Meditation is a refocusing on symbols. It's not emptiness. We are using symbols, doorways to step from one world to another, from darkness into light, from death to immortality.

Life for most people is a bad dream. They live in pain, grabbing at what they can for pleasure. As they grow old, they despair. Things don't work out the way you planned.

Honesty, I went through terrible, terrible times where I just took myself over the coals. I thought I must be the most impure person in the world ... but because that is reverse egotism, I thought I must be the second most impure person in the world.

While I had many friends as a child I aslo kept a great deal to myself. I noticed that adults were drawn to me. They would talk to me for hours at my parents' parties. Strange to find yourself at seven, dressed in pagamas with feet, listening to adults tell you their deepest secrets.

As the years progressed, my spiritual evolution seemed to increase in speed. I stepped outside this world, the selves reordered. The combination, the aggregate of beings that I was, dissolved in the white light of eternity.

Since there were others, a long time ago, who were kind enough to give me a hard time and allow me to study with them, I try and express the same Buddhist courtesy.

Visualize the soft white light continuing to expand as it gently swirls around, until it has filled the earth, the sky, the universe, and all of infinity.