A quick look at how Roy Master's teachings could be beneficial to someone "lost" in "The Mirage"

What follows below describes my VERY CYNICAL FIRST REACTION in 1996 to receiving what became this life-changing Observation-Exercise-Meditation. The tape arrived. After a day or two I found a tape player and listened for about five minutes. I was extremely cynical. ‘What kind of nonsense is this! And this ‘you are about to embark on the most wonderful experience of your life’ stuff! This radio counselor - a limey, yet!
I was a student of the most brilliant concepts in the fields of psychology. How could this possibly help? I asked myself. What did he mean thoughts would arise to stop this? The hokum people will listen to! Well, what could he know? He was, after all, English. They went into WWII looking ridiculous in short pants and silly-looking helmets. They wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for FDR and LendLease, anyhow, Do they appreciate it? No-o-o. Or was that the French? Remember that class I took in college...  European Poly-Sci and that girl I had sex with from that class, was she smart! rubbing shoulders with UN people by assisting the Professor; her family had money and political connections on the leftist union side and an apartment in the Upper Eighties on the West Side. She was a terrible lover … Used to hold me too tight right below my shoulder blades, and kind of drag my upper torso down… reminding me now of that great movie “Election” and the main male character hearing the words “good job” upon completing sex… and...and …and… what the hell am I doing?"

I suddenly realized I was no longer in my chair in the bedroom meditating along to the tape, but was now standing in front of the refrigerator while ridiculing his message.
What am I doing in the kitchen? What’s going on here?
I continued to try to get through the first side of the meditation tape. I tried it again. Oh, this is stupid. But wait, my thoughts are repeating the words I’m hearing, but if I make an effort to be aware of even these thoughts…then there is a flash of something new. A literal expansion of “consciousness.”
‘Wait a minute. What is this? Insistent thoughts are in my head trying to get me to do something else. Anything else. Stand up and leave the room again! In other words, words were coming into my head telling me to do things just like he was warning me about! How can that be? He’s not here! How can he know what’s going on in my head?’
Ten minutes later found me on my way to the kitchen again wondering what I was doing. The suggestion was made in my mind that I should stand in front of the refrigerator and look for something to eat. Later, while trying to meditate again, I was reminded that there might be dirty dishes in the sink; as if I ever cared about that! I had been sitting upstairs trying to meditate a few moments ago. How can this be? I’m the mental giant here. What’s going on? Feeling strangely – and suddenly – brave, I returned to the cassette. I sat down, pushed play, and made it about thirty seconds before my mind took off just like he said it would, and then in five more minutes I found myself starting to get up to look for my shoes, again a victim of another one of my own mind games; this time a reminder of some groceries I suddenly “needed” to buy. What the hell is going on here!?! The “not me” of HS Sullivan started to get the light of awareness brought to the Jungian shadow.
Weeks pass.
I am beginning to listen to the meditation tape a few times a week and get all the way to the end. Now I'm listening every day. I even make it to side two. It is beginning to grow on me, as its concepts are being reflected by both my deepest fear and my deepest understanding.

Exorcism experience while meditating while dancing

I had an epipheny concerning the nature and significance of sexual fantasy while on a 900 transexual phone
call that I believe was the result of this Observation-Meditation. (click for auto-erotic revelation)

I am smoking a lot of pot. I confide to a stoner friend my paranoid thoughts concerning my psychosis. He alerts me to the fact my logic is based on the equivalent of having hostile space aliens camping out in my ears. I find this – coupled with my daily meditations - extremely reassuring.
I continue to meditate although the pot is actually getting in the way of the conscious expansion a good deal of the time, as I find myself imagining myself in heroic postures for a good part of the meditation; simply falling into my thoughts pleasantly. When I’m not doing that – or if I’m not smoking pot - I find a clarity to the meditation that is unlike anything I'd ever experienced.Even though as a “meditator,” I’m not supposed to get lost in thought, it was almost impossible not to do so for a large portion of the time. As my marijuana use decreased, the depth of my meditation increased, and a strange thing happened.

