From:
Steve Amdur, Campra, CH-6718, Olivone, Switzerland
20 Oct. '05 - 17 Tishrei - Chol haMoed Sukot Day 3, Yakov - 
Moedim l_Simcha - Seasonal (harvest) festivals for joyousness --
17 Ramadan

A dreary grey day, Campra covered in mist or low clouds - about 6 degrees Centigrade - can barely see from the Restorante to the highway - a trail crew has been out all week in this, with chain saws - 


Respects and best wishes to all:

What follows is the 'Course on Meditation' by PVK.  It is apparently dated 1998.  It is apparently written by PVK, without an additional editor, and apparently was produced by the SO Seattle.
It is written in a very clear dry style, which I had not hitherto found in PVK works, with neither the musicality of his Abode/Zenith 'seminars' ('talks', 'group retreats', whatever), nor the denseness of his KITs (nor the one Emergence article of which I took heed, in Emergence 8)

I obtained it from a CD-R that was given by Shahabudin to Katrina, although Katrina did not give it to me.

On my Campra fixed disc it is located at:
D:/HIK2/ Hik Works / Infobase Storeage / Course in Meditation
And runs under Folio 4.11
(/HIK2 is my name for a subdir-'Folder', as they call it - to which I copied the CD; the rest is from the Seattle disc.)

Because I know nothing about Folio, and not much more about the Microsoft Dinosaurs - if DOS was good enough for our ancestors, etc. -- I got it to here with a seat_of_the_pants Q&D cut_and_paste (ie, Click_C__Click_V), then did a Save_As as text (*.txt) in Word, and am trimming off the loose ends now.

I have added nothing to the following text, and I hope omitted nothing.

Of course there are questions of copyright, esoteric security (whatever that is) and proper administrative procedure if not quite hierarchy, and I'm not entirely comfortable with the position I have taken in those respects, but I don't think that in this situation they should be determinative.

I am much more concerned with the risk, and I reckon likelihood, of some of PVK's Nachlass getting lost.

We do have a long way to go.

With respects and best wishes,
Steve Amdur
Z.

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OK:  Because Click_C__Click_V has small jaws, this Save of the 'Course on Meditation' breaks into the following documents, corresponding to the set of Lessons, 1-45.  As far as I can see, I did save the entire Document, though there is no signoff at the apparent end of Lesson 45.

So it breaks down into:
=pvcm0107.txt -- Lessons  1--7 inclusive
=pvcm0817.txt -- Lessons  8-17 inclusive
=pvcm1824.txt -- Lessons 18-24 inclusive
=pvcm2531.txt -- Lessons 25-31 inclusive
=pvcm3246.txt -- Lessons 32-46 inclusive
 Lesson 46 is apparently complete, and is apparently the last lesson in this Course on Meditation, but there is no signoff, so I'm not sure.

As far as I can noticed, from a quick glance, no text was lost in going from Folio to Word and then doing as Save_As as plain text.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
All that follows is PVK's text only.


