Here are three key mystical takeaways:

🔹 Transcend the Ordinary: Learn about the seven states of consciousness, from everyday thinking to the ultimate state of Unity Consciousness or enlightenment, and how regular meditation can help you traverse these levels.

🔹 Experience the Power of Meditation: Discover how simple techniques, such as focusing on the breath and bodily sensations, can quickly bring calm, order, and deep relaxation—even for the busiest minds.

🔹 Reconnect with Your Divine Purpose: Uncover why we’ve incarnated into this playful dance of life, and how meditation helps you remember your true nature, fostering self-love, peacefulness, and better decisions from the sanctuary within.

Tom’s uplifting insights remind us that the journey into consciousness is both a path of healing and profound spiritual discovery. Whether you seek relief from anxiety or long for deeper meaning, meditation offers real, transformative gifts.

Tune in for practical wisdom, an accessible guided exercise, and inspiration to begin your own mystical exploration within. Don’t miss Tom’s teachings—available online and in person—and discover more about your limitless nature on this edition of Exploring the Mystical Side of Life!

 

Transcript

Tom Cronin:
When I discovered meditation and that transcendent experience to realize that, that God is actually an extension of us, it’s a unified field, that we’re part of this pervasive intelligence. And so that really sort of went from religion and this dualistic idea of God and my relationship with God to sort of a unified experience in a more spiritual way.

Announcer: Welcome to Exploring the Mystical side of Life with your host, Linda Lang.

Linda Lang:
Hi, this is Linda Lang from ThoughtChange.com. We are Exploring the Mystical Side of Life once again this week. If you enjoy our conversations, remember to subscribe, share with a friend. Today I have meditation trainer and the founder of the Stillness Project, Tom Cronin with us. We are going to take a dive into meditation and the exploration of consciousness. Welcome Tom.

Tom Cronin:
That’s great to be here. Love a bit of “woo woo” for a conversation. So I’m looking forward to this.

Linda Lang:
Me too. So meditation is your thing, right?

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, very much so. I’m a one-hit wonder.

Linda Lang:
How did that start for you? Because I know you have a background in corporate.

Tom Cronin:
I was a broker in finance on a trading room floor. And so if anyone’s seen The Wolf of Wall Street, there was a lot of parallels there. Jordan Belfort, I guess the story that he created in Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah, he started his career in 1987 at the age of 22. And I started my career as a broker in 1987 at the age of 19. And it was incredible how accurately they portrayed a trading room floor back in the ’80s. I kind of got goosebumps when I saw the film because that was very much what my world was like. And so I was very young, I was straight out of school, I’d just been backpacking around the world and was supposed to go to university.

And next thing, I landed a job on this trading room floor. And surprisingly, I was really good at it. And what happened was I got kind of swept along by the current of that industry and you know, there was a lot of drugs, a lot of drinking, a lot of partying, a lot of hedonism and narcissism and yeah… you know, it’s very influential. And next thing, after many years of being in that career, I started getting a lot of anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and this continued to culminate eventually into in my late 20s, a full blown nervous breakdown. So it was a very dark, bleak time for me. I was having suicide ideation, I was seeing psychiatrists, doctors, I was put on medication. But the Universe divinely organized for me to see a documentary that I was watching on TV while I was sitting at home twiddling my thumbs.

And the documentary was about a property developer that was extremely successful. But he mentioned in that little snippet of that episode that he used meditation, particularly transcendental meditation. When I heard that word, transcendental and meditation together, I was like, “Whoa, hang on a sec. What is this?” And they actually showed him sitting in a chair in a room, in a suit with a tie, meditating. And that’s kind of what my world was like, wearing ties and suits and sitting in chairs. So I looked into this meditation, and many other forms of meditation, and it was a game changer. It really turned my life around. Now I went back into my job for 16 more years as a broker, but just meditating every day.

And that became something that I saw not just in my life, but many of my peers and friends and family that I’d recommended the meditation technique to, and it changed their lives as well. So I eventually became a teacher, and here I am today.

Linda Lang:
So there is a big difference between the corporate world and meditating and then opening the awareness into the mystical field. So you obviously must have had some kind of experiences that made you understand there’s more out there than meets the eye.

Tom Cronin:
Yeah. I believe my Catholic upbringing laid a really big foundation to the idea that there was more. And I had a very, very strong sense of faith in God. And as a child, I prayed every night. It was quite interesting. I had a communion, communication with God on a regular basis. Obviously, there was the structured form, which was going to church every week. We never missed a Sunday mass, and we’d say grace before dinner every night.

