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Extraordinary Experiences which set
me on a Search for Truth
By Parmatma Kaur Leviton
Experience is the foundation of knowledge and it changes
civilizations. Experience is sovereign.
My life would have been very
different if I had not gone out of my body at the age of eighteen into
another realm
of existence.
In this other realm,
the air was love. The water and trees were
more vibrant and radiant than anywhere on Earth and the river of water
was a
clear clear light crystal blue. It was real. It existed separate from our
minds' constructs, separate
from any projection of my subconscious. The air
was sparkling. Time did not exist. I understood profoundly in those moments
that time does not exist. This was not some kind of deductive process, this
was direct knowing and experience.
When I returned to my body I told my
friends, "time does not exist and love is a frequency, it is a vibration.
I
never heard anyone say either of those things before that and not for
another twenty years when I came in contact
with the teachings of Yogi
Bhajan.
I came back into my body when I was no longer able to maintain the
frequency. Otherwise I instantly
forgot about my life on earth and would
have wanted to stay there. Anyone on this earth would have wanted to stay
there forever. There was no want for anything and no reason for desire to
arise. It was pure existence.
In this energy I know that the worst criminal
minds or most traumatized beings of all times would be delighted to be
there
and would heal in an instant. My life on earth was just a small
inconsequential thing that could be
waved away with a flick of the wrist.
I was unable to find anyone who understood my experiences except a
man
who was a student of Swami Sachetananda, Bill Kotzwinkle, a writer of
children's books and co-writer of the screenplay
for E.T. He was the only
adult that I felt safe with letting know what was going on with me and what
had
happened. He was the only one I was inspired to talk to. I knew he
knew. I knew from reading his writing in a newspaper.
I touched the writing
and thought, " this man is writing beyond ego." When I think about this
now I realize I was being very intuitive and also realize how extremely
acute the intuition is in our early years.
I did not know that he knew
anything about yoga. He was able to communicate with me and to give me
appropriate
yoga exercises to do to get me back into good alignment with my
body. He also directed me to read Carl Jung.
I had
two major experiences.
In the first one, I was lazing around in my bedroom and sensing this
beautiful energy which
I responded to by lying down and enjoying it. Then a
huge magnetic force of energy went up my spine and I found myself
going out
my forehead and then hurtling through a brilliant purple tunnel with a green
pulsating light around it.
The only way I can describe it would be to say it
was as if I had a thick column of iron filings along my spine and a
huge
magnet the size of a refrigerator came along; and starting at the bottom of
the spine pushed energy from the
base to the top of my head and my
soul/subtle body went shooting out my third eye point. I had absolutely no
control.
I found myself on the bank of a beautiful clear-flowing river.
Everything was as real as real could possibly be; as solid
as any known
thing. Everything was as radiant and alive and beyond the limits of my
imagination or words to
describe. Every breath was like a feeling of love
beyond anything I had ever felt. It was Wha-Hey-Guru.
This was a near-death experience; but it was not instigated by trauma. What
I had been doing that day was walking in
the woods when I was overcome by a
feeling of oneness with all things just how I remembered feeling as a child.
I had not been doing yoga at this time in my life.
I knew nothing
about yoga. This is an important point because there is still a lot of
confusion in the west about
kundalini yoga. Some people think that kundalini
yoga creates these intense experiences. This is incorrect. On the contrary,
kundalini yoga balances the energy, chakras and strengthens the nervous
system in general and will help ground the
energy after such an experience.
I believe that if this type of experience is going to happen in this
lifetime,
then it will happen no matter what we are doing, yoga or no yoga.
We are talking about a force which felt like fifty
pounds of horizontal
pressure simultaneous with fifty pounds of vertical pressure going up my
spine. It took many
years to get grounded and find my direction, make sense
out of the experience, acknowledge it, feel worthy of it, claim
it and to
grow into it. It was eighteen more years before I began doing kundalini
yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan.
