Inner Experience
When I was in kindergarten, our family attended a neighborhood church that did not yet have a building in which to hold services. Instead, the church used the facilities at a local private park known as Knott’s Berry Farm. Presently, this park is an extroversive amusement center with roller coasters and other thrills, but back then it was a quiet, pastoral environment.
The adults held services in the “Chapel of Reflections” while we children got to have Sunday school in the passenger cars of an Old West train. Sitting on the old-fashioned train seats, we read the Bible, sang songs, and learned conventional Christian theology.
One Sunday the teacher was explaining that Jesus not only knew everything you did, but he even knew everything you thought. Not only that, but Jesus knew this about everyone, everywhere, all the time. I was struck by this idea; how could anyone know all that? My mind turned inward and I concentrated deeply on this puzzle.
Suddenly, something happened. In that moment of concentration, I had an experience that I can hardly explain any better now than I could as a child. It was as if the train compartment and everything in it were no longer separate or apart from my self. Everything was connected through an awareness that I assumed to be Jesus.
Sunday school ended a few minutes later and I departed the train reuniting with my brother, my sisters, and my parents. We strolled around the park in our Sunday best for a short while. The world seemed new and alive to me and I felt happy. The lingering effects of this experience lasted for days but gradually waned until it became less of an experience and more of a memory.
The experience was brief, but profound to the point that I have never forgotten it, even now, a half-century following. I never spoke of this experience to others and thought at the time that this experience was the purpose of church, and that everyone else was experiencing it also. As time passed, however, my experience in church became progressively more dry and empty until, as a teenager, I stopped going to church altogether.
Spiritual experience is a universal human characteristic found in cultures throughout history. Yoga is the science of this experience, the practical method that leads to its attainment. Meditation is the process of going inside, of coming to know oneself not as a limited being, but as infinite consciousness.