I was always tough with my students. Ha, I almost wrote a Freudian slip there too and said, "my stupids". I would make them do the open-eyed, eye to eye meditation from day one and "blast them with dhristi" as you say.
I was terrible. A real maniac looking back on it. Once or two I felt really bad about because the person coming in was really just looking for "Peace of Mind" and I was ready to pump them full of 5,000 Years and Destruction, and turn them into Brahmins. Some of them were clearly very nervous or neurotic and should have been going to therapy or something instead. They generally did not come back.
Interesting though, at least one was a Christian and have a vision of a Mary-like character during meditation, although to a BK, I suppose it could have been Mama or something. Really, I had not a clue what was going on and would say anything.. It was very irresponsible.
You relate some very interesting experiences. Do you think you could still do them now? (Don't try!). Do you think you knew how to do them? Or was your part in it just to sit there, quieten down and allow it to happen through you? That is what they call "overshadowing" ... in theory some other being/s entering into your aura and using you.
I remember one specific meditation, a long bhatti, when I was guiding it and it really felt like someone was moving my head, "clicking" onto whoever I was supposed to be giving dhristi, and then moving on to the next one when I should quite forcefully. I remember sort of resisting and feeling an increase in pressure to do so.
Of course, I could be wrong/projecting but other traditions all over the world theorise about the same thing; Tibetan schools, Benjamin Creme, spiritist mediums, Sufi and tribal dancers, Brazilian vodun and so on.
Could it feel/be "powerful" in BKism? Most certainly. Is it ultimately benign and enlightening? The jury is out on that ... and that is the problem.
People are so seduced by the "power" and "light", and don't question the latter and the ulterior motives ... which appear to be to kill off humanity.
I suppose that's decider. If you think it's a good idea, then BKism is for you. Just surrender your mind and body and let their spirit army possess you and use you like their dolly ... a BK Barbie or a BK Action Man.
I am just about to quickly read over an old book called, '
The Varieties Of Religious Experience (1902)' by William James, an American psychologist, philosopher, and physiologist who wrote a number of works on psychology, theology, ethics and metaphysics. It looks dry and hard work.
However, writing about mystical states, he notes four qualities which are usually found. The last being ...
Passivity.- Although the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.
He seems to suggest he thinks it is just a "sort of [our own] consciousness" that we are prone to. But, as he says, they are also ineffable. Suggesting that he had not experienced them.
The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.