Meditation as taught in The School of The Natural Order
Vitvan
The next step after that thought is established is breath. One must learn breath work before he attempts meditation. We use what we call the full breath. Sit down, keeping your spine straight and your head erect, hands in your lap, palms up. Relax. Find a relaxed position. Inhale air deep into your lungs, and then gradually exhale. Inhale slowly and steadily, exhale slowly and steadily, and keep practicing that full breath until with the breath in your lungs you can feel your collarbones lifting. It sounds easy, and many people think that they breathe deeply, but a vast majority are shallow breathers. Mountain climbers and athletes breathe deeply; they must do it. But those who are not mountain climbers and athletes are generally shallow breathers. It takes quite a little effort to get over the habit of shallow breathing and to take a full breath. When you think that you have your lungs full of air, breathe in some more. Quite a little practice is required to learn how to take a full breath.
The Four Somatic Divisions of Man
Now we have two factors: the thought that we’re dealing with energy and the practice of taking a full breath. This is only preliminary. We’re getting ready to meditate. Then, turn the thought upon the four somatic divisions of yourself, of ‘man’. The lowest of the four is symbolized by earth; the next by water; the next by air; and the highest, in the head centers, symbolized by fire. These are a part of zodiacal symbolism, which is only a language that describes the functions. It does not mean that when Venus is in Libra that anything is going to happen to you. It simply means that when you have the force in the heart center the experience that you will have is describable as Venus in Libra. And when your forces are down in the solar center and Mars is in Scorpio, it means that you are wont to quarrel and fight, even when everything is harmonious and peaceful. You’ll stir up something so you can have a good quarrel.
The Four Somatic Divisions of 'Man
This breakthrough into the registry of the psychic world is extremely important. I would love to address meetings of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts because they’re all at sixes and sevens among themselves. To me they’re the blind trying to lead the blind. I’d like to lay it al I down to them and prove every statement made regarding the etiology of psychological maladjustments.
Let us return to the point. This lesson is on meditation, but I had to bring in the vast ramifications relative to understanding the psyche and its centers and the way it functions. After the breakthrough one becomes more and more conscious of the wave-frequencies on the psychic side, which for a long time are unconscious—what the psychiatrists and psychologists would call: in the unconscious. “In the unconscious” simply means this: during the long, long time that we have been in objective self-consciousness we’ve been objectified, and that habit of objectifying everything— ‘thingifying’, we call it hangs over long after the psychic centers are awakened and stirring. We still persist in objectifying, and that constitutes a heavy wall, a heavy veil, between the mental, cortical, objective thinking and the psychic functions. Gradually— meaning four, five, six, seven palingenetic cycles—that wall gets thinner and thinner, down to a veil, and by-and-by the veil disappears and we perceive just one world.
We function in this so-called objective sense just as we would if we didn’t have a body or a brain; just precisely the way we do when we check out in what the blessed Aristotle fans call death. We function right now, all the time, just like we would if we had no body and no brains. And what a ruse the brain is, because when we have that brain working, the more we think the less we know. Functioning in the frequency world by frequency registration and responsiveness to the quality, the guna of the frequency registration, is far beyond the best brains. I’ve had occasion through the years to point to this one or that one who is highly successful in the objective sense and show that these ones never functioned by brains at all. They functioned by their higher psychic centers and psychic forces.
I remember reading the autobiographical sketch of John D. Rockefeller, and I bring that in because these aristotelians often want to be millionaires. He was the head of the board of many far-flung oil companies. He controlled the majority of the stock in all those companies. Many are the times, he said in his autobiographical accounts, that he stood before his boards and opposed every one of them. Unanimously they were against a certain move, and because he controlled a majority of the stock he had his way. And afterwards, they all came and said to him, “My goodness, how did you know?”
What am I doing? Talking about meditation? I am. I’m talking about the breakthrough; how little by little the wall or veil between what we call objective life and the psychic world disappears. When the awakening comes, it comes in the genital center. The awakening to the psychic world comes in the genital center. Back in the mid-Victorian puritanical age I used to have to skate around and talk cryptically. I don’t anymore. This used to be so secret that an allegorical story was told about the awakening of consciousness, the Power-to-be-conscious in the psychic side awakening on the generative level. It went I like this: Once upon a time, my dear little children, there were some shepherds tending their flocks at night. And suddenly angel voices sang, “Peace on earth, good will among men.” And the shepherds saw a brilliant star, and they followed that star and found that it was over a stable, and they entered that stable, and there in the manger of the stable there was a beautiful newborn babe. And from afar off, three wise men also saw the star and made a long journey across the burning sands and came to the place where the babe was born, and searched diligently, and attracted so much attention in searching that old King Herod heard of it and got frightened and sent out all of his legions to kill all the newborn within the year to be sure he would get the right one.
That was the story to camouflage the awakening of the consciousness and the vital force, energy, in the generative level of the psychic nature. Need I elucidate the story? Here, in the manger, where we have heretofore fed the animals, the power, energy, awakens, and it is the beginning of the birth of a newborn one in the Light’s Regions. I think it’s the most beautiful story ever told.
That force, when it awakens, very often separates men and women. Very often one still wants to function just by sensation; the other has to have a more subtle wooing response. One shall be taken and the other left. All sorts of physiological, mental and psychological maladjustments result from not being mated with one who knows how to function on that level, responsively, one with another.
