=kit072.txt

KIT 72 - Meditation Aftereffect

            At a certain point in our search for meaningfulness,
it may suddenly dawn upon us that our quest of trance-like
meditations or retreats may arise from a perhaps unconscious wish
to escape from a life situation (for example, parental authority
or the ruthless, merciless civilization we are living in: its
violence, its greed, its manipulation). Moreover, it has become
evident in recent years that meditation practices can and do lead
people to drop out of life in general and eschew taking
responsibility in their lives for loved ones or fellow beings.

Further, we just may be trying to validate our own personality in
our own view or that of others by being special or different!
Actually, we may be missing out on the inestimable value of that
which has been acquired by humans throughout the ages in terms of
beauty, material convenience, and orderliness: the marvel, the
excitement, the courage, the vulnerability and the enriching
effect of sharing joy and pain, relationship, friendship, loyalty,
and service in which God is to be found as a living reality. It is
tragic to cloister oneself in an anesthetized psyche that shields
one from confronting the challenges of the drama of life, which
both actuates the celebration in the heavens in a concrete way,
and tests our mettle. There is a way of being high without being
spaced-out!

            When meditating ( or prescribing meditation ), it is
important to be clear about the aftereffect that the shift of
focus of consciousness may be expected to have upon our
personality, attunement, and world-view, and to know which
practices trigger off which effect.

1) Since our notion of ourselves needs to be expanded when
extending consciousness, we contemplate vaster and vaster reaches
of space, we identify with zones of our being beyond our notion of
a skin-bound material body. We may become aware of and identify
with our magnetic field and/or aura. As these do not have a
boundary, we then envision ourselves as being like a vortex
(boundless). What is more, we tend to assume that we lose
ourselves by merging with the totality of the universe.

            It is important here to keep in mind that one is both
a vortex and, at the same time, something like a cell, bounded by
a membrane, albeit porous. We need to work with both in
combination, not just one or the other. Our minds in their
commonplace thinking mode find it difficult to reconcile these two
paradigms. This problem is similar to the one that physicists
encountered in accepting that, since photons of light behave
either as waves or as particles according to the way the
experiment is conducted, they may be considered as displaying both
of these properties. So it is with our notion of ourselves.

            Our bodies (including the subtle bodies, the psyche,
personality, and consciousness, etc.) are indeed holistically
related to the totality of the fabric of the universe. This means
that they carry potentially in them the bounty of the totality of
the fabric of the universe, just as every drop of water has the
same properties as the water of the ocean. In fact, every cell of
the body has the same genes as every other, but in one some will
be activated and in others different ones, so that by diversifying
they create the change to cooperate. Thus they differ while being
potentially identical, and in that sense may be considered as
"discrete entities." It is in this diversity that our freedom is
rooted. A vortex is open to its environment, and in fact
incorporates its environment indiscriminately, whereas a cell,
thanks to its membrane, may select the elements it takes in from
the environment, or secretes to the environment, while still being
open to some measure of osmosis.

            If we identify just with the vortex model, we are
overlooking the containment which ensures our protection against
undesirable impressions, honors our idiosyncrasies, and confers
upon us our incentive. If we neglect our boundaries, we run the
psychological risk of finding ourselves disoriented, spaced out
and unable to confront circumstances as real (one may even invoke
the concept of maya to justify this attitude). What is more, just
as we generally fail to realize that an eddy does not lose its
identity by joining with other eddies in a wave-interference
pattern (whirlpool), and can even be retrieved, we tend to believe
that we lose ourselves as we merge blissfully with the totality of
the universe or the being of God. However, the objective of the
universe is that the bounty of the totality should be customized
in each of its sub-wholes in a unique way! Fana does not mean that
one loses oneself, but only one's commonplace notion of oneself.