At that time, I was smoking a pack a day of cigarettes. After a few weeks of meditating, I was still listening to his tape on meditation, not having graduated yet to doing it on my own, and I had one cigarette left in my pack, and immediately thought ‘I better go down to the 7-11 and get a pack,’ when a deeper, more unspoken message radiated up in me: ‘what do I want that for?’ It suddenly seemed a little bit exciting and courageous (dare I say 'good'?) to stop smoking.

I was immediately re-united with a vision I had had in the late 60’s coming off an acid trip. It was a hallucinatory/spiritual representation which showed the bits and pieces of vegetable refuse in the New York gutter often found near fruit and vegetable stores after they spray off the sidewalk. In the vision I took a piece of old newspaper and swept these bits of vegetable garbage into the newspaper, wrapped it into a funnel and lit the giant stogey on fire, with my mouth and nose leaning close to it to breath in the smoke; it was the spiritual representation of smoking tobacco.
Now, thirty years later, the impression, with an unsounded voice added to it – which had clearly inferred, “what do I need this cigarrette for?” had kicked up that old image into my consciousness. I suddenly felt brave and free, and not a little bit daring. For added panache, I decided to refuse the one left in the pack as well, turning on the faucet and running water into the box to ruin the last stick. I burned my bridge and crossed the Rubicon; never going back.

I had picked up smoking again during the divorce the previous year. Being more than a little familiar with addiction, and having quit cigarettes eight years before that after a three-pack-a-day habit, I was amazed at the power of the meditation to make the temptation to smoke nothing but a small discomfort. The ability to see the temptation (“the need for a smoke”) as a need to “escape the current thought” allowed the meditation to kind of “zap” the craving. I could see the urge for a cigarette and with the meditation be aware of the emotional element demanding smoke in order to override my consciousness, demanding it (my consciousness) be shielded from the awareness of whatever it was that was within me prompting the need for ‘a smoke.’ I saw it was a lie, this ‘need to escape-with-nicotine.’ I became aware in a more fully realized way that I did not have to give in to it. I was pleased and satisfied to be a ‘clean-air breather.’  I was very fortified with the sense of this success. It was an independent success. I was becoming independent of the crutch of the nicotine, and I had surmounted the challenge in an independent manner. Nobody else in my life even knew I was doing this. This was no ego/head trip. This was a very real accomplishment as I knew better than anyone my weakness for addiction. This inner weakness had crippled me my entire life. Here it was just slipping away almost effortlessly. I had taken the demon of nicotine and bitch-slapped it. No shrinks, group efforts, programs, books, chants or sayings. Just this meditation. And I wasn’t ‘puffing up.’ There had never been anything quite like this in my life before.

Holy Ectoplasm, Batman!
It was not long after the Battle for Nicotine was concluded that an experience I can only describe as inexplicable occurred. I was meditating in my bedroom and was at a point where I was able to sense that “stillness” that is a result of a sincere (and oftentimes frightening) effort at awareness, when I began to smell this rather bad odor coming from somewhere close by. It was as if a cigarette filter was smoldering in an ashtray, but it was not exactly that odor. It was only close by. I was concerned for fire, and after sniffing myself all over, spent several minutes looking under the bed, in closets, etc. for the source of this offensive smell.

In truth, I received a ‘sense’ of what it was at the time, but figured that was too far out and then forgot about it as the smell simply disappeared. Years later I was listening to a tape of Roy Masters with a group at the FHU (his Foundation’s) ranch in Oregon when somebody in the audience asked a question concerning this same phenomenon. It is very common, he said. Many of the people in his audience there had also experienced it.

What can I say? It happened. It does happen. It could happen to you, too. I wouldn’t have believed it either, and at any other time in my life I would have eagerly led the charge as the captain of the skepticism team regarding this very phenomenon. I won’t say any more about it except this: in the words of Russel Crowe’s Master and Commander, “not everything is written in books.”

A moment of "exorcism"
Also see "Advanced Meditation" Link to come

Introduction
Exercise
Discussion