My Meeting with the Buddha
In 2004, After a friend gave me the book The Power of Now, I decided to start a meditation practice. Although I didn’t consider myself a Buddhist, I joined a Buddhist meditation group. This was partly out of curiosity and partly because I didn’t want to just meditate alone every day. Several months after I had joined the group there was an announcement that some Buddhist relics were going to arrive in town. I found out these relics were bone fragments of the original Buddha and other Buddhist saints. It was said that these relics were incredibly special. I decided to be open-minded about them but I was also skeptical.
The image above does not show the same relics I saw but this is what they looked like. They don’t look like much really.
The day the relics arrived at the temple I ventured out to see what they were. They didn’t look like bones as it turned out. The relics looked like little pearls. A nun explained these pearl-like relics had been reclaimed after the bodies of the saints had been cremated and that they were supposed to hold the same enlightened vibration as the deceased saint. She then gave me a sly smile and said, “of course it might just be the placebo effect.”
I was trying to open my mind to the possibility that these tiny pearls had some mystical quality but I wasn’t doing a very good job at it. Someone in the temple announced it was time for a blessing. Then a nun approached me and asked me if I would like a blessing. I was experiencing some resistance to doing it but I said, “Sure.” I got in a line with the others and knelt down to receive a blessing.
When my turn came a different nun placed a small container of some kind on the top of my head. I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye. It was shaped like a small handbell. As soon as the container was placed on my crown I felt a wonderful warmth. However, this warmth was peculiar. It didn’t just stay on the top of my head. It somehow traveled gently down through the center of my head, into my heart, and then warmed me from the inside out. At the time I didn’t think much about it. I didn’t actually realize that a physical warmth on the top of my head couldn’t travel down into my heart. Instead, I rationalized that she must have warmed up the container before placing it on my head. Shortly thereafter I left the temple and headed home.
That night as I lay down to sleep something extraordinary happened. I felt a similar warmth in my heart as I had earlier that day during the blessing. Then, the warmth started to expand until it encompassed my entire chest. As the warmth expanded a vision unfolded before me. A spinning tapered cylinder of golden light came into view. It was spinning slowly clockwise. Showers of golden light were being released from this cylinder as it spun. From this place I saw light filling the entire universe. The scene then changed to an immense garden that was imbued with the same golden light. The garden contained every kind of flower imaginable: flowers of every color, shape and size.
There was a teaching that unfolded within me as I gazed upon the eternal garden. The diversity of the garden magnifies the beauty of each flower. Every type of flower is needed to complete the garden. So it is with people. We all need each other. No one is left out. There is no superiority. There is only an incredible array of diversity. We are all part of the same light but we reflect this light in different ways. We are whole in the light and also un-whole in that we need to appreciate the full complement of life around us to be truly fulfilled. We are one in the light but many in form.
Eventually the vision came to a close and I fell asleep. The next day I awoke to a light filled room. Everything, it seemed, was saturated with light. I felt a deep, inner peace that seemed to transcend everything and light up the world around me. There was nothing that was not somehow imbued with golden light. I decided to cancel my work appointments that day so I could spend some time just soaking in the wonderment of my experience. A question occurred to me, “what was in the handbell-like thing that the Buddhist nun put on my head?” I drove out to the temple and asked her. She gave me a little smile, the same kind of smile she gave me when she mentioned, “maybe it’s the placebo effect,” the previous day. She then pointed to the bone relic of the original Buddha. At this point my mind collapsed into wonderment.
The bone relic from the Buddha was the thing that gave off that warmth! Of course it couldn’t have been a regular source of heat because it trickled down into my heart from my crown. Regular heat doesn’t do that. After visiting the temple, I then drove to the music store as I was shopping for a keyboard. I met a clerk there who had been at the temple. He was as wide-eyed as I was about his experience of getting a blessing. When I told him what was in the cylinder his eyes became even wider.
Every person I met was imbued with golden light that day. I could see it so plainly. Their outward appearance didn’t matter. Unlike my earlier experiences with Jesus at St Peters and with the Orb of Light in my dream, I was able to actually hold a sense of peace throughout the day. I felt so much gratitude. I was thrilled. Everyone I met was a treasure to behold. Everyone was beautiful. Every moment was an opportunity.
That evening my wife brought our sons back from daycare. I caught my youngest son Eli’s eye as he crawled around on the floor. Suddenly we connected at a deep level. His whole face lit up with amazement and recognition. We truly saw each other. It was an experience I’ll never forget. I had never seen him so happy before. It was with some distress that I saw Diane but could not see her light. I could see no golden streams flowing behind her as I had with everyone else that day. I knew she had a light but I just couldn’t see it. She was a blind spot for me.
The next day I woke up in hell. Everything was darkness. There were no opportunities. I felt loathing toward everything and everyone. My oldest son, 3 year old Colson saw me that evening. He looked my direction, pointed at me and said, “Dark.” I felt like a sore on the surface of the world. Just as the enlightened experience didn’t last, neither did the hell experience. Pretty soon I was back to my normal ambivalence.
But something had stuck from my experience with Buddha’s bone relic. I felt more open than I had before. The day of golden light did not return but I had faith that my experience was real and that it was possible to reclaim it. After all, I spent a whole day in that amazing state of mind. It was an improvement.