We’d do the rosary during Lent. If anyone’s not a Catholic, you might not know what I’m talking about, but these are kind of prayers. So it was very structured in some respects. But outside that, I myself personally had an unstructured communication happening on an almost daily basis with God. So it was a very strong sense of this other entity. Now, in the early days in my childhood, I sort of saw that as a sort of, you know, the old cliched “man in the sky” that’s going to answer my requests. And interestingly, a lot of those requests were answered, which kind of reaffirmed my faith more and more as time went on.

But then I went through this sort of deep, dark night of the soul for 10 years as a broker into drugs and drinking and partying and all sorts of addictions. And then when I discovered meditation and that transcendent experience to realize that God is actually an extension of us. It’s a unified field that we’re part of this pervasive intelligence. And so that really sort of went from religion – religion and this dualistic idea of God and my relationship with God – to sort of a unified experience in a more spiritual way over time.

Linda Lang:
Beautiful. And it’s wonderful that you had that close personal relationship even as a youngster.

Tom Cronin:
You know, it depends on how you look at things. I sort of have been led to believe and told by energy readers and past life people that I’ve spent some years in monasteries and meditating prior to this lifetime. And I kind of resonate with that because I’m very drawn to ashrams and monasteries and reclusive mountain tops to meditate. So, yeah, I can feel that there was some sort of maybe pre-life experience that had alluded to that.

Linda Lang:
I would think if that’s the case, then it would be a pretty quick transformation for you once you got back into meditation, because you’ve had a lifetime or lifetimes where you develop that skill, then you could make real strides in this life tapping into that.

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, definitely was a fast track. You know, it’s… there’s an analogy we like to use for students that have been putting off and putting off or going into deeper and deeper, darker sort of separation. And it’s like pulling the string and the arrow further back in the bow. And the more we pull it back, the further away we pull it from the actual other hand. And then when we finally let it go, it has this much more rapid trajectory, whereas if we don’t pull it back far, then it doesn’t take off as quickly.

So for me, it had been pulled back to the stretching limit. And so when I did finally go into that meditation and spirituality and Eastern philosophy, it was a really quick and rapid transformation that I went through, which is why I became so passionate about it, because it was like, “Wow, I can’t believe this is happening.” And deep transcendent experiences, and this sort of expansive realities of the infinite, the eternal became a big part of my sort of waking experience on a daily basis, which is really beautiful.

Linda Lang:
So as a meditation trainer, is it Transcendental Meditation, TM that you train others in?

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, the technique that I teach is very similar to TM. It’s called Vedic Meditation. There was just a difference in naming and things like that, organizations. But as far as the structure goes, it’s with particular mantras called Bija mantras that are specifically for the purpose of transcending. That’s going beyond the thinking mind, the physical body, and the feeling form. So to go beyond that realm of, I guess we call it, three dimensional world, the world of form and finiteness, and to transcend. And most of my students in their first weekend workshop will experience that transcendent experience, which is realizing that you’re more than thoughts, feelings and physicality. And I think this is the missing link for humanity is that so much of us identify with the form of thoughts, feelings and physicality, which keeps us in that separate pain state.

Linda Lang:
How beautiful that that can happen that quickly.

Tom Cronin:
Well, the beautiful thing is it’s always there. It’s just that knowing how to get there is the tricky part. And people use different modalities and methodologies. There’s breath work, there’s plant medicines. For me, the most accessible I found was just this ability to transcend, on a daily basis, using a simple meditation rather than going to Peru to take some plant medicine and vomiting for a few days.

Linda Lang:
And does it also give you a way to explore consciousness? Or is it simply about, you know, repeating your mantra and quietening the mind?

Tom Cronin:
I see it as two steps. The first step is to quieten the mind and get out of the thinking realm. And as a result of that, we, by definition, we start to explore consciousness. Because consciousness is not thoughts. Thoughts, it’s like clouds in the sky; the clouds aren’t the sky. The clouds are in the sky and thoughts are in consciousness. And what we want to do is start to discriminate the difference between thoughts and conscious awareness. And so with the ability to transcend, we start accessing what we call pure consciousness.

Tom Cronin:
So it’s consciousness that’s pure and that it’s not tainted with a thought, because thoughts are in the future or past. They’re right or wrong. They’re good or bad. And so with this purity of conscious awareness, we access that through the transcendent experience of getting beyond thought.

