Question: When I am meditating, I feel my head expanding and I feel that something is pounding the top of my head.

Sri Chinmoy: Two seemingly contradictory things are happening. On the one hand, you say that your head is expanding; this is the purified consciousness that is expanding in your mind. On the other hand, your impure thoughts, impure consciousness, want to pull down Light from above by force and when they do so, they feel a heavy pressure. When the pure forces in us want to pull down some thing from Above, there is no pressure. Why? Because when our little divinity looks up and invites the highest Divinity to enter, it sees its oneness with the Highest. It is like a child who sees its father. The child is not afraid, because he knows that it is his own father that he sees. He calls his father and his father comes to him. But if he invites in someone else's father, he may be afraid of that person. He may fear that that man will show him an angry face and say, "Why did you call me?" This fear comes because the father and the son are not of the same origin. The son sees someone unfamiliar, so he experiences a kind of uneasiness and fear.

Now similarly, when impure thoughts invite the highest Divinity to descend, the Divinity is ready to come; but the impure thoughts are afraid because they think they will be crushed. They do not get any familiar feeling. Observing that the Divine is foreign and strange, the undivine feels uneasy and experiences a severe pressure on the head. But our divine thoughts, our pure thoughts, do get a familiar feeling when they see the Divinity coming down in abundant measure. It is the undivine in us that is always afraid of the Divine even though at times it wants to see the Divine.