Previous to that I hitchhiked around a lot,
studied a little art, a little music, did two years of university,
lived on
an ashram, did development work in Africa for two years and spent ten years
on "The Farm"
following the teachings of Steven Gaskin and Suzuki Roshi.
The second experience brought me in contact with other beings
in
that realm and directly with Guru Gobind Singh. But as for this first
experience, I do not remember much
more until I found myself hovering over
my body trying to breath myself back into my body. It seemed like it was
about an hour of hovering and I finally came back in through my heart
chakra. I have no idea what transpired
in that realm in that first
experience except for having a very clear feeling of timelessness and being
by
that beautiful stream of water and radiant trees. I have some sense that
I had a conversation with someone while I was
there. I had some sense that
they were Tibetan Llamas and that they told me to study kundalini yoga.
When I came
back I knew a lot about yoga which I had not read anywhere.
The second experience was different. It was
as if the first
experience created a pathway. I laid down and went through the same purple
tunnel with a rim of
green pulsing light without any huge sensations in my
spine -out my third eye as before finding myself on the same
riverbank.
On the shore of this river of crystalline water and the shoreline of true
exposure to life
beyond, the beauty was indescribable and with every breath
I felt love like humans do not feel and do not know exists.
Every inhale
was love. There are no English words or probably no words at all to
describe it, except "Wha
Hey Guru".
In this realm I walked across the vibrant ground conscious of my
breath as being
a way to feel the love. I had not a care in the world. I
dismissed my life on earth as trivial and dismissed
it in an instant.
I walked towards a huge solid beautiful castle. All of a sudden I
was with my best friend.
She walked confidently and knowingly beside me.
We already knew somehow that we did not need to use words. We were able
to
look in each others eyes to share thoughts. It was as if words did not
exist and even thought did not exist
per se. Thoughts were not a formed
thing. There was just a knowing between us. I did not give this phenomena a
moment's notice, it never registered as a phenomena, it just was. The fact
that we were living in this new type
of existence did not occupy our minds,
there was no objective thought or reservation of thought, it did not seem
strange
to us. We knew in those moments that this was authentic reality,
that this was the mother reality to all other realities.
Life on earth did
not occupy our minds.
There was nothing to keep us from laughing as we skipped and ran
towards a castle. I do not know how to explain her presence there. On
earth, we were always together and
had been in the same classroom since
childhood; and people in highschool didn't know us apart sometimes. Our
highschool life is one blur of laughter. What our classmates remember of us
is that we were to be found almost
every day doubled over in the hallway
laughing with our books flying in all directions. People looked like
cartoon
characters to us and in high school everyone looked like a grown-up
insecure version of the child we remembered them
to be. To keep from peeing
my pants I sometimes would throw myself against a wall and use it to lean on
and
slowly move downward until I was sitting on the floor as my friend would
skip with her legs crossed to the nearest bathroom
usually leaving me with a
pile of books on or beside me in complete disarray. Growing up in
Fredericton, New
Brunswick, the capital and a University town was a
small-town but yet refined and sophisticated experience. We
knew everyone.
We fell off chairs laughing sometimes and people would joke, " don't give
them chairs, let them
sit on the floor." Our teachers were kind and patient
to us but probably only because we both made good marks.
But she does not
have a memory of the experience in the ethers. I believe we were in the
second level of ethers.
Running carefree towards the castle. thought, if we can call it
that, seemed slowed down but only in retrospect.
At the time it was normal.
For example, I was thinking of thinking of hesitating when I saw four guards
with rifles
on their shoulders moving quickly in a square formation. But
then I thought better. I did not want to think the thought
so I did not
allow myself to actually think the thought. It was as if I had some
precognitive ability which took
up space/time in my mind which made it so I
could manage every thought. Possibly it is what it feels like when you have
no subconscious whatsoever. When I looked into my friends eyes and saw that
she was completely and innocently
confident that we could and would just
happily run by them into the castle that I decided not to think the thought. And
today when I look back on that, I am glad I chose not to think the
thought because it would have created a vibration
of doubt and insecurity so
I may not have been able to get by the guards.