COURSE ON MEDITATION, BY PVK


Lesson #l: 	Introduction

The present course is programmed as a set of instructions intended to be carried out by the pupil daily. The lessons are meted out progressively and cover a vast range of practices, based on the traditional teachings of the esoteric schools that developed through the ages against the religious background of the great civilizations. The lessons will be dispatched at a regular monthly pace, but it is left to the discretion of the pupil whether to continue practicing the previous lesson in addition to the new one or simply to concentrate on the new one or to consistently refer back to earlier practices.
Pupils are advised to preserve the lessons by collating them in sequence in a loose leaf ring folder. Also, it is intended that pupils include in the book their own daily curriculum of practices, which should be reprogrammed in an ongoing way.
May we be reminded here that, while the present trend is toward dealing with real life situations and confronting personal problems, it becomes obvious to the more enlightened that one cannot assess situations reliably while one is too engrossed in them. (One cannot see the woods for the trees.) Moreover, one's personal vantage point in a situation cannot but prove relative, just like the landscape gets distorted through a lens: "the map is not the territory". A more holistic view of our problems would ensue from alternating the focus of our consciousness, viewing ourselves and the situations from this perspective. Most of the time, we are grappling with our concepts of our problems instead of grasping where the real issues lie.
This is where meditation proves to be invaluable, not just as a stress-alleviating technique, but as a training in a more apt use of consciousness. Furthermore, meditation could be applied to fostering the creativity of our personality - an objective which we shall continually keep in mind throughout this course.
Meditation is the art of modulating consciousness beyond the middle range (in which most people most of the time are entrapped) and therefore marks a step forward in the evolution of the human species. It is as skillful and elaborate an art as learning to play a musical instrument, compose, paint, dance, or act in the performing arts, or train in the skill of the artisan or scientist or technologist. Perhaps even more!
There are certain preliminaries that must be taken into consideration before we start our course. First of all, as soon as one reaches beyond the middle range of thinking (just as in non-Euclidean geometry or relativity), the commonplace logic breaks down and proves itself inadequate. We are dealing with complimentarity instead of thinking in terms of categories. For example: there is no boundary to our being. Rather than beinglike the section of an orange, we are like a whirlpool - inextricably enmeshed in a wave-interference pattern. Such a realization shakes our self-image drastically! Or, again, we are a continuity in change - which does not mean that a part of us, the spirit, is eternal while another part, the body, is transient, but that our being - considered as a whole - (that is, holistically) is without boundary and in a state of ongoing transition. The next point to consider when meditating is that we cannot induce transformation, nor even concentration, by our will, since our individual will is as limited as is consciousness when focalized in the individual setting. The approach to the problem is a subtle one; one may train the unconscious by dint of one's will or one may learn how to enlist an impersonal will into action.
It might be helpful to understand this if one were to borrow the metaphor of l cone. We may imagine that we are the apex and the universe is the base: we converge the physique and thinking and consciousness of the universe. But there is a more advanced model: we are the whole cone, not just the apex. We can shift our identity to include the whole cone. This is the ultimate in meditation. When one achieves this, one's will becomes overwhelmingly powerful because it customizes the will of the universe. Perhaps we feel sometimes the immensity and bounty behind our limited action on ourselves. It is this hunch that will spur one to strive to discover and marshall this cosmic dimension of our being. The art of training oneself to do this is meditation.
There is yet one further noteworthy consideration before we embark on our work: it is emotion - not the will - that triggers off a shift in the focus of consciousness. Once more, to invoke our metaphor: it is not the personal apex of the cone, but the whole cone, that is the ecstasy that breaks through every time that we are suddenly freed from a constraint, be it our biased assessment of a situation, our emotional dependence upon a person or circumstances, or our limited self-image.
The art of meditation has been devised and elaborated in the course of history as the findings of men and women who have explored inner spaces of the psyche. This required solitude and austerity - the way of the recluse - which seems incompatible with the way of the "householder". Many sects and charismatic groups have been imputed of encouraging other-worldliness in their disciples. It has been hailed as the "spiritual bypass". We are endeavoring to grasp the techniques and know-how that the contemplatives have culled and apply them to dealing with our problems in action, in worldly life. It is worth the challenge. Suffice it to imagine how it would be if we could maintain a stalwart peace and serenity in the midst of a stressful situation, grasp the hidden springs behind the programming of our lives, and develop intuition, mastery, radiance.
This will require of us to instill something of the hermit intothe way of the knight. Our need for freedom is as imperious as our need for involvement. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive? There is a way of reconciling the irreconciliables. An example! -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 described as self-transcendence.
Our practice will start with the second lesson - following presently. 

Lesson #2:  	Breathing Practices: The Purification Breaths

It is advised to commence all meditation sessions with a breathing practice. Adopting a holistic view, the action of absorbing oxygen from the environment and expelling polluted gases from the lungs is only one factor in an overall ebb and flow of exchange of energy between the organism and the universe. The human being may be looked upon as a vortex (or whirlpool), that is, without boundary,which is only able to maintain itself by continually dispersing, and conversely, processing the environment.
Amongst the unteemed ingredients of the universe so converged, processed, radiated and spoliated, the magnetic field (more specifically, the geomagnetic field) assumes in the human being the form of personal magnetism and is greatly enhanced wherever one reaches out with one's consciousness into the vastness of the universe. Another factor is the light of the universe converged in the form of one's aura, then radiated. For these practices, references will be made in the lessons in preparation. Of course, there are many more factors related to the ebb and flow of breath.
One of the reasons for the importance of controlling breath in spiritual practices is that by the sheer fact of becoming aware of one's breath, one unwittingly slows it down. In the normal diurnal rhythm of breath, the organism is in a state of readiness to spring to action; animals are alert to catch their prey or defend themselves. This is called the catabolic state, whereas in the state of rest called the anabolic state, the organism can rebuild energy, digest food in protected conditions. The human mind can indulge in an overview, taking stock of situations rather than having to keep in a state of readiness to spring into action. Thus the slowing down of breath favors the state of meditation.
Several breathing practices will be described and prescribed inthe present course. We will start with the one that is called, in the Sufi Order, "the purification breaths". It is advised to practice these every day, first thing in the morning. This practice has 2 objectives in view: cleansing the energy field from pollution picked up from the physiological and psychological environment, and recharging the energy from the environment, with special reference to the elements: earth, water, fire and air. They are based on a hermetic knowledge embodied in alchemy. I like to consider these as both purifications and baptisms with the elements by reestablishing our covenant with nature - the ground of our body.  

