in the flow with DR GRAHAM WILLIAMS A regular column exploring the benefits of meditation THE LUMINOUS SPACE OF YOUR MIND

When you are meditating and you reach the point where your mind and body are deeply balanced, the conscious and subconscious sides of your mind are connected. In a sense, they can talk to each other. This usually only happens when we are deeply relaxed in sleep and begin to dream. Our conscious minds are literally asleep, and so the subconscious can start come into view.

Our subconscious mind contains the vast repository of our experience; our memories, the stories we have constructed out of our experiences, and those we have inherited from our family and our culture. It also includes all the experience of being a human being which we have inherited simply by having a body.

One of the things meditation does is bring these two sides of your mind together while you are awake and meditating. The hypnagogic images of your subconscious mind can then arise while you are conscious, and it is as though you are dreaming while being awake and alert at the same time. Your inner world has opened up—the world of your intuition. I have known countless numbers of people at the Lifeflow courses who have been surprised and delighted when this experience opens up for them, and they know they have discovered a tool for training their intuition.

As you continue to explore this inner world, your mind eventually becomes completely still, and you discover that this deeply balanced state is one of the most exquisitely blissful states it is possible to experience. Different people respond to it in different ways. Some feel a sense of awe or transcendence and from it they draw a deep feeling of inspiration. Others experience it as a profound connection with the environment, with all the plants, animals, other races and peoples, and even the earth itself—with everything which nurtures and supports their life. And others will feel a sense of union with God, while some will experience a feeling of deep peace.

All of these experiences are expressions of what it is like to be deeply balanced. This is the natural state of our minds and bodies and we feel a sense of unity, bliss and clarity each time we touch it in meditation. We normally don’t experience it because we are so preoccupied with our thoughts and emotions. And yet this is experience so many of us are seeking.. It is open, spacious and expansive, deeply peaceful and incredibly blissful, totally beyond all judgements of good and bad.

When you are in this balanced state, you become aware of how your thoughts come and go as you see the space between them. You become aware of the space in your mind, exactly in the same way as you can see the sky in which clouds come and go.

This space is vast and luminous, just like the sky on a clear, cloudless day. Ultimately meditation can bring you to experience this—the vast, luminous totally clear state of mind in which everything you experience comes and goes.

From a balanced state you can start to see how your mind and your life move in patterns and cycles, just like the patterns of the weather. You find that you are not just your emotions and thoughts, but that you can rest in this space every time you reach a balanced state in meditation.

Imagine the kinds of emotions you would have if you genuinely believed that you controlled the weather. Each sunny day (presuming you liked sunny days) would bring elation and possibly a rather drunken sense of power as you knew that you created it. Then when it became cloudy, raining and a thunderstorm appeared over the horizon you would be shattered. You would have completely failed. Elation would be followed by depression. Up and down your emotions would go, totally at the mercy of the weather patterns, without you having any means to do anything about it.

Unfortunately, believing that somehow we control, or should control, our states of mind is exactly the same and leads to the same result. It guarantees that we don’t get to see and understand how our minds actually work because we are looking in the wrong place.

For example, if it is raining and cold and we are dressed for a sunny day because we believe that, as we control the weather, this aberration of rain shouldn’t be happening–– well it’s not hard to guess the result. We would be lucky not to get ill.

We know how to avoid getting physically ill by adjusting our behaviour and clothing to the climate, by eating well and by washing. Keeping the mind in a reasonably healthy state is no different; however, it is totally impossible if we are blinded by wanting things to be perfect and by believing that somehow we are in control of it.

As you move from trying to fix how you feel and control what your mind is doing to learning how to establish a calm state, you can accept how you feel without the need to do anything about it. You can then watch, and notice what your feelings and emotions actually do. You find that you can reach this state of balance, the space in your mind which is calm and deeply peaceful, whenever you choose.

Dr Graham Williams is a concert pianist and ordained Lama and is the Director of The Lifeflow Meditation Centre, which runs regular meditation courses in the city and retreats in the hills. He has been teaching meditation for 25 years and is an Associate of a national corporate psychology company. He has released the CD Reflections in Water, of piano music of Chopin, Liszt and Debussy; music of light and water, and a CD of piano music of Olivier Messiaen, My Heart Keeps Watch.