AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jun 20, 2023 12:35 pm To a certain extent, I suppose that I always knew it was related to the intuitive temporal context that Cleric has illustrated in many places. Of course, these ways of thinking about our stream of becoming (as opposed to standard linear time flow of cause-effects on the physical plane) are so unfamiliar that we will need to rekindle our intuition for it over and over again. I never focused on the Mandala symbol too much or used it for meditation, though. I felt it was too complex for me before and it still is, to some extent. However these latest illustrations have given me a much better feel for it. For ex. when Cleric wrote:
But as Imagination sets in, it is perfectly possible to have an experience where the memory panorama of our life is grasped as something like the above animation where we feel how our present life started to expand from the center (the fertilized egg) and life events arrange themselves as expanding petals
Now I was able to connect the above with what we were discussing in the context of Hermetic astrology, i.e. how the waves of destiny are woven into the etheric body during the embryonic phase and then unfold in rhythmic periods after birth. From birth to age 21, we are recapitulating the stages of involution - the physical body, life body, and desire body are fashioned before the Ego-I fully descends into these vehicles. From 21 to 42, the sentient, intellectual, and spiritual souls are developed. Then after that, we have the opportunity to work on developing the germinal spirit self, life spirit, and spirit man, which is of course what we are aiming to do here with all these exercises and contemplations. A big part of that is purifying the spiritual soul life by deconditioning the intellect from lower passions, prejudices, etc. and turning it towards the high ideals.
With the Mandala exercise, I am proceeding with Cleric's suggestion for only using the classic symbol of a dot with a circle around it and manipulating that thought-symbol to rotate the 'dials' in opposite directions. We could say the dot is the masculine intellect and the circle is the feminine higher intuitive reasoning. The latter is the wise reasoning that, for ex., perceives something on the road while driving and activates our will to avoid it before it registers to our waking intellect, or that simply knows how to grasp an object without micro-managing the individual joints. I always try to remember that the 'interfering sheets' are above and behind my mind's eye, i.e. they cannot be found anywhere in the volume of my current soul-content of perceptions, feelings, thoughts. Instead, I can only attune my current consciousness to their higher Intents-Ideals, by focusing concentration into the thought-symbol, and patiently wait for the Grace of their attractive pull. Another helpful diagram I came across recently is as follows.
That is the higher "I" situated on the vertical axis connecting with the lower "I" (the two-petalled lotus). The former is oriented towards the supra-sensory future (the interfering sheets) while the latter is observing the sensible past, including the thought-symbol we are meditating on. We could say that, through proper concentration which attunes the lower "I" to the higher "I", the higher "I" perceives the spiritual counter-image of our thought-symbol, i.e. the constellation of spiritual forces that weaved the intuitive temporal context resulting in the black bands of the symbolic pattern. It then transmits this knowledge to the lower "I" and we are able to 'triangulate' some portion of the Time-stream that connects the course of past events to those of the present and the future. In other words, our waking consciousness is able to begin making more sense of our holistic stream of becoming within the intuitive temporal context, i.e. the waves of karmic destiny (and the pull of karmic potential) through which our life unfolds.
Thanks for this detailed reply, Ashvin. I have also tried to imagine the 2-dial rotation. Not as meditation, only as a brief exercise. I actually struggle to meditate every morning, especially if I have things coming up for work early enough in the morning, and even if I wake up early. In these cases I am unable to create a restful soul foundation and my attention is sucked in by the attracting force of the event to come. Also when I'm traveling, I am unable to meditate. Do you, or anyone else, have tricks for that? Do you set an end-of-meditation alarm?
Regarding the simple mandala, I can only make the 2 dials rotate in opposite senses if they have same rotational speed, otherwise I would lose sight of one. I don't know if it's misleading, but I was thinking that the center was I, with no distinction between higher and lower, because the prospective goal of the meditation is to come to experience their connection anyway, so I would imagine them as unity. And I imagined the larger circle as the context co-shaping the unfolding of events in time. I was not including the larger circle inside my individual activity. For me it reflected the activity perceived as willed by other beings, for example the angel that, on the road, arranged coincidences in a way that spared me a possible accident, rather than the wise reasoning that could have done the same through steering my own will. Maybe there's no big difference. But I was trying to imagine the "wave span" as large as possible between the center and the periphery.
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