June / July 1997
Dear Friends,
As members of humanity, most of us find ourselves living in a high-pressure, fast-paced society. We function in an environment where we don’t have the “luxury” of extra time, where our busyness leaves us “out of time.”
Do busy schedules allow time for meditation? People say, “On the one hand, I would really would like to find the time to meditate; on the other hand, I have no time in the day to set aside for meditation.” Sound familiar?
I once read a statement by President Abraham Lincoln where he was quoted as saying, “I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” What does this mean? It can best be described with an explanation about the practical use of meditation. In meditation a person reorients his mind from its lower daily activity, toward his Higher Self —toward his Solar Angel and toward the Buddhic Plane (the Plane of the Intuition)—whereupon he can absorb the ideas and ideals, and organize them into thoughts, translating the thoughts into essential information. The leader of tomorrow one day will comment “Because of meditation I am able to write a shorter letter, write a smaller book, or present a shorter speech because I am able to recognize, embrace, and express only the most essential points of the issue. Without meditation it takes me longer to get to the point.”
Meditation is a tool, which eventually shapes a person’s schedule into the most essential.
When meditation has been steadily practiced, and when impurity has been overcome, enlightenment takes place, leading to full illumination.
“Meditation” is the theme for this issue of Meditation Monthly International. It is our privilege to present to our readers two articles and one poem that reflect the structure and beauties of the activity of meditation. The articles, which give an historical accounting of the evolution of yoga and meditation, were written by two practiced meditators. The poem is the creative result of a person who meditates. Each of these three people are professionals who have very active daily schedules yet their work reflects the organizing and illuminating effect meditation has had in their lives.
Shanti,
Maxim Osinovsky lived for several years in a Tibetan Buddhist community headed by an accomplished Tibetan lama.
“Yoga” and “meditation” are often used as technical terms pertaining to Ori ental systems of spiritual training and their varieties transplanted in the West. Yoga (Sanskrit for “union, matching, tightening, means”) originally meant one of the traditional schools of Hindu spirituality; later it came to mean a wide range of practical systems leading to spiritual liberation. According to Swami Vivekananda, four main varieties of yoga include Jnana Yoga–yoga of knowledge of the true nature of reality; Bhakti Yoga–yoga of love of or devotion to a perfected human being (like Krishna or Christ) or an impersonal principle; Raja Yoga–yoga based on physical (such as special postures and breathing exercises) or mental exercises (concentration, meditation, contemplation, and so on–meditation here meaning deep, concentrated thinking for spiritual purposes); and Karma Yoga–yoga of selfless activity.
Widely known Hatha Yoga is traditionally considered
a preparatory phase of Raja Yoga. The term yoga
is also used to designate specialized spiritual practices, such as Kriya
Yoga (practice of physical, emotional, and mental purification); Mantra
Yoga (practice of reciting certain syllables and phrases charged with
spiritual power); Laya Yoga or Kundalini Yoga (practice of
concentration on centers of psychic force). As Westerners were learning
more about Eastern spirituality, they discovered other varieties of yoga,
e.g., Tantric Yoga and Tibetan Yoga (often subdivided into
Yoga of Energy and Yoga of Mind). Proliferation of yogas even resulted
in coining such terms as Christian Yoga, a hybrid of Christianity
and Eastern yogic techniques.
Built into Eastern philosophy is the idea that yoga is a separate activity, different from ordinary life. Longtime community members in the Tibetan Buddhist Community, of which I was a part, were quite happy living in a closed community and did not care about the world at large except as a market for products and services offered by the community. For traditional Hindus as well, there is a clear separation between several stages of life prescribed by the Laws of Manu. After spending several years as a head of household, one is supposed to become a sannyasi and start a new phase of life devoted to a search for higher knowledge and liberation.
From the standpoint of a modern Western man or woman, a major drawback of all the traditional yogas is that a real yogic practice requires a serious commitment, well beyond fifteen minutes of doing yoga for health and longevity, which inevitably leads one away from active personal and social life to retreat to a forest or a mountain cave. This is partly because the traditional yogic philosophy is based on essentially the same idea as an early Christian doctrine of the vale of life being a hated realm of unceasing sorrow and irreparable sin—an unacceptable doctrine for many Westerners who would prefer to make this earth a better place to live rather than to escape from it into some kind of nirvana.