Getting Functional with Vitvan
The force does not remain on that level. It rises. Notice the three lines running up through the circles on the chart. The outside two lines, like the negative and positive lines of force, spiral upward. One turns one way end one the other. That is the ancient symbol of the caduceus, Hermes’ staff. Our modern medical association has adopted that ancient symbol. I wonder if they understand it. One cannot function on a relatively higher level without the energy with which to function. So little by little those currents are directed upward, until “where three ways meet, go into Jerusalem” (go into the kingdom), “and in an upper room” (notice the symbolism) “prepare the last supper” (the death of the personality, the resurrection of consciousness in the Light.) Read that Good Book. It’s all there.
The ida-pingala currents go ahead. Another allegory is John the Baptist, who “goeth ahead and prepareth the way, but there is One coming after me who is greater than I,” etc. Those currents have to go ahead and prepare the way for the awakening of a greater power, the speirema, the kundalini, the fire, because it would be absolutely disastrous for that greater power to awaken if the psychic self was not purified. That going ahead and preparing the way, we call, in our work, the purificatory period on the path. That’s our label for it, because as the force rises it throws out on the periphery of the psyche everything that cannot be utilized in the new vesture, the fire body. Everything must go out, and it is cast out on the periphery before it is cast out entirely.
To accomplish this, or to co-operate with it, constitutes the object of meditation. Sitting still and trying to hold your thoughts still and getting still and mumbling something, like, “My own shall come to me,” is the most dangerous thing that one can do, because he is opening himself to any influence that might be around in the psychic atmosphere. The most dangerous thing to do is to sit negative, supine, waiting for something to happen, the Lord to speak to you, or what have you. Meditation is the most positive attitude that one can assume.
Let me backtrack now and pick up the factors and put them together. Here is the way we meditate, the way we practice co-operation with the Natural Order Process. We sit relaxed, hands resting on our thighs, palms up; the spine is held straight to allow the forces to flow freely. We focus attention upon one or the other of the psychic centers, wherever we happen to be in our ongoing. Some even haven’t awakened the power in the level of generation. Some have. Some are in the solar center, some in the heart center, some in the throat center, and some in the pituitary. It doesn’t make any difference which center, there’s no ‘high’ or flow’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’: we’re dealing with energy, just like electricity. There’s no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about electricity. You function with this energy on the level upon which you want to function.
With attention focused upon the psychic centers, begin to breathe deeply. Gradually breathe air into your lungs until they are full—a full breath. Keeping your focus on one center, breathe air into your lungs while you visualize, imagine, realize you are charging the battery, you’re taking in energy. Oxygen is another label for fire, energy. Just as we convert the food that we ingest into energy before it is available to the cellular structure, so we convert the oxygen into fire by the breathing process. You are understandingly co-operating with the process now. “With all of thy getting, get understanding.” Don’t go mooning around; work in the clear light of understanding at all times.
Focus now, we’ll say, on the heart center, and fill your lungs full of air, taking a full breath, and as you do this realize, actually experience in feeling, that you are converting oxygen into fire, into energy. Hold the focus and exhale slowly and gradually, and as you exhale feel that this heart center, for instance, is like a powerful searchlight that is shining in all directions, and that shining is breathing out love to all creation. Breathe it out to everything—the grass, the flowers, the earth and the trees, the dogs and the cats— not just to some one. The world needs this power to dispel the ugly destructive forces that are being released elsewhere. Breathe this power out, breathing out love, to everything. Hold your focus as you do this. Practice that five minutes to start with. After you do it five minutes four or five weeks or so, increase the time until you can do it for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes. You can’t do that at first; but you can build yourself up to where you can do it.
The focus of attention is very important on the grounds that the psychic nature operates under the power of suggestion. It doesn’t operate any other way until it is free, liberated, independent and well developed. After a few months of holding the focus, your psyche finds out what you are trying to do and will do it whether you think of it or not. We condition the psyche over the years until it operates under the suggestion whether we think of it or not. That is the point.
Gradually we bring the force up until we focus at the crown. The focusing at the crown awakens the power in the sacral center and the greater One awakens and comes in and turns you over into the Mind Level, into the Supernal Light.
So much for meditation. Now I’m going to make a few comments about it. Those of us who have been practicing this form of meditation for a number of years find this: we’re busy with the housework or the job or whatever we are doing, and we are so busy we don’t think there is any need to make preparation for something that is destructive. Suddenly, right in the midst of being objectively busy, we’ll feel the forces beginning to rise and intensify. We have learned through the years that the psyche knows something is impending that the brain, the objective person, doesn’t know; and so the psyche is getting ready to meet it or is lifting the forces above the level that it is on. If one can get his forces above the level that the impending menace is on he is immune to it. It cannot touch him because it can’t get off its level and he’s already on a higher level.
Train and discipline your psyche until your psyche begins to do this automatically. No, it’s not actually automatic; there’s wisdom, knowledge and consciousness involved. The psyche knows much more than the brain knows about anything and everything. When the psyche knows something is going to happen that is destructive or disagreeable or that we should be protected from, it goes to work and raises the force, and the raising of those forces attracts our attention. So we co-operate with it. Very often that happens almost daily. Many other things like that eventuate as a result of this form of meditation. It opens up whole new worlds teeming with life, teeming with people, teeming with activity, and full of the most fascinating discoveries while we take the journey to the promised land.
Meditation is the key to the whole thing, and if you get hold of that key you will have something extremely valuable. If you don’t want it, leave it alone, stay out of it. The time will come when you will want this more than you want anything else.