The Practice of Mystical Vision

My book The Soul’s Journey to Wholeness was released just two years ago, and it contains a detailed description of the mystical turn in meditation practice. At the time, I spoke of this turn as a crossover into the subtle domain of the soul. This transition occurs when our meditation has taken us so deep that we forget who we are and what we are doing. In the passage below, that transition is described with vivid clarity.

“…during the first phase of meditation, you are learning the art of conscious contentment and as you learn to be content no matter what is happening, you will discover that you need to forget yourself in order to do it. If you are thinking about yourself meditating, you simply can’t let go. This is exactly analogous to how you needed to forget about yourself riding a bicycle in order to master it. Eventually meditation and self-forgetting become second nature to you and it no longer requires your active participation. Meditation has become a habit that happens by itself. Now that you are not busy meditating you are free to notice the subtle universe of possibilities that begins to appear all around you. This is when the possibility of soul journeying and creative illumination become possible.”

The Soul’s Journey to Wholeness< is my most recent book illuminating the mystical turn, but in many ways it represents the culmination of years of mystical work, sometimes pursued consciously and deliberately, and at other times unfolding unconsciously and almost tangentially. As I look back, I can see how long the mystical turn had been forming beneath the surface of my practice.

Recently, while revisiting my first published book, The Miracle of Meditation, I was surprised to find passages that articulate, with striking accuracy, what I now recognize as the essence of this turn. These early intuitions were pointing toward dimensions of practice I had not yet fully entered. Only now do I understand what they were preparing me for.

I offer two of those passages here:

“After a few minutes I have an experience that I can only describe as falling asleep while you’re still awake. I feel a deep relaxation descend over me and my body becomes partially paralyzed.”

“At one point in meditation I decided to stop breathing and let the body naturally take over the rhythm. It worked. I was meditating, becoming very still, letting everything be as it is, making no effort, when suddenly I had the feeling of nodding backwards into sleep. I didn’t try to stop it from happening and I just fell backwards, fully aware. It was like falling into a black hole or the mouth of a volcano.”

The second passage above is the one that struck me most powerfully as a direct precursor to everything I now understand as the mystical turn. I was genuinely surprised to find it expressed so lucidly in that early work, but as soon as I read it, a vivid memory surfaced. I remembered the exact moment, more than twenty years ago, when I made the spontaneous decision to stop breathing in meditation.

Over the past few years I have been exploring the spiritual practice of yoga nidra, and I’ve come to see that the goal of that practice is precisely what I described in my first book: falling asleep while you’re still awake. In yoga nidra, the body grows deeply still while awareness remains bright and alert, and I’ve since discovered that this condition is widely recognized as the “mind awake, body asleep” state—a term first coined by out-of-body experience researcher Robert Monroe.

What surprised me is how many other spiritual teachers recognize this very same threshold as the stepping stone into higher dimensions of consciousness and reality shifting. Neville Goddard, Jane Roberts, Dolores Cannon, and Vadim Zeland to name just a few, all point to this liminal state as the gateway where the subconscious becomes permeable, the imagination becomes creative, and the deeper architecture of reality opens itself to awareness. It is precisely in this borderland between waking and sleep that higher-dimensional perception begins to unfold and the mystical turn truly takes root.