In fact one need not escape from anything once one realizes that there is no separation between the heaven and the earth, and that there is but One Life manifesting itself as stars, stones, living things, the sinner and the Christ alike. Consequently what is needed is perfection rather than escape. Perhaps it was this realization that gave rise in this century to new forms of yoga that do not negate the Great Life in its entirety. Recent developments include Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, intended to unite the four main types of yoga; and Agni Yoga, another integrated system incorporating elements of Raja, Karma, Bhakti, Yoga of Energy, and more. Sri Aurobindo, whose message was that yoga should work in the real world, was the first to declare, “All life is yoga,” from an unconscious “desire” of a flower to grow toward sunshine to fully conscious attempts of human beings at achieving freedom from exploitation, misery, and ignorance. Sri Auribindo went so far as to use the techniques of yoga for the cause of liberation of his motherland, India, from British imperial domination.
Agni Yoga and some related systems go even farther in the same direction and proclaim that any kind of intense and sincere activity in tune with the Life is in fact a sort of yoga leading to perfection: artists’ and musicians’ attempts to bring down glimpses of beauty, scientists’ and engineers’ research aimed at clear formulation and materialization of natural laws, businessmens’ effort to increase the national wealth, social workers activities aimed at bringing more justice and harmony into human relations, and so forth. The way these people use their minds is a modern counterpart of traditional yogic meditation (dhyana, spelled as Chan’ in China and Zen in Japan).
All those coworkers of the Life also implement another ideal dear to the hearts of many people, that of collective rather than personal perfection and liberation. (This is known in the East as the ideal of bodhisattva.) This is based on a vague feeling that in some deep sense we all are one, and that our individual perfection is unattainable until other people around us suffer.
Of course, only one who is a free, strong, and independent individual, is able to withstand this new, more demanding yoga and be of real help to other people. This is where the old and the new yogas meet. This also means that the modern yoga is not a negation, but a natural outgrowth of the ancient one.
Concentration,
Meditation & Contemplation
by Joleen D. Du Bois
Traditionally, the custom of medita- tion can be traced in the East—and through the history of yoga. Until the late sixties and early seventies, the practice of meditation in the West had been obscured by various fundamental religions. When meditation was “imported” from the Eastern to the Western world, consequently building in popularity, many people naively assumed that the techniques that worked for one culture would work equally as well for another culture despite a widely separated geography. This naivete also failed to take into consideration the differences between the thinking man of ancient times and the thinking man of modern times. Despite its acceptance however, there continues to be a general widespread ignorance about meditation.
The practice of meditation plays an important part in the unfolding of one’s inner life in order to gain more awareness and to have greater control over one’s influencing environment. Various meditation techniques have been given to the world by Great Ones as a resource to discover the whole of human life. The Ageless Wisdom discloses that seven major techniques have, throughout the history of mankind, been given to unfold the human consciousness. These seven techniques are progressive, and all have the same common purpose—which is to unfold the Core within man. These seven major techniques, which include specific meditation techniques, are: Hatha Yoga, Laya Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Raja Yoga and Agni Yoga. The most recent yogas for modern man are Raja and Agni Yoga.
Each yoga and its technique for meditation prepares
the nature of the human being for the next stage of his
advancing consciousness. Hatha Yoga, which was given to man 18 million
years ago, was for the development of the physical body, for uniting spiritual
energy with the dense material physical body. Laya Yoga was given to primitive
man to purify his etheric centers along the etheric spine. Laya Yoga was
considered very advanced, surpassing Hatha Yoga and helping man to raise
his consciousness. The next progressive yoga given to ancient man was Bhakti
Yoga, the yoga of devotion. Bhakti Yoga included three yogas, called Mantra
Yoga, Shiva Yoga and Asparsha Yoga.1
Through the practice of Bhakti Yoga, man was able to release the power
of beauty and compassion from within his nature. Bhakti Yoga, through devotion,
purification, worship, and unity, prepared the advancing soul for its next
expansion of consciousness. Bhakti Yoga is the synthesis of the phy- sical/etheric
body with the emotional body, through the fire of devotion. Karma Yoga
taught the yoga of selfless service through making contact with one’s higher
consciousness. By keeping the focus upon the one Self, a person’s selfless
service prepared the field for his higher consciousness by creating a union
within his nature for future service to the Lord. Jnana Yoga, the yoga
of wisdom, gave the technique of uniting the consciousness with the light
of the Soul and, in that union, discerning the unreal from the Real. Today,
Jnana Yoga is considered the higher octave of Bhakti Yoga, with the introduction
of how to differentiate the Real from the unreal, thereby initiating the
cycle of mental development.
