This Mystical Life

Excerpt from chapter 5, Light on Fire: Waking Up to Divine Love

One evening in July, I settled in at my desk to do the meditation. Golden light from the setting sun flooded my study. The Rainbow Meditation felt easeful, and incredibly simple. It involves imagining your in-breath pulling a different colour up into your body through the sole of your left foot, taking it up to the different chakra locations on the body, and then your out-breath takes it out again down through the right foot. There was no explanation as to how colours relate to different parts of the physical, emotional and spiritual body, so I had no preconceptions about what I was working on. I simply breathed in the colours in the sequence listed – in complete innocence and naivety.

I visualized coloured energy travelling up and down my body for each different chakra colour, and as I did this, I felt powerful energy building inside me. I was quite taken aback. I faced a split-second decision: I knew I could stop this strange experience from developing any further if I wanted to. I could just stand up, walk away, and break the spell, so to speak. But as that thought flashed across my mind, I heard my inner voice saying, I am held by the white light, and I can stay for this. I have no idea how I came to say such a thing, the meaning of which I barely understood – except that I sensed it was completely safe to let the experience continue, and I also knew that I would miss something absolutely amazing if I walked away. So, I went with it – once more surrendering to an experience that lay far beyond my intellectual understanding.

When I got to the seventh chakra on top of my head, suddenly – without the slightest warning, without any preliminary sign, with nothing to prepare me for it – I felt Jesus come to me in a blaze of fire.

My head exploded with that same holy fire I had experienced on the pier, and in the park on the summer solstice – only this time, it was absolutely staggering in its intensity and in its holiness. I felt Jesus’ presence as a blaze of energy, as a sacred fire, all around my head. As soon as he came, he said to me, ‘I AM The I AM.’ I heard the words silently in my head with an inner hearing, but they were spoken with phenomenal majesty, as a king speaking to the whole world.

As I heard them with my mind, I was filled with a feeling of staggering and sublime holiness.

I knew with absolute certainty, as part and parcel of the experience, that this holy fire I felt blazing in me and all around my head was Jesus. I don’t know how I knew it; I just did. I felt Jesus, but I did not see anything. It was not a physical seeing in any way. It was a feeling-knowing at the level of the higher mind – the supra-rational or the spiritual mind. I could feel the incredible holiness of his presence, and his intimate closeness to me. His light surrounded me, and I was utterly absorbed into the experience. Nothing I could ever see with my physical eyes could come close to the beauty, the power, and the profundity of this inner experience and this inner knowing.

Then I heard myself spontaneously begin to chant inside my head, saying, I am in love, with love I am. I had never heard such a sentence before. My inner voice repeated it many times. I was enraptured and lost all sense of my own being, my own body, and the room I was in. The whole world had faded from my awareness to the point of obliteration as I was drawn completely into this joyous experience of Jesus. I was consumed by his holy fire, and I became fire too. All I could do was live the enormity and the intensity of what was happening to me.

Then the energy of Jesus’ fire, his spirit, flowed into me, and my fire flowed into his fire. I’ll try to explain this with an image of two fountains of water: one bigger (Jesus), one smaller (me), beside each other, taking turns cascading our flow of water in and out of each other in a figure-of-eight, like a vertical infinity symbol. We flowed into each other several times in a beautiful, seamless dance of flowing fire. It was utterly blissful. I was ecstatic. Spiritual ecstasy is something that mystics have described since the very beginning. We often see them depicted in holy rapture in art. That is what I was experiencing.

Throughout it all, the holy fire blazed in my head, and on every new in-breath, I felt a fresh wave of fire come pouring into me through the top of my head. I was in awe at what was happening, for the blessing and the sacredness of being visited by Jesus. It was a happiness beyond anything that could ever be experienced in ordinary life. I wanted with all of my heart and soul to give myself to Jesus. The ecstasy lasted about three or four minutes, and as it ended, all I could think to do was to say, ‘I offer myself to you. I am yours to do with me what you will. I am the handmaid of the Lord. I will do your will.’ I was burning alive with spiritual fire, and even now, as I am typing these lines, my head is burning again with that same sacred fire.

Gradually, the fire subsided and I no longer felt Jesus to be present, but I continued in the meditative state, awestruck. When the meditation did come to an end, I wrote everything down in my journal, offering my gracious thanks to God for such a stunning and powerful experience. I knew with certainty it had been The I AM with me, around me, in me, crossing over into me, and me crossing into It.