THE MYSTICAL MOMENT

I was meditating this morning, focused on my breathing, when I heard a voice say, "Step out of your fear." I've heard it many times before and always see a circle of low stones, the size of cinder blocks, though made of stone. I see myself step over them and sometimes, when I've repeated, step out of your fear many times, and imagined myself stepping over the stones, fear leaves me and I calm down. 
     This morning, the stones changed into a doorway with all its symbolic meaning. I imagined myself walking through. But the image wasn't resonating in me. Then I saw a gate, a tall one attached to a fence or walls, a gate that clearly marked one side and the other, under a broad blue sky. I wanted to pass through and know myself in a different place.
     I focused on that image for the rest of my meditation. I was looking for something I've felt before, the moment when suddenly there's no barrier between image and me. I've taken it fully into me, or it's taken me. In a sense, the kind of connection I mean is an obliteration, a sudden disappearance of the walls between me and the world, between me and self, and self and object. In short, a mystical experience. It didn't happen today but it's happened before and I'm sure it will again. I know I'll stumble into those moments of exquisite obliteration.
     I come back from those moments with the seeds of change. I don't think about it. I don't make up stories around it; I don't think that moment means X, Y, or Z. I move through my days, busy with other things, but underneath, deep below the crust of self-consciousness, those seeds are growing. I don't realize it until one day I find myself doing things differently - writing more, cleaning things up immediately, making commitments and keeping them, not getting angry at the slow driver in front of me. I have more often a feeling of equanimity. 
     I don't know how it works. In that giving over of self, there is the sense of very deep expansion. Do the molecules in my body expand, reorder themselves, initiate new wiring? I'm not seriously considering that theory, but who knows? Stranger things have turned out to be true. Whatever the mystical moment is, it's the place where change begins, the place where healing at a depth I can't fathom takes root. 
     There are things I know with my mind and things I know with my body. I want both kinds of learning but for me it's in my body that deep connection comes into being. And sometimes, I who compulsively puts everything into words, want to be silent as I sit with that. 
     "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."