The two more recent yogas are Raja Yoga and Agni Yoga. Raja Yoga is a mental yoga. It creates a synthesis between the physical and etheric body, emotions and mind. It is a technique where man’s intellect meets the Solar Angel.2 There are four main stages of unfoldment and nine steps in Raja Yoga, which lead the individual to Soul awareness and Group Consciousness.
The seventh technique is the yoga of fire: Agni Yoga. Agni Yoga is a spiritual yoga that unifies the intuitional body, mental body, emotional body, etheric body, and physical body through spiritual fire. Spiritual fire is an invisible psychic energy that is in man’s emotional, mental and intuitional bodies. When these fires coordinate with the fires of the centers, a wholeness is created. Man has forty-nine centers within his bodies. These centers are little flames, and when they coordinate with each other, they create a fiery synthesis.
It is important to know that as a person’s consciousness evolves, he needs to engage in a corresponding technique of meditation appropriate to his level of advancement. As Centers of Light come into manifestation, it is my hope that they will be able to offer appropriate techniques to meet the different stages of consciousness of those seeking enlightenment; and that each Center will be united in the principles of cooperation, freedom, beauty, and synthesis, whereby they can direct the student to the most appropriate Light Center, where his spiritual needs will be met with the right level of discipline, spiritual exercises, techniques of yoga and meditation. There are many reasons a person should meditate: The first reason is to transform the mind and brain from chaotic and haphazard thinking into concentrated unity, harmony, and clarity. Second, to use the mind in a practice of concentration, thereby creating harmony in and gaining control over the lower mechanism—the mechanism of the physical-etheric body, emotional body and lower mind—the personality. Third, to shift the consciousness from the lower mind to the higher mind for spiritual nourishment, to the realm where great energies and great plans exist. Fourth, to build a line of communication to the higher mind and Intuitive plane, bringing the energies, plans, joy, and inspiration down to a practical application. Fifth, to transform one’s life from a narrow, self-interested “I” orientation to that of selfless service and a deepening sense of responsibility toward the whole of humanity and Nature.
“Meditation in the New Age will be a labor to reveal the laws of survival for the whole of humanity, to create a world in which man will bloom to his highest potentiality. In the past, meditation was done for personal salvation, personal satisfaction. In the New Age it is for all humanity, for all kingdoms.”3
There are key stages to meditation that correspond to Raja Yoga and prepare one for the next technique, Agni Yoga. These three key stages are: concentration, meditation, and contemplation.
Concentration is perhaps the most challenging first step in meditation. Today’s fast-paced, high-stress, pressure-oriented society does not lend itself toward the process of concentration. Consider also the many interfering distractions in life that divert the mind from concentration, distractions such as noise and chemical pollutions, computers, television, and the Internet, as well as a multitude of daily worries—all which tends to find the mental and emotional life filled with busyness and chaos. So, to prepare your mind for meditation, you first need to cultivate concentration.
Concentration means to focus your attention upon one subject or object without engaging your attention on any other subject, object, or activity. Can you do this? Can you attend a lecture and focus your attention upon the subject of the lecture without letting your mind wander off into the events of the day or the upcoming events of tomorrow? Concentration is an exercise on how to halt the mind’s chaotic and mechanical fluctuations. In concentration a person learns how to control the ceaseless activity of thoughts occurring in his mind. Concentration means to focus your attention upon one subject or object. Before you can engage your mind in meditation and experience the next two stages of thinking— the stages of meditation and contemplation— you must develop concentration. Doubt, memories of pain, suffering, hatred, and fear disturb concentration, as do emotional hang-ups, relationship problems, economic problems, and poor health.
To help you cultivate concentration, set some basic rules for yourself. For example, when you start an activity, make certain you follow it through to completion. Read, learn how to write or play music, or paint, but remember to put your whole self into the project, especially your heart. Have an ideal Teaching and live it. Dedicate yourself to some creative activity that will help others.
In concentration, you must strive to unify the fiery energies of your physical, etheric, emotional, mental, and spiritual bodies. Concentration brings about a unity, an at-one-ment. If you do not have unity you are divided; without unity you cannot concentrate.
Meditation—Meditation is possible only when your mind is calm and quiet. It is a practice that gives you the capacity to disassociate yourself from the forces of emotional and mental chaos. The practice of meditation creates an opportunity to reduce the pressure of the outer and inner discordant factors that disturb your sense of balance, direction, and creativity. “Meditation is a creative process, and when it is carried on upon abstract mental planes, it has seven steps through which the consciousness penetrates into the world of meaning: (a) analysis, (b) synthesis, (c) creativity, (d) purification, (e) communication, (f) recognition and (g) revelation.”4
Meditation should not be attempted without first training your mind in concentration. It is through mental concentration that meditation becomes effective. If you have not yet developed concentration your efforts in meditation will not give you beneficial results.