But thought was not thought as we experience
it here - there was only
knowing.
I could have touched my flesh and saw that is was as real as I know flesh to
be. But I had no thought to do this. I was not questioning anything. I was
in it.
The guards continued
to walk in a perfectly square formation without
blinking or noticing us one single iota. We scampered by and quickly
into
the castle. As we went by them I was conscious that I was on a different
frequency than them and I felt one
hundred percent confident. I knew that
they would not notice us because they were on a different wavelength. We
were near the top of the castle where a square wooden deck jutted out and
contained the guards.
We walked
into a large room with a high ceiling and a thick
roughly-hewn wooden floor like I have seen on old ships. My friend
went on
to another room and I never saw her again. I bent down and opened a wooden
square on the floor which
had a latch on it. To my delight I was able to
see down into a room that looked like it was about forty feet high.
There
were women with radiant deep-robin-blue dresses on and as they danced in
circles and patterns, it was like
watching a kaleidoscope. I put my hand
down into the air and the air swirled with tiny sparkles of ionized energy.
I can not remember why I put my hand there. The swirled air caught the
attention of one women who looked up and looked
in my eyes. A beam of love
went from her to me. I never felt anything so wonderful before or since and
I am reminded
now as I write this of the writings in The Guru when they
speak of the "nectar of the eyes".
I
was locked into this eyemeld for a little while but then I looked up and
approximately twenty feet away from me was a
man with a sword with whom I
then locked eyes. There was also an all-pervading and overriding feeling
of love from him but it was different, it had a different quality. It was
coming from a completely neutral place.
I absolutely knew that this love
was not just for me, this was love given to everyone and everything. It was
emanating
automatically from him as part of his nature. This was not just
my interpretation. The love from the women
had felt personal and universal
at the same time. This felt exclusively universal and absolutely neutral.
I looked
in his eyes for as long as I could and then I looked down at his
sword which had blood on it. It was Guru Gobind
Singh and this had been
confirmed by teachers close to the Siri Singh Sahib when I first started
teaching k.y. and
recently by G.G.S. by Siri Gian. After awhile I went
into fear as I looked at the blood and I lost the frequency
that sustained
me and kept me in this realm. It could be that I was experiencing the end
of a death from another
lifetime out of sequence with my life today; it had
been my prayer in another lifetime that I would always be with Guru
Gobind
Singh and I have experienced little snapshots of a lifetime with him in
dreams and in self-hypnosis.
I came back through my heart chakra just like before. Ever since this
experience whenever I close my eyes there is
an ever-present green throbbing
light with purple inside.
To feel that it was not just some phenomena that happened
to me but
that it is stream-lined and blended with my on-going search for truth and
development of my self was a
long process in environments with many confused
and mixed messages. These experiences were something that
were
ever-present and lingered in my conscious and less conscious parts of me
always letting me know that, yes,
there is something that exists beyond us.
It took a long time for my subconscious to recondition to the idea that time
does exist on the material plane and that my body needs to sleep. I have
had a sleeping problem all my life and
the only thing that makes it so that
I can sleep well is to meditate and do yoga.
This experience was the one thing
that I had to hold onto for
decades when the way was not clear, when the tides of social thought were
going in other
directions and when spirituality was not only not popular but
was suspicious and frowned upon. The one thing that
I knew was that this
experience had been real.
I had been having out-of-body experiences ever since I can
remember.
As a three-year old, I would run into my parents bedroom often in
the early morning and yell "I'm back, I'm back
." By the time in my life
when I had these two experiences where I went out of the electromagnetic
field
into the ethers - I knew the difference between a dream where you are
projecting the elements of your own subconscious
as opposed to being on the
astral planes. I understand the astral planes as being made out of the
mental-emotional
energy and projections of humans en masse. I knew that this
was not either of those things.
