Channeling Experience in Meditation

I am channelling.

I think.

I don’t really know for whose is the voice in my head, mine or somebody else’s? Some ‘body’?

But whose ‘body’ if it isn’t mine?

‘Hello’, I say to the voice.

‘Hello yourself,’ answers the voice. ‘You sound Irish,’ I say.

‘Do I now? Well perhaps I am.’

‘Don’t you know?’ says I. ‘Don’t you?’ says the mystery.

‘Should I?’ I say back, disgruntled. ‘After all this is hardly what channelling is supposed to be about is it and you, you’re hardly a ‘Seth’ are you?’

‘You’ve got yourself a small problem with this channelling thing haven’t you?’ said the voice gently.

‘I suppose I have, yes. By the way what do I call you?’

‘What would you like to call me?’

‘Don’t tempt me,’ I said, ‘this is not at all what channelling is supposed to be like. You’re supposed to be a sage, a wise man. But perhaps Patrick. Is that all right?’

‘One name is as good as any other,’ said Patrick with a grin in his voice.

‘Patrick it is then, but what are you?’ ‘I am the universe.’ ‘Really?’ That’s a bit big isn’t it, to be talking to me? ‘

‘That all depends on your point of view, Thomas. From mine it seems reasonable enough.’

‘Okay, if you are the universe, what is the universe?’

‘Well it is nothing for a start.’

‘How can it be nothing – no “thing”?’

‘Well it’s all down to language isn’t it, for what do you mean by thing?’

‘Something tangible?’

‘Something tangible? Like your body for instance?’

‘Yes, or like this steel barge my wife and I live aboard, or the trees I can see from my window or those swans over there cleaning themselves in the river by the reeds.’

‘Right. But at the molecular level as you know from your reading, Thomas, ‘things’, as in the particles you think you are made up of, appear and disappear into nothing all of the time.’

‘So what you are saying, Patrick is that everything is really nothing. So what is nothing?’

‘There we go again, it’s all about language, words and their meanings. Perhaps you can get a slant on nothing as being something powerful, something lasting, something that gives rise to all those particles of some ‘thing’?’

‘That’s been a lifelong struggle for me that one, Pat. Can you help me to get a new angle on it?’

‘Sure, just think of it as the source, as you have been doing, think of it as being not energy but the source of energy, not matter but the source of matter.’

‘Well I can do that, it’s what I have been doing, but what else?’

‘Think of it as being all that really is. Think that nothing is - and this is the problem with language - some ‘thing’ that gives everything meaning, life and being.’

‘Spirit you mean?’

‘Spirit if that does it for you, for some it would be a turn off,’ said Patrick cheerfully.

‘I realise that,’ I said more glumly. ‘it has been that for me, I try to avoid religious terminology if I can, but it isn’t always possible.’

‘So stick to scientific terminology then, Tom.’

‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘So who am I talking to, really?’

‘Me – Patrick; yourself; your higher mind - since we are all one in the ‘source’ - the universe.’

‘So I’m talking to the universe?’

‘That’s what I said in the beginning.’

‘So you did, Patrick. Well thanks for your input, it’s food for thought if no ‘thing’ else.’

‘Thank you, Tom, and I’ll always be here if you want me.’

‘I’ll hold you to that, bye, Patrick.’

‘Bye, Tom.’