It is in the technique of meditation that you open your mind to the light of the Inner Thinker, the Solar Angel, and Its ideas, knowledge, and visions. Meditation creates rhythm and harmony in your mental sphere, preparing it for contact with higher levels of the seven Cosmic Planes, preparing you for the next stage of your evolution, preparing you for higher learning and more spiritual disciplines.
Contemplation—In meditation you are active on the higher mental plane. In contemplation you function between the higher mind and the Intuitional plane, the plane of prototypes, principles, and energies. Through contemplation you work with straight knowledge. Straight knowledge comes from your Soul, your master, or a Great Being. Through straight knowledge your heart says to help that person, or to sacrifice something, or to help that family, and you do it. In straight knowledge you bypass your logic and reasoning because, like an arrow, direct information will be given to you, and you listen to it. In straight knowledge you ask a question and you receive an immediate answer.
Once you have prepared your mind with these three stages of meditation, you will be prepared to move on to the next technique, Agni Yoga.
_________________________
1. Please read The Science of Meditation, Chapter XXVII, for a more detailed description of the seven yogas.
2. For more information, please read p. 256 of The Science of Meditation by Torkom Saraydarian. This book may be purchased through the White Mountain Education Association. Write for more information.
3. Torkom Saraydarian, The Science of Meditation, p. 19 (Aquarian Educational Group, 1971). Reprinted by permission of copyright owner, The Creative Trust, all rights reserved.
4. Torkom Saraydarian, Thought and the Glory of Thinking, p. 99 (T.S.G. Publishing Foundation, Inc., 1996). Reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Creative Trust, all rights reserved.
As artists of the West,
We never thought,
We didn’t even guess
That sounding through the arts of Man
There Is one Artist-Scientist-Creator...
We may have thought him a remote and abstract God,
We may have called him Sun or Zeus
We may have called him Nature
We knew that he is One
But we did not know that he Is One
Who once was very much like us,
Human beings seeking further light
In art or science
Or whatever work we do
Nor did we know that in another spin of time, 
We too collectively will be a One,
A Spirit of Humanity
Creating histories and evolutions
Earths and stars and species
While our God moves on to realms unknown
* * *
The Universe we saw seemed distant
The most supreme of works of art
And God the Great Creator
We didn’t know that “many mansions”
Includes a University for Infinite Creation
A schooling for Apprentice artists,
Craftsmen, Master artists and beyond
Attuning from the simplest wholes
Onwards towards Infinity,
Learning, understanding and creating
All the way from primal shouts and drums
To symphonies and worlds and stars
And unthinkable unknowns beyond the stars
We didn’t know that a composer
Seeing a symphony in his mind as a whole
Or a geologist reconstructing
A history of the earth,
Are in pre-kindergarten—
Learning A-B-C’s towards
Sustaining worlds and stars
In times remote but sure
We didn’t know that all our works,
All our understandings,
Are but infant steps
Towards creation beyond comprehension
Nor can we even guess
At the wonders of the learning
Between creating symphonies and stars
Nor the unfathomable times of such a process
Yet all along
We felt infinitely more to our adventure
Than we could ever say
Eternity kept splashing through
The time-space slits of countless single lifetimes
Now we know it’s true
The music of infinite creation
Is clearing away forever
The final flimsy frameworks of our finite minds
* * *
Flowing through the works of Man
We hear one note
Is it not the music of our Friend,
The Artist-Scientist-Creator-God
In whom we live and move and have our being?
Sounding clearest in the greatest human art
Diminishing towards nothingness and noise
Exactly in proportion
As frets of ego rule the art
* * *
Yesterday, our friends the Ionians,
Not in jungles or in deserts
But in a liquid space
Of crags and mountains,
Rocks and valleys,
Forests, flowers and sun-drenched seas
Immersed in high white blue light
As visible as trees
Our friends the lonians
Looked out upon their world
And saw it as a Oneness
Of earth and air and fire and water
The Ionians began to think in note of light
A note with quality of feeling
Man may have felt but not expressed before
At least not in the works of history we know
Soon the note went sounding through all time
In the hyperspace creations of Greek art and thought
A clear and whole new note of worlds to be
Then Light appeared on earth
In form that all could understand
From coexisting future worlds,
A Life blazing with the music of creation
In every moment’s feeling, thought and action
A Waysharer lighting paths ahead!