Linda Lang:
Can you explain the levels of consciousness for us?

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, according to the Vedic worldview, which is an ancient body of knowledge, we call it “the science of life.” It recognizes that humanity has the potential for seven states of consciousness. Most of the world currently are experiencing three out of those seven. And that’s what defines this era of time that we’re in. According to the Vedic worldview, which is called the Kali Yuga. Some people are saying we’ve kind of passed out of the Kali Yuga, some are saying we’re still in it. But Kali means ignorance and Yuga means an epoch of time. And the ignorance that we’re in is the ignorance of our seven states of consciousness. So the first three are thinking, “I think, therefore I am.”

So your thoughts are really defined around this idea that, you know, there’s a you. 99% of our thoughts revolve around ourselves, which is our desires, our ambitions, our fears, our phobias. And then we go into deep sleep, which is an unconscious state. So that’s every night we completely surrender being us. And that’s where we become unconscious in that lying down horizontal state. Then we enter into dream state every night as well. So then we now emerge out of the unconscious state. Now we’re back into a conscious state, but we’re still sleeping. And all of our dreams revolve around ourselves.

So we’re at the center of every dream. And then.. it’s a very first state and third state, a very kind of narcissistic in some respects, not being mean, but just that’s the way we are. We’re very self-centered as an ego. And then we go back into thinking state. So most people move in and out of those three states. But when we start transcending in meditation, we get into a fourth state. And this is called turiya.

And turiya in Sanskrit means the fourth. So, beyond thinking, deep sleep and dream state. And this is where we’re awake now but not thinking. So it’s a new phenomenon. And then when we do this on a regular basis, go into the fourth state, then back into the first state and into the fourth state and into the first state… and that, I guess, oscillation on a consistent basis morning and evening. This is why we recommend twice a day to meditate. Then that first and fourth state becomes a fifth state.

And now we’ve got Cosmic Consciousness, which is where we have this non-changing state of conscious awareness. We call it  turiya-tita, , the silent witness… just silently witnessing the machinations of life whilst we’re still having the thinking states. And now we’ve got two things, which is kind of like we’re realizing that we’re the sky and we also have clouds in the sky. So those two things happening together. And then we move into two more advanced states. The sixth state of consciousness is where we start to witness that divine informant phenomenon outside of us in the subtle expression of God or Source or Divinity manifesting into form and phenomenon. And then in the seventh state of consciousness, which is a very advanced state to get into that very few people on the planet are in, which is a non-dual state.

We call it Unity Consciousness. And that’s what we would ultimately call enlightenment, where that egoic identity has, I guess, in some respects, some would call this has been cleared of the vessel and now there’s just a unified experience being currently expressed in a current location. So this is what we call non-dualism or non-duality or otherwise known as enlightenment. And we call it Unity Consciousness in the seventh state of consciousness.

Linda Lang:
And so this is what you teach in your meditation training?

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, we teach them the methodology which is how to meditate and how to transcend. And then we teach them, you know, there’s so many layers and life is so complex and it’s not an easy path to walk. And you know, they need a lot of support, I need a lot of support. We’re all on this journey together and discovering the fundamental truth and reality of life. So yeah, there’s many layers to share over time. So we run retreats and do workshops and give them mentoring and support along the way because it’s a, it’s a windy path this one, isn’t it?

Linda Lang:
Well, I don’t know Tom, I kind of think this would be a good time to have an experience. Would you be open to leading us through something?

Tom Cronin:
So what I can do is I can give everyone a calming technique of meditation. We use in our technique, we teach them over four 90 minute sessions, so it’s quite an advanced program that it takes time to sort of really understand the mechanics and the methodology. But what I’ll share with everyone is just a really beautiful grounding and calming and centering of our mind technique of meditation. I call it a concentration meditation rather than a transcending meditation.

But the beautiful thing with this practice is that our mind, particularly more so today than ever, is so scattered in its ability to constantly process so much information that it gets really sort of frayed and frazzled and leaves a pretty sort of frazzled impression on the nervous system. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to center the mind and bring it to one point. Now your mind is going to show up, putting up a lot of resistance to this process because it’s looking for charm, and focusing on one thing is not very charming for the mind. So there will be some resistance, like a little four-year-old kid that’s being disciplined to sit in the corner.

