Güney27 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 03, 2023 5:39 pm
all, we shouldn't expect to perfect the practice in any short timeframe, attaining spectacular results. Instead we should treat it like learning an instrument, where we will devote a small amount of time each day to studying the relevant material and accustoming our organism to a new skill, practicing whenever possible.,,
I could see in myself that I wanted to do the meditations in order to achieve success quickly and to get to know and understand the spiritual worlds.
This put a lot of pressure on me, which could possibly be a hindrance.
Instead, I'm doing things differently now.
I see my esoteric training as sacred, and when I meditate, it's like physical training for me (I'm a huge Mma fan myself and do the sport myself with devotion, that's why the word training, which is so often associated with physical training, very appropriate), in the sense that a single training session does not matter much, but consistency is what counts.
Rather, it is a path that you walk along, a process in which you are constantly evolving.
It is also important that I do not feel compelled to meditate as if it were a requirement.
I should feel a lot more free and do it to get to the realization of many significant soul processes.
Ideally, one even enjoys meditating.
That's a very good approach, Guney. Indeed we should not force ourselves to do anything we don't have at least some desire to do. On the other hand, there are clearly things we discern with our reasoning in the pursuit of Truth to be healthy for us even if they seem undesirable at first. We can think of many examples of that in life with respect to health and fitness, for ex., like physical training for sports. So if we have the desire the pursue Wisdom, Love, Truth wherever they leads us to their victory and completion, then we also find the courage and strength to endure that which seems uncomfortable or undesirable when we first encounter it, such as meditative exercises, but can be reborn as Divine peace and enjoyment. There are some things we only learn to enjoy once we have exposed ourselves to them enough and discovered the new degrees of freedom they have to offer.
Guney wrote:,,Except, as mentioned before, we can also develop a sense for how this is no mere personal skill we are acquiring, but something which contributes to Earth evolution as a whole at a time when the stakes are high.,,
How do you mean that? In what sense do we contribute to overall evolution when we meditate?
We can survey the world around us and ask how much of what we see results from past thinking activity. Practically everything in our house falls in this category. If we live in a populated area, most things outside will also fall in this category. The cars, roads, signs, houses, buildings, etc. So we already see how influential human thinking activity has become on the outer landscape. Yet we also know most of these things will be gone in 100 years - the cultural landscape will look radically different and much of the natural landscape as well, given current trends in technology.
But the blue sky, the Moon and Sun, the starry heavens, these will remain fixtures of the landscape for quite some longer time. We know these are also the outer manifestations of Thinking activity. Our normal thinking based only on mimicking sense perceptions can help build up our capacity, but all the ideal content will dissolve like our physical corpse when we die. It will be disassembled and used for its parts in the general spiritual economy, so to speak. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does little to help counter the materialistic images which permeate our modern environment and, if left to their own devices, would seed a grotesquely materialistic-animalistic future.
The Divine Thinking, however, is imbued with the creative power of archetypal feeling and will. Actually we can rightly say all we perceive around us in the sphere of Nature are the previous meditations of the Initiates and Gods, decohered by other trespassing influences. Of course the Gods weren't sitting in physical houses and rooms meditating on a physical mat, but the essential activity was the same. In our modern ennobled meditation, we aim to reach our thinking back up into this Cosmic sphere of creative ideational activity. Our imaginative thoughts become like our speech and our deeds, which weave objective threads through the world. We are then helping to seed the future Nature which we and other lower life waves will inhabit.
Owen Barfield also discussed this aspect in a more exoteric way:
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances wrote:Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.
It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating.
We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.
There are many more explicit connections which can be drawn, which we will gradually unveil through meditative efforts and spiritual scientific investigation. There is really a battle being waged for the future of Earth, but the physical and conceptual battles we are familiar with are only dim outer manifestations of an ongoing inner struggle between the thought-forces of fragmentation and those of unification, those of animalization and those of spiritualization. Through modern meditation, we are recruited as foot soldiers in this battle. We truly have invisible allies who radiate our consciousness with wise instruction and insight - these are individualities who have already tread much further on the path of initiation and even the Gods themselves. That is what I mean when speaking of the inflow of 'Cosmic impulses' through our inverted spiritual activity. These are what we seek to attune to and attract with our concentrated activity.
Guney wrote:"In that sense, the content doesn't matter much and we can inflow Cosmic impulses which lead to genuine imaginations and inspirations regardless if we start with words-verses or pictures"
I don't understand the meaning of your sentence here. What do you mean especially with Cosmic impulses?
To what extent do these impulses of meditation lead to imagination and inspiration?
I would still like to ask you ashvin,
How would you describe your current status and progress in your esoteric training?
So that leads to your other question - I am at foot soldier status, or perhaps only preparing in boot camp. Relative to the perspective of my old self with spiritual activity in the blind spot, it is a vast improvement, because that old self didn't even know a war was being waged and that it had the capacity to helpfully participate in it. Everything changes when we work through boot camp and prepare to graduate. We now have a clear ideal purpose ahead of us. We feel less rushed to accumulate all world knowledge and wisdom in a single lifetime. The spirit of renewal which flows through us, as individuals and collectives, is discerned as it brings new inspiring life to the imaginative forms of culture and nature. Our lives begin to resemble the great archetypal rhythms of humanity and Earth.
I will mention a small anecdote. The other day I was driving by my old office near DC. The street number is "
7777" and written on the side of the building in big, bold red letters. I had never thought about it before, but suddenly it flashed into my consciousness. I was 28 when I moved into that office for the new firm I had started. That was really the time I started gaining a spiritual consciousness and I can now discern pretty clearly how many events since then led me to where I am now on the path of initiation. Steiner writes a lot about how this time period has generally been an important one for spiritual transformation in an individual's life as well as the collective life. For ex. the Mystery of Golgotha unfolded during the 4th of 7 epochs of our current civilizational cycle. These are not rigid rules and the timelines can vary depending on our circumstances, but I am just mentioning it as the sort of thing we begin discerning in our own lives. It is important to remember along the path that we are always halfway between what is known and what is unknown, and the latter will always arrive from unexpected and unsuspected directions. In that sense, we can only judge our 'progress' by where we ourselves were the year or month or day before, not by any external markers or comparisons to others.
Guney wrote:For pictorial thinking, I try to do the exercises suggested by Cleric, such as vividly picturing my plans for the day instead of speaking it with the inner voice. Sometimes I use the Rose Cross in meditation or a few other ones suggested by Steiner.
I find it difficult to do this exercise because there are so many things that are difficult for me to put into pictures.
Is this exercise also about focusing one's spiritual activity, or does it have other promotional purposes?
The pictorial exercise is not really about concentration in the sense of quiet meditation, but just about loosening the rigid conceptual mask which constantly formats our imaginative activity through the inner voice. We can do it at any time during the day when we remember to do so and have a few moments. Remember, the higher ideational activity is always there animating our normal thinking. We are always utilizing imaginative thinking but normally only become conscious of its finished results through sense-perception and the inner conceptual voice. So this exercise helps us accustom our organism to entering consciously back into the flow of that fluid imaginative thinking.