1. Baptism with the Earth: Inhale and exhale through the nose 3 or 5 times, slowly without retention. The breath should not be overly slowed down. If indoors, it is advised to do this before an open window if your health allows it. Accentuate the exhaling, extending it, while ejecting all impurities in the mind and emotions that might tarnish your magnetic emanation. Identify yourself with your magnetic field rather than your body. Envision the magnetic field of the Planet Earth as resorbing any pollution in your magnetic field. I believe that one might say, in terms of physics, that any irregularities in an open system get balanced out in the larger system in which it is immersed. Toward the end of the outbreath, extend your consciousness into the vastness of outer space, and think of the whole universe as an enormous force field partly crystallized in the fabric of the galaxies. Now, if you can envision yourself as a vortex, that is, without boundary, you will see yourself inextricably intermeshed in the cosmic immensity. When consciousness becomes thus all-encompassing, the amount of energy converged into the vortex of the magnetic field becomes incomparably greater; energy builds up. The clue is freeing oneself from one's limited self-image. Here one discovers the relationship between consciousness and energy.
You may notice that, of all parts of the body, the bottom of the spine (if you are sitting cross-legged) or the soles of the feet (if you are standing) or both (if you are sitting on a chair) are the areas in which the updraft of earth energy are most felt. This energy is felt as triggering off Kundalini, unless balanced by a "descending" current, which we will call "celestial" or pure spirit. If, rather than concentrating on the geomagnetic field, you concentrate on the magnetic field of the entire universe in all its vastness, you will feel as though energy were impinging upon the body from all azimuth simultaneously.
As you exhale now, not only does your notion of yourself disperse into outer space, but simultaneously, you are aware of radiating energy into the environment, farther and farther, but at the same time, any pollution (irregularities) in your life field are earthed and drained away.
2. Baptism with Water: Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. Instead of simply identifying with a pulsing field, become sensitive to the variety of frequencies or wave lengths ofenergy composing the field, particularly a very fine form of energy traditionally called pure spirit. From the moment you experience yourself as an open system, merging with the universe, you realize that spirit is both a component of your field and interspersed in the entire universe. Rather than being quickened by it, you try to earmark it in yourself, or rather, as a component of yourself. Experience it when you consider matter as something that accrued to you in the course of your biographical becoming.
You will need to draw your memory back to your pristine condition when you were like a mirror, devoid of impressions. This will require you to systematically clear away all impressions whatsoever, good or bad, and transfigure joy into peace. You will first feel yourself to be like gossamer, then diaphanous, then as a highly refined energy that acts like a catalyst, triggering the latent cosmic life force into motion. This high powered brand of energy seems to break through as an outburst, rather like lightning. Consequently, one has the impression that it descends upon one - shattering one and regenerating one. Yet it is already part of one, at least virtually, not unlike lightning, which is the release of the tension built up between two poles. One also has the impression of water traversing one's magnetic field like the river Rhone filters through the lake of Geneva.  It is good to link this practice with the previous one: draw cosmic magnetic energy in as one inhales through the nose, and experience the outburst of pure spirit as one exhales through the mouth. Practiced thus, Kundalini is enured of any danger.
3. Baptism with Fire: Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the nose 3 or 5 times. Fire is a very drastic form of purification. Think of your most detested, and maybe resilient, defects: guile, deviousness, manipulation, cheating, deceiving others - any form of accommodating or compromising that humiliates one's spirit because it is below one's ideal. One's own imperious urge for truthfulness calls one's innate fiery nature to the fore. It may manifest itself as hot flushes or bouts of heroic resolve. Knowing that the temperature of the body is evidence of the fact that organic matter is in an ongoing state of combustion, one may imagine a "bioplasmic effusion" emanating from one's body while permeating it. One may even identify with this "igneous body" which pulses as one inhales and exhales. One might experience what it would be like to be a braise, sucking air from the environment. This is what one does as one inhales through the mouth. Actually, one does not only resorb oxygen from the environment, but radiance..
For this practice, it is advised to visualize, as one inhales, the lower frequencies: infrared (or red), concentrating on the lower chakras, then visualizing yellow or a golden color in the heart chakra, green in the throat chakra, blue in the eyes, violet in the third eye, and a glistening white (or colorless) light with diamond-like hues in the crown center. The hermetic principle upon which this practice is based is called"transmuting fire into light". Such can only result from a very severe and consistent catharsis.
4. Baptism with Air: Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the mouth 3 or 5 times. In alchemy, air stands for the "volatile" state. Not unlike the second baptism, one frees oneself from one's notion of "substance". One experiences oneself as dematerializing as one exhales, then rematerializing as one inhales. Not unlike the first baptism, there is an experience of merging with the universe as one exhales, then building up the "vortex" we call the self as one inhales. But, whereas in the first baptism one thinks in terms of energy or magnetism, in this, the fourth baptism, one envisions the universe as a program, as "software", as pure meaningfulness, as a symphony, not sound (because sound is the pulsing of matter), but vibration (because vibration is an oscillation of energy - or rather the condition in which energy is modulated - that is imprinted with meaning or simply carries meaning, like radio signals). Such is the significance of the "akashic body".
Rather than being the convergence of the matter of the universe, envision yourself as the congruence of the meaningfulness of the universe. And what is more, you are contributing by the fact that the universal programming is thus conjugated in each of its relays, towards the meaningfulness of the whole.
This requires of one to lose altogether the notion of oneself as an entity as one exhales, merging totally in the "mind of God". As one inhales, one experiences oneself, not as re-emerging or being reborn, but rather as the apex of the thrust of the whole universe. Likewise, it might become clear to one that it is not true that a wave emerges from the ocean, since a wave does not have a boundary; its underpinnings include the whole ocean. Rather, one might say that it is the whole ocean that emerges as what appears to be each wave.
One's understandable aversion to losing oneself is due to the very compulsiveness of the most basic of all instincts: self-preservation. It requires courage. When this fear is overcome, one becomes an adept on the spiritual path. But this must not be confused with blanking out. As Buddha says: the personal notion of consciousness is carried over into cosmic consciousness without a break in the continuity in the act of consciousness, and consequently, of memory. Then as one inhales, one adumbrates one's personal vantage point and personal self-image with the immensity of divine consciousness, and the splendor of divine identity. In this baptism, not only undesirable thoughts and emotions are eradicated, but all conceptual thinking is dispersed and all emotions, even the satisfaction of enjoying peace, are evaporated.