So we want to use some effort and some discipline rather than just letting your mind just wander around aimlessly doing whatever it wants. So we need to flex a little bit of muscle of mind control, bringing the mind back to a single point and what you’ll find as a result of that… we’re just going to do it for maybe five minutes or so… and what they’ll find is that they’ll feel a lot more relaxed, a lot calmer. But they’re going to train their mind to be much better at focusing and have a lot more concentration capabilities. So that’s a really important thing when it comes to your nervous system, your overall well being, and your biochemistry.

Linda Lang:
For anyone listening, sit back in your chair, nice and comfortable.

Tom Cronin:
If you’re driving while you’re listening to this, please don’t do this because we’re going to be closing our eyes and that wouldn’t be a good idea while you’re driving. So if you want to pull over, maybe in park in a side street, we can do this together. Otherwise just pause it. So let’s just sit back in our chair and then we close our eyes because that’s a very stimulating sensory perception. So we want to reduce as much stimulation as we can. We just take a deep breath, just clearing out the lungs and then just returning to your normal breath now and allowing the breath just to ebb and flow as the body does. You don’t have to direct it, just a natural breath since the day you were born. And I want you to notice that as that breath moves in and out of your body, it’s passing through the rim of the nostril.

I want you to notice as it’s ebbing and flowing, in and out, like the ocean coming up onto the sand, I want you to notice that there’s a slight cooling effect just around the inside rim of the nostril. It’s ever so subtle. And what’s happening here is as the air brushes in and brushes out against that skin inside the rim of the nostril, there’s a very subtle film of moisture inside the nostril there on the skin. And with that wind and the moisture and the skin, there’s a slight cooling effect as the air cools the skin. I want you to just keep your attention on that cool skin as the air brushes in against it. Now the mind’s going to drift. It will go looking for something a little bit more entertaining than this.

So your meditation is to just keep bringing it back, just keep bringing it back and just stay with that one thing, the cool skin around the rim of the nostril. And you’re going to find that the air will just be cooling that skin.

Whenever the mind drifts away, just keep coming back. Stay with it just for a little bit longer. Now just enjoy the freedom of not needing to go anywhere, do anything, think about anything, but just be here in this present moment. Just one thing happening, air moving in and out of your nostrils, cooling the skin it. And when you’re ready, just letting go of the meditation and slowly opening the eyes, and we’ll come back to the session.

Linda Lang:
I’m sure we all feel a lot more relaxed. Tom, thank you so much. It’s very interesting when you focus on the body and the different sensations that are so minute, they’re there all the time, but we’re just not aware of them because our minds are so busy.

Tom Cronin:
I’d really like to come back to the third law of thermodynamics that recognizes that as de-excitation occurs, order increases. This is an interesting phenomenon that we see this with things like a large football stadium with 80,000 people in it. Now, when they’re de-excited and calmly leaving that stadium, they can leave that stadium in 10 minutes. But if there’s a gunshot or a bomb blast or a fire and there’s now excitation, they’re moving really fast and they’re racing everywhere. Then we see disorder, things just turn into chaos. And so our body is a system, and when that system is hyper-stimulated… and now most of our world is specifically designed for hyperstimulation, coffee, sugar, Netflix, Spotify, emails, traffic… you know, everything is about going somewhere, doing something, getting stimulated, getting more activated.

But really what we’re missing in our world is de-excitement. And we should be really compartmentalizing time each day to de excite, to give that system the opportunity to recalibrate, to reset. Even our sleep has been compromised because of Netflix and Spotify and Snapchat. So what we want to do is really compartmentalize windows of time, otherwise we’re just not going to do it. If you look at most people possibly even listening today, unless you have a structured meditation, stillness session on a daily basis, you’re going to be in stimulation until you get to sleep, which is now putting a lot of pressure on your sleep time to have to do a lot of the work. Now, when we take that workload off your sleep by adding the meditations into your day, then sleep will become a much more efficient and effective place as well as.

Linda Lang:
And that’s something we could all use more of, right?

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, absolutely.

Linda Lang:
So aside from having that desire to tap into cosmic wisdom and great spiritual understanding, there are some benefits to our own individual selves as well. Can we talk a little bit about what it does for your spirit, what it does for your soul here in this life experience?

Tom Cronin:
If we take it from the macro perspective, I mean, we came here as a descended experience. So there’s ascension, which means to go back into the ethereal, celestial and the light field. But we went from that which is Divinity into descending into form and phenomenon. And the reason for that is like, “Wonder what it’s like to be there… Wonder what it’s like to, as a form, be able to eat ice cream and to listen to music and to dance and to watch a sunrise and to jump in the ocean and to crunch snow under your feet and to make a snowman and to cuddle kids and to have your face licked by a puppy dog.” Like, we actually came into this experience, into form and phenomenon and seeming separateness, to do that dance. We call it Lela, the Dance of the Divine. The Divine is in a playfulness of dancing in form and phenomenon.

