting, which was one event along a string of challenging events in my spiritual community, for my Baha’i brothers and sisters. Being a sensitive soul, I took on some burden of pain and struggle my community experienced (whether or not other people saw it). Thus I have also felt stress, lost sleep, and experienced a toll on my body’s well-being. The meeting was important because it would address challenges head-on, in an open yet safe setting that we perhaps needed for a while.
At the opening of the meeting we recited prayers, and I went into my now-usual mode of trying to focus on God as I meditated, prayed, listening to others’ recitations.
Again I saw the hands. I saw an orb. I saw the orb wrapped in gauze… but this time the hands were unwrapping the orb. I watched this happen in my mind’s eye… wondering what was going to happen next. It was exciting, a feeling as though something was going to culminate, a mystery was going to be resolved. The hands unwrapped layer after layer of gauze from the orb, to reveal… >clunk<... a shiny, heavy, metallic orb that dropped to the wood floor (that had suddenly appeared in the limitless black space). The metal orb rolled off to the side, and stopped.
Then the hands found another orb, layered in gauze like the first. The hands began to unwrap the orb. Again, >clunk< the orb fell to the floor, and it was like a large marble of reds and yellows, on fire. A third orb appeared, and the movements were repeated, and again it dropped to the floor, a globe of brown and green; again, another orb, and again, a heavy drop, this time swirling black water; one more, this time clouds of grey in a misty blue glow; and the orbs were done. All had fallen to the floor and rolled to the side, as though God had healed them, and they were all complete.
Here they were, the “elements,” or the pieces of the puzzle, all prepared and ready to use, having incubated for some length of time in my visions.