When I read Lopsang Rampa it all seemed strangely familiar. Even
though it seems today like these books are farfetched
, back in those days
they held a lot of energy, mystery and answers to inquiring minds that were
trying to break
down the door into "something else". L. Rampa was the first
person I ever read that told how to astral project,
for example in his book,
" You Forever. "
I have my own understanding now derived from my own experiences
and
from doing Kundalini Yoga as taught by our precious teacher, Yogi Bhajan,
which is: Basically I would not dispute
the legitimacy of the methods used
by the great yogic masters of Tibet. With over five hundred years of
experience
and inquiry into the spiritual realms, they certainly have
accumulated knowledge about the universe which is and will
be of great use
to mankind. But some of the methods (if we are to accept L. Rampa) are
extreme and unnecessary once
we have developed a consciousness which is more
merged and as we are able to put out frequencies which match the frequencies
of creative consciousness, the source energies of the universe. This is a
relevant dialogue today because there
are people teaching how to
astral-project as a singular activity independent of a spiritual context.
All
of the experiences that I had going out of my body before doing
Kundalini yoga felt like I went far far away and I hovered
over my body and
I had to breathe myself back into my body. When I first started doing
Kundalini yoga all
of this astral activity stopped for about five years.
When I began having extraordinary experiences again it never felt
like I
went anywhere - there was no distance. And I did not feel weakened in my
body by them. Before that
I would feel very weak and could not sleep well.
There were some years when I felt that I was becoming more and more
weakened
and my auric field was also very weak.
But now I was connected with everything. The experiences just felt
like they all happened in my room. There was no longer any breathing for
long periods of time to come back into my
body. I was already in my body, I
never went anywhere. My body was as big as the universe. The places that
my consciousness wanted to go to in the universe came to me by just tuning
into them rather than me having to go to
it. It is a state of a more merged
consciousness.
Yogi Bhajan teaches that it is more difficult
to maintain a state
of raised kundalini than it is to actually raise it. I have learned the hard
way that, once
raised, one must work hard to stay out of conflict with
oneself and to work physically and mentally to keep up with yourself
and the
evolutionary thrust of consciousness development.
How my friends reacted to me was very telling
of the times in which
we found ourselves. When they were high on LSD they were interested,
philosophical and sporatically
seemed to know what I was talking about; but
when they were back in normal consciousness, they listened politely, said
a
word or two, smiled and changed the subject. As a Woodstock nation beehive
we were all searching for truth and
a greater reality and reacting to what
we felt was the jail of materialism. In the day to day our lives were
wrought with bizarre discussions and experiences warped with tangents and
distortions and distractions and philosophically
bizarre arguments. These
are uncapturable. People said all kinds of bizarre things. I remember
someone saying
that they thought they had turned invisible. One person said
they sat in front of a clock for what felt like five
minutes and watched the
hands of the clock go around for twelve hours. So my story was just a little
story among
many bizarre stories in the late sixties and early seventies.
The difference was - I was not doing drugs. I was
scared to death to do
drugs because I felt that I could have one of these experiences and never
come back.
How
fortunate we are now to have enough teachings to make sense out
of these experiences and we do not have to climb high
into the Himalayas to
find some answers !!
What did it all mean? At the time it meant
to me: other realms
exist. It meant that perhaps there was purpose in life. It meant that love
exists as a vibration
and it exists separate from us and from our mind's
constructs. That souls exist separate from the mind. That our search
for
truth is worthwhile.
What does it mean to me thirty-eight years later? It means that I
know that I am on
the right path learning and teaching Kundalini yoga. K.Y.
has helped make sense out of my experiences more than anything
else and has
healed trauma and has gotten rid of the effects of past lives faster than
anything else. I pray
for the many people on the planet today who are
suffering from mental illness who have never been able to make sense
out of
their experiences, those who may be too medicated to work on the
development of their consciousness,
and those who have extraordinary
perception and are not able to get grounded or to integrate their
perceptions with
everyday life.
And I know that having extraordinary experiences or having special
gifts does not make you
a spiritual person ; that spirituality is created by
what you think, say and do and how much responsibility you take
on for your
reactions to the life you are given. web.ncf.ca/parmatma , email address parmatma@ncf.ca
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