from
The
Womb, Karma and Transcendence:
A Journey toward Liberation
by
Namgyal Rinpoche
"Fourth
Womb Stage - Deliverance"
The
"plop" and the "cut" in meditation
In
order to understand this entire study and the work ahead,
we must first turn to the fourth womb stage: delivery. Hear
the language: "Delivery," "Deliverance." You have already
had a liberation! An emergence. Our philosophies and
religions are based on actual facts that have shaped us. The
first thing to understand is that the fourth stage is divided
into
two events; the "plop," and the "cut." Certain phenomena
arise in connection with each of them. Orientate your mind to
meditation, begin innocently. In meditation, certain feelings
and experiences occur seemingly out of nowhere - for
example, a rush experience, or a definitive experience of
absorption (jhana),
or a hurling of the consciousness to the
heights ("raised to heaven and plunged to earth"). Actually
you have already had this experience; during birth there was
a rush through the tunnel, the birth canal, and an emergence
into the light. Then there was a grand opening. This is really
first experienced in life and then relived in meditation.
Some
of these phenomena may also appear at the dream level,
or when conditions are just right for them to come through.
There's the experience of an expansion of space; also, the
feeling of containment and pressure - especially on the head.
The actual pressures experienced in the womb were released
at delivery and now you have a reliving of the release -
suddenly, there's an openness and an expansion of space. In
addition, you experience the walls of a new womb, so to
speak, especially if you were born at home. You are born into
the light. If you were born in a hospital, you might have a
wall of lights experience.
It
is somewhat unexplainable, but in meditation, fourth stage
womb phenomena is often accompanied with the appearance
of four colours: a light sky blue (not deep space blue, that
comes earlier), golden light, white light, and a full range of
rainbow colours. The light has a crystalline clear, deva,
or
"radiant" quality, and it moves. The light is traditionally
described in the Vajrayana
teaching as "heavenly." The
organism directly experiences the "inner eye" and the auric
body from within.
To
summarize, you have release. There is no physical pressure
of mental containment. You are "spaced-out"…literally,
boundless. There may be visions of "Halls of Glory" or the
"Palace of Tara," then there may be colours. Well, all this is
very nice…but then comes the cut! Back to reality. There
might come a gasp, a disruption of breathing. Remember,
until the umbilical cord was cut you were breathing in the
womb. Your mother's breathing pattern is already there. In
meditation, the cut manifests as a very sharp sword thrust
into the navel - a kind of spiritual hara-kiri.
But it can also
manifest in any one of the major energy centres - the heart,
for example - along with a gasp or a crisis in breathing. Here
you are, years later, everything is rosy in your garden, but
there's a kind of inner certainty that it won't last. That
program comes from the cutting. The technique of cutting the
umbilical cord used to be less extreme than it is now. There
was a waiting until the pulsations of the cord stopped, but
now the cut is made more immediately after delivery. So we
might expect that this will show up historically across a
broad
societal spectrum, as a kind of crisis orientation.