So lovemaking isn’t two bodies pressing up against each other. Lovemaking is the wind brushing your cheek, the taste of sugar on your tongue, the sound of thumping dance music in a nightclub. Like, we actually came here to celebrate this incredible existence and we kind of lost ourselves along the way, thinking that it’s all about something else, and myself included. The whole point of this journey is actually to go from seemingly forgetfulness back into remembrance whilst we’re in the playfulness of the dance.

Linda Lang:
I think one of the biggest gifts I’ve noticed is the relationship you have with yourself. It’s like you know what you feel like more than who you would normally consider this physical person in this body. It’s almost like you reach an understanding of yourself beyond this. But yet there’s that resonance, I guess, that resonance… You can understand that feeling almost like there’s a sanctuary within you that’s bigger than you. And that sanctuary can actually help you to be calmer and more peaceful, but also to help you make more aligned decisions and choices.

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, absolutely. This was the, one of the biggest, I guess, insights and leaps that I made in life was when I started transcending in meditation and realizing that, yes, there is thoughts, feelings and physicality, but there’s a conscious awareness as well, that’s watching me make those thoughts, decisions and be in my physicality. And then from that conscious awareness, start to be a little bit more discerning about the things that I say, the things that I do, the things that I feel, even. And this is an ongoing process.

I’m probably my worst critic, and this might surprise people, but I’m constantly in this, “Oh, you idiot.” You know, like, I kind of can’t help but that maybe it’s something to do with my Irish Catholic background, but that self-flagellation of always knowing that I could do things better and say things better and be better. Not to try and reach perfection, but just to fix up the things that you were doing wrong and having that ability to, I guess Velcro apart those two things, which is there’s me and then there’s consciousness, which is awareness itself witnessing me and knowing that that silence or that awareness is inside of me. So it really I think is an integral part on helping us become better people and better humans along the way, and getting out of the just constant chat of being the thoughts and being the feelings that drive our actions. That is, I think it’s a big step for humanity.

Linda Lang:
So you might step into it as a form of stress release or just to find a little bit of quiet time and peace from the chaotic world that we live in, but there’s so many gifts in it if you stick with it.

Tom Cronin:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, you know, interesting. Most people come to me because of a pain point. You know, there’s a, there’s a problem I need fixing which is I can’t sleep, I’ve got anxiety, I can’t focus, I’ve got ADHD, I’ve got trauma from my childhood. So most people are coming to me with a pain that, that need resolving, which is where I started as well.

But then that usually is a catalyst, which is beautifully designed and organized by the Universe in some way to be a form of impetus for your deeper exploration and understanding about who you are. And so I always know that, okay, let’s just deal with this problem, but knowing ultimately what they’re here for is to discover who they are. And that’s something that unravels over time as they go deeper into the journey.

Linda Lang:
Tom, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Tom Cronin:
It’s been my pleasure. It’s been great to be and have this wonderful conversation.

Linda Lang:
Now where can we send people who’d like to know more about your work?

Tom Cronin:
I guess two places: Instagram, I love communicating with the community. Instagram and something about that app that I find is a nice communal experience. So @tomcronin is just one word. @T O M C R O N I N and then my website is the same www.tomcronin.com. So they can see all the things that I do there on my website.

Linda Lang:
And you, your training is also online, not just in person?

Tom Cronin:
In person and online, and I do retreats and mentoring. I like to support other yoga teachers and meditation teachers to help them with their businesses as well, a little bit of spiritual business training as well. So there’s a quite a few different things that I offer. It’s to realize that we’re spiritual. You know, we already are spiritual. Businesses are already spiritual. It’s just that we need the people that are creating the businesses and in the businesses to realize their true nature.

Linda Lang:
Absolutely. Totally agree. Thank you again for being my guest.

Tom Cronin:
My pleasure.

Linda Lang:
And thank you for listening to this week’s edition of Exploring the Mystical side of Life. You will find all of our conversations on YouTube and your favorite podcast platform. Come visit me at ThoughtChange.com Pick up your copy of Learning to Listen. While you’re there, check out my program, Alchemy from the Inside Out, and we will see you again next time. Bye for now.