Towards Life for All
The “lamp of hope on high”
Then seemed to dim and disappear
In darkness and in ignorance,
In barbarism and feudalism
And all the other mazes and miasmas
By which we slowly see
What not to feel and think and do
Until we learn to look for cause
Behind our lights and darks…
And know ourselves creators
* * *
In time the Light again began to flow
Throughout the minds and works of Man—
Though all were part of building the expression,
More than others of his time,
Leonardo spoke the sunny note,
Evolved the timeless music
Of beauty, balance, harmony and wholeness
Between the Greeks and future worlds
The Light moved on and West
With all increasing speed
Sounding and resounding into space
Rembrandt painted in and from and for the note
And Newton thought It
Poussin and Claude and Bach and Mozart
Goethe, Shelley, Beethoven and Turner
Whitman, Faraday and Darwin,
Monet, Cezanne and Poincare
All who kept alight
The “lamp of hope on high”
Then in our times
The cumulated light of generations
Exploded in arrays of minds
Aiming towards the Universe
From the Infinite to the Infinitesimal
Mathematicians, historians, biologists
Astronomers, philosophers and physicists
Creative artist-thinkers of the West
New Ionians seeking through diversity
Towards laws and processes of oneness,
Smuts and Bergson, Keyser and Korzybski,
Whyte and Biederman and Whitehead
Heisenberg and Einstein,
Fuller and Teilhard and Barbara Hubbard
All known and unknown humans of all times who
Like Henry Vaughn, in any way, in any form,
“... saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light
All calm as it was bright...”
All known and unknown humans
Who lived and worked from understanding
“A primary function of art and of science
Is to arouse and keep alive this feeling
In those who are receptive” (Einstein)
Each heard the note,
And in creating
Sped its light around our planet
A light expanding towards infinity
With each responder-understander
* * *
Each and every time a work of Bach is heard,
(And who could count the times?)
In concert hall, at home,
On radio, tape or hi-fi,
Each time a book goes singing with a truth,
Each time a painting of Cezanne is seen
Each and every incalculable millionth time
A work of Man Irradiated by the note of light
Is created, recreated, loved and understood
Each and every flowing point of light
Expands creation round our world
Building infinitely stronger streams of radiation
Than all transient nothingness and aberration
The exponential explosion
Of creative radiation round our planet
In the past few hundred years
Is Immeasurable
Absolutely astronomical
It is the diverse and complex
Symphony of Man
Fusing towards a new simplicity
One new note, one new light, one new key
A very young new note
Of a new humanity
The Light of the West
Is a new light
In the history of Man
It is a new note
Entering the stream of evolution
It is the cumulating note
And more, of all creation in the Light
It is the Sunlight
Sunbright Spirit of the West
It is clean and high and free
There is no moaning at man’s lot
No trace of death or darkness in it
It is the note of Man
Discovering he is made
In the image of his Creator
It is the note of Man
Responding-sounding
Towards Infinity
It is the seedling note
Of Man’s divinity
It is the Essence of Man,
Artist to the heights and depths and very core—
It is the Ionians
And the light of Plato, Leonardo, and Cezanne
It is light forming freedom
Through the minds of Man
From Athenians to first Americans—
It is Copernicus discovering new rotations
And Constable discovering greens—
It is Handel alone three weeks with God
And young John Keats who said it simply
Way back when, and wild wonderful Shelley—
It is the spring note of Scarlatti
And Mozart and Monet
It is Beethoven’s Sonata 109 In E
It is Creative Man
Seeing a new God
And saying
You are an Artist!
An Artist-Astronomer!
An Artist-Physicist!
An Artist-Mathematician!
An Artist…
You are the Oneness Light
We sought to form in all our works
The music that went streaming
Throughout our hearts and minds and souls
When first we were Ionians
So stricken with the beauty
And the wonder of creation
That we simply loved to understand it
To know it as the Oneness that we felt it
In all our questing and our building
For the Light of Oneness in the world
We did not know
That Light was also building in ourselves
And that by Law expressed since ancient times
And that we now begin to understand
The Light would be returned,
Straight back through us,
Immeasureably
Inevitably
Sooner or later,
Gradually or suddenly,
As the case may be,
It is the Law, and it must be
For only so
Do we begin to understand. . . . . .
Truly begin
Our Adventures in Creation
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