Am-107 MEDITATION (1)

In our journey through the 4th Kingdom of Nature, there comes a time when a monad begins to wake up and ask the questions, who am I? Why am I here and where am I going? Esoterics describes such a monad as an Aspirant. These monads are not being monitored by the Hierarchy, if they were, they would be called Probationers. Aspirants are trying to find a path, the path to Enlightenment. The aspirant is most likely to start by seeking out information in books, or they may look for someone who could act as a guide. There are many paths an aspirant can follow. They usually chose one that is best suited to their ray configuration. An aspirant on rays 2, 4 and 6, tend to be attracted to subjective forms of knowledge presentations that focus on consciousness development. This would make sense because the whole evolution of the monad is one of consciousness development. The drawback of walking this particular path is that the material nature of life is at best demonised and at worst, ignored. This is counterproductive to someone who happens to exist in material reality. This has been the predominant presentation of most schools of philosophical and spiritual thought. The problem with this approach is that it is very difficult to construct a hypothesis about the reality you perceive because, with a subjective approach to life, there is no external reality. Is there another way? Yes, there is. There is a system of knowledge acquisition that starts its investigations from a matter perspective. Hylozoics is the only system I know of that maintains such a focus on matter, although it only allows the student to construct tenable hypotheses that have to be verified at a later date, through direct experiences. This approach to consciousness development is best suited to monads functioning on the 3rd and 5th ray principles.

So, we have two ways of reaching the goal of consciousness expansion that will hopefully lead to enlightenment and the eventual passage to the 5th Kingdom of nature. If we are discussing the workings of our objective reality, we can set up hypotheses and test them. What happens, however, if we seek to ascertain the validity of hypotheses that pertain to super-physical reality? The answer is, not a lot. The very fact that something is super-physical, implies that it is not found on our current planes of amber. To investigate those realities, we have to somehow transfer our conscious perception onto those planes of matter and observe them directly. Do we abandon all hope and return to our caves? Not necessarily, if we are prepared to train our minds to break through the barriers that separate one plane of matter from another. How do we do this? Meditation! This series of presentations set out to describe not only what meditation is, but how best to go about achieving this most crucial activity that promotes consciousness expansion.

When we consider our thoughts, where do they originate from? The answer is, either from our Emotional or our Mental envelopes. Our attention is directed from our physical environment to our feelings, onwards to our thoughts and back again, in what is most often a very haphazard manner. The first thing we, therefore, have to do is control our consciousness, so that it attends to what is occurring in our physical, emotional and mental worlds. We have to be actively conscious and aware of where the signals are coming from. We have to, closely, pay attention to them; not allow them to randomly appear and throw us off balance. If one does this, you have the ability to then refuse to pay attention to something distasteful your senses may be picking up. You can discard intrusive emotions and thoughts, which serve no purpose in what is your current focus of activity. You become self-determined and this is often described as the application of Will-Power. Laurency points out that there has been a misconception when there is a conflict between different desires, as being a conflict between imagination and will. The truth is that the strongest desire always comes off victorious. Chocolate always wins. We have the power to decide, which will be the strongest motive and this is called the application of our ‘will’. This gives us a clue as to how we can control our random thoughts. We need to occupy our attention with a concrete, defined thought. The objective is to stop our mind wandering from one thought to another. This is easier said than done because if you have a task you are concentrating on, when you relax, your mind wanders and then random thoughts begin to suddenly pop up in your mind. The way to avoid this is to have a defined problem running in the back of your mind that it can return to when it is not focused on the primary task at hand. What could such a background problem be? Let’s make it an easy one, what about the Meaning of Life! Mystics have a tried and tested technique called ‘living in constant prayer’. If that does not appeal to you, the obvious solution is to be so focused on what you are doing that your mind simply can not wander. Wherever the mind is proactively focused, can be considered an act of worship. Praying is not a higher activity on some imaginary scale.

What we all realise is that controlling our consciousness is not an easy task. In fact, it takes many lifetimes to achieve it. But persevere we must. It is important to note that attention strengthens everything it observes. Therefore, if you watch your faults, you end up strengthening them. How can this impact us? Imagine you look back at something you did and live in remorse as a result. What you think is a good intention, to review your fault, only ends up strengthening it. It comes back to the point just made; attention strengthens what it observes. You have heard of the Akashic Records, which record every act or deed, no matter how inconsequential. Well, nothing we focus on is ever lost. It just sinks down into our subconscious and lies there, just below our conscious threshold. It lives its own life, befitting or inhibiting our waking consciousness. The complex nature of our subconscious sees to it that every impression is sorted into a subject category. These complexes are continually vitalised by new impressions. It is not possible for you to dissolve these complexes. Is all lost then? No, but you have to refuse to pay attention to these emotions or thoughts and in this manner, you omit to revitalise them. The net result of this is that they eventually grow so weak that they are unable to send impulses back up to the waking consciousness. These subconscious complexes act as irritants to us. If something irritates you, whatever that ‘thing’ is, it belongs to a complex and you have just strengthened it. Have you ever recalled a wrong you feel you have suffered, only to find yourself annoyed again, at a later date, by that memory? In this cyclical manner, we end up developing emotional and mental ulcers, which may eventually manifest as boils, ulcers and even cancers in our physical organism. Laurency informs us that 75 per cent of all diseases result from uncontrolled consciousness. We know we should not dwell on the past, our mistakes or other people’s violations of our rights. This leaves us embittered and irritated. This leads to our complexes rising, in an uncontrolled manner, into our waking consciousness. This results in these complexes deciding where our attention is directed. This then impacts other areas of our lives. Because we are not controlling our consciousness, we end up making faulty observations of our situation and environment. We assimilate spurious facts and end up drawing faulty conclusions. This ends up with our memory feeding into our waking consciousness, a set of experiences that have been distorted by our emotions. These remembered experiences are then recalled and end up becoming a source of new misconceptions. This is why so many people end up deceiving themselves into thinking that what they are saying is true when it is a fabrication, based on false assumptions that have been regurgitated from past, often disconnected experiences. Is it any wonder we live in such a messy environment? The sobering fact is that 90 per cent of what we assimilate, on a daily basis, is more or less fictitious. This brings us back to the assertion made at the beginning of this presentation. It is vitally important to control our attention and occupy it with only essential thoughts.

That brings us to the end of the first presentation on mediation and we have not even mentioned the word after its introduction. Well, as has been alluded to, it takes many incarnations to master the art of meditating. It will be no surprise then that it will take several presentations to review the concepts around mediation. We have made a start by highlighting the importance of the focus on our thoughts. In the next presentation, we will start by outlining three steps to aid in the control of our consciousness.