2)         In meditation we learn to "turn within", which can
easily be misconstrued as encapsulating ourselves in our psyche
while blocking any impressions, physical or psychological, from
the environment. Here it is the opposite: by setting up a boundary
segregating ourselves from the environment, we tend to merge with
the totality in an inverted space. A person unfamiliar with
physics would find it difficult to have any clue as to what one
might mean by "inverted space." It may therefore be preferable to
envision that our magnetic field or aura intersperses with that of
other such fields, like the eddies on the surface of a lake as
they compose to form a wave-interference pattern. It is difficult
for us to realize that this does not imply that they spread out or
diffract in space. A good analogy would be the difference between
a short musical theme, each note following the other and the notes
forming a chord without being stretched out as a melody. This
happens in our dreams, where impressions are jumbled; in order to
retrieve them in our memory, we sort them out in a space-time
framework.

            If, however, as we turn within in meditation, instead
of setting up a boundary encapsulating ourselves in our thoughts,
we envision that we are protected by a porous membrane that
filters impressions from the environment (at all levels of
reality) and that we are consequently able to radiate into the
environment, then we will enjoy an incomparably richer experience.
Now, envision that you are not just filtering these impressions,
but transmuting them, just as we digest our food in order to use
it, since we can only deal with amino-acid chains that match our
own. Just as in digestion, we need to break down the ingested
elements and rebuild them on the model of our own idiosyncrasies
and reject those elements which, being too alien to our own
beings, would prove to be difficult to incorporate, or might even
be harmful. Here our sense of having boundaries will help us
reject unwanted impressions, on the one hand, or filter and
transmute those impressions that can be put to good use if
adjusted to our particular attunement, on the other hand.

3)         Transcendence: there can be no doubt that our
involvement with life at its lowest common denominator fosters
greed, limitations in the field of consciousness, and conflict,
while our quest for freedom from conditioning opens the doors to
the wonder and meaningfulness behind what seems to be happening at
the existential level.

            Another way of putting this is to say that we must
instill something of the way of the hermit into the way of the
knight. Our need for freedom is as compelling as our need for
involvement. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive? There is a
way of reconciling the irreconcilables. One example is to love
without being dependent upon being loved. In meditation,
detachment frees one from the conditioning of one's thinking and
the constraint of one's self-image. Freedom from the usual setting
of consciousness will enable us to shift consciousness into an
inner space or, alternatively, into a mode of self-transcendence.
    
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[ This concludes the SOS booklet of KIT's.
As noted, I did a skim cross_check, and found no substantive
divergences except with KIT 30 vs. SOS KIT 31.
I did find a small number of instances in which Kaivan did not
identify quotes as such; I have noted all those.

Here's a repeat of my boilerplate note on the matter.

[ Editorial Note (sa), "More of Less"  (Celso, Celso's Bar and
Grille, Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico, near New Buffalo commune ]

Here's a bit of boilerplate, Mate:

[ 'SOS' = 'divergent text from the SO SURESNES KIT' ]

[ Skimming only, I find no significant divergence in the Kaivan
KIT XX text from the SOS KIT XX text ]* 

* I have cross_checked this Kaivan KIT 62 against the SOS KIT 62
only by skimming the starts and stops of the paragiraffe (1), not
by reading the sentences.
(1) A 'paragiraffe' (singular, 'paragraph') is, obviously, an
extended paragraph, eg a KIT.  ]

Kaivan KITs 61__72 are published as SOS KITs 61__72 (with Kaivan
KIT 30, published as SOS KIT 31 ) in a booklet by the SOS, long
flogged or peddled , as Everyman progresses, at Zenith Camp, it
should only evolve indeed into an 'Institute'. ] 

[ I also happen to have at hand, thanks to Rinatya Nachman (24
HaShalom, Rosh Pina 12000, Israel, renatia@bezeqint.net ) xeroxes
of the following KITS, which I hope similarly to skim if not
precisely peruse:  SOS KIT's:  96, 97, 98, 101, 102,  105, 106,
107, 110 ]

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