How it started

It all started late one night in the year 1986. I was ten years old.

Sitting cross-legged on my bed as I contemplated the day’s happenings, I felt myself slipping into an altered state of mind. The events that transpired during the day faded in and out of my consciousness even as I tried to make sense of them. Like a haphazardly edited video recording, the arrangement was chaotic and choppy. Though the pandemonium was similar to the mad flashes of lights and angry bursts of noises that one would associate with urban city conditions during the evening, it surprisingly left me with a clearer mind than at the start of the episode.

The social and emotional frustrations that I had as a growing child lightened their tight grip on me at the end and I felt myself relax, both physically and mentally. I did not take note of the duration of the episode but I distinctively remembered laying back down after that to fall asleep almost immediately.

In the nights that followed, I did the same. Each night before I slept, I assumed the same cross-legged posture on my bed and closed my eyes. I did not specifically will myself to experience the same sensations though I did try to recreate the same train of thoughts that I had on the very first night. Occasionally, the sensations that I experienced were similar. Flashes of light and loud sounds.

On other nights, I had other experiences in which my mind’s eye saw the people I had met during the day. They would be walking past me most of the time; sometimes they walked right through me. What particularly struck me during such episodes was that I perceived certain feelings in varying degrees from each of them – anger, happiness, distrust, sadness among others. It was almost as if my mind was revisiting the things that had happened and analysing the people I had encountered during the day. Unknowingly, I had stumbled upon the power of the subconsciousness through a variant meditative state.

Incidentally, I had begun to feel strongly about the notion of good and evil just about the same time when I started having these nocturnal pseudo-hallucinatory episodes. I had also just received a gift that I valued tremendously as a child, a set of encyclopedia. As I was by nature a curious child, I sought answers to my many questions in the tomes.

My thirst for knowledge was so intense that I kept at least one volume with me whenever I could. Volume A would be with me as I ate my lunch and dinner. Volumes T and U were for my bed-time reading. The more questions I asked, the more my mind queried. It was as if my hunger was insatiable. There were many uncertainties that the books could not resolve. Issues such as good and evil, right and wrong. These were ideas for which examples existed in both non-fiction and fiction but were extremely difficult for a child to grasp directly from flat two-dimensional examples.

My parents were traditional in their thinking and strict in bringing up their children. They gave me guidance in the form of do’s and don’ts but offered little in explaining what the intricacies of life entailed. The combination of my experiences at that point in time was likely the primary reason for start of the nightly meditation sessions. By a twist of fate perhaps, an avenue was opened to me where I could obtain some form of closure for some of the numerous unknowns in my life at that juncture in life.