Lesson #3:  	Purifying The Aura

You may have noticed how the native Americans cleanse their auras with eagle feathers. They hold their hands out like antennae, drawing energy from the four cardinal corners of the earth. They are plugging into the magnetic field of the earth and drawing energy into their magnetic field. This, of course, gives great healing power.
We are going to work with purifying our auras. By the aura, one means the life field, which includes the magnetic field, the aura of light, the akashic body and many other bodies extending far into space. The first thing that one wants to do is to be aware of the magnetic field and identify with it instead of the body. Perhaps you have seen drawings of the field around a magnet. That phenomenon is to be found around the physical body and possibly is the mold in which the body is built.
See if you can feel your aura around your shoulders and shoulder blades, extending forward from your heart. It is not an equal field, and there are areas that are more intense than others. Those are plumes of magnetic force. You can use your hands to become aware of different thresholds, quantum leaps, in your magnetic field. By placing them in front of the areas mentioned and gradually moving them away, you will note how the field tends to weaken as it gets farther away from the body.
You may recognize several plumes where one has to concentrate on drainage. Those points correspond to the wings of the Seraphim archangels. The first pair of wings proceed from the temples, as in the Greek statues representing the winged thought. When one does the Sh'ma Yisroel or the Bismallah prayers, one places the hands on the temples. This is also to be found in the movements of the prayer Saum from Hazrat Inayat Khan when we say, "Praise be to Thee...". While doing this, you can free any tension in your head. By placing your fingers at your temples, you will be releasing the tension which is due to magnetism that has become polluted or stagnant and has not been drained. Here is an effective way to drain this polluted energy: Place your hands next to your temples, holding them as if you were going to unscrew a jar. Turn each hand in a counter-clockwise position (which means they will be going in opposite directions, with the right hand turning backwards and the left hand turning forwards). Then gradually move hands outward away from the temples while continuing the turning movement. (See illustration.) You will find a point at some distance from the temples, different for each person, where there is a threshold between one level of energy and another. At this critical point, any fluctuating motion of your fingers is felt immediately in your temples.
The second pair of wings is in your shoulder blades and the arms are the physical expression of the plumes of energy. The point of junction between the origin of those two wings is the place where the King in the grail legend was struck by the lance when heturned his back and was not facing the truth. It is a very sensitive area and when we are tired or nervous, tension is felt there.
Now the wings can be folded almost forward to form what the Sufis call the mantle of light, which is a protection against evil and magic. As a practice, you can represent those wings, originating in the shoulder blades, being wrapped around you as a protection.
We have been speaking about the wings, and there are other related centers in the life field. They constitute the access of the vortex, like a constellation of centers. We will focus upon the most obvious one, the heart center, through which tremendous energy flows in a forward direction. It actually spreads, fans out, but the main thrust is forward. This is what one feels when you say the wazifa, "Ya Fatah", especially if you also use arm and hand movements that accent the radiation. While the Seraphim are using their wings, they are also radiating energy through the heart. (Here you may repeat the movement suggested before, that of making a counter-clockwise turn with your hand, this time from the heart center, gradually moving away from the body. This will release any blocked or inverted energy.)
The third pair of wings is represented symbolically by the wings on the ankles of Hermes, or Mercury, the Messenger. The messenger is the one who uses his winged feet (which means to displace oneself) in order to communicate the order of the heavens on earth, and establish lines of communication between these two spheres. The plumes of energy that finally blossom forth as the wings in the ankles start much higher up, in the solar plexus, which is the point of junction, and then divide up in the adrenal glands. Then you will find that those plumes of energy descend down through the limbs to the sciatic nerves into the feet.
You can place your fingers on your solar plexus and feel all of the tension which is of an emotional nature: worry, fear, love,despair. Once again, you can do the motion of releasing energy, this time from the solar plexus, by turning your hand counter-clockwise as it is moved out from the center. This may lead to creating a circle of light around the solar plexus, which I always recommend to people who come to me and say they are being attacked by bad forces.
For those who are aware of massage, the way of cleansing the magnetism in this area is to move downwards with the fingers, along the legs. Finally, you find that the energy gets blocked in the soles of the feet and that is where foot massage is often the way of releasing tremendous amount of tension in the magnetic field of the body that got blocked in the feet. Walking barefooted will prove to be very helpful in deblocking the bottleneck. The other thing is dancing, - the dervish dance. Then one is picking up the right foot and one is creating a current, a gap in the energy between the right foot and the left foot. The Russians do that in their very energetic leg dances. And theFlamenco, of course. You can simply concentrate on, if I can use a metaphor, - "flying without feet".
Now one of the modern ways of working with the bottom range of wings is jogging. There was a rishi in India who was 108 years old and he used to jog every morning. He could hardly walk but he could run. If you can, go jogging bare- footed. It is much better. It is good to be conscious of the energy flow between the soles of the feet and the earth when you are running. Jogging can be real yoga practice. I daresay that while you are jogging, if you would just visualize that you had wings on your feet, you would jog better, instead of stumping around as many of us do. After having cleansed the plumes of energy in one's aura, then the next thing to do is to receive a blessing or energy from the celestial beings, and that means attuning oneself to their attunement.

Lesson #4:  The Cosmic Dimension of Consciousness

 As mentioned in Lesson 1, meditation could be looked upon as the art of modulating consciousness from its usual Local and middle range setting. Not unlike the magnetic field, consciousness could be looked upon as a vortex: a formation within the total field of consciousness of the universe.
Just as the lens of a camera reduces much of the detail of a landscape in order to reproduce it on a small celluloid slide or piece of cardboard, likewise, by the fact that the consciousness of the universe is focalized in the human se the ordinary grasp of our consciousness is extremely poor and inadequate. In photography, by changing to a panoramic lens, one can encompass a wider landscape, albeit by losing still more detail. Our consciousness functions rather on the same principles.
Adopting a further example: the span of our vision may be extended to watch a panorama or, alternatively, we may zoom our eyesight upon a particular letter in a word we are reading.
Usually, our consciousness is conditioned by our commonplace concerns, but when it comes to grasping the implications of a situation or the meaningfulness of our lives in a wider context, our minds fail to make sense of these. Sometimes unwittingly, our consciousness tends to adjust itself to a wider range.
At this first stage in meditation, one learns to stretch one'sconsciousness. As a consequence, one gets used to grasping things in a wider context. By applying the same principle to one's personality, one may free oneself from the constraint of one's usually rather inadequate and limiting self-image. 
PRACTICE:
Imagine your consciousness as an all-encompassing effulgence rather than a beam of light.  Immediately, consciousness is modulated beyond its middle range into its expanded mode.  Think of the stars, the galaxies, the enormous expanse of space.  You could also experience what the vastness of understanding would be like in comparison with a bigoted view, or again, what a cosmic attunement of emotion would be like in comparison with wallowing in personal fretting or ego satisfaction.
You may notice that when the setting of consciousness is narrow and sharp, the universe seems outside yourself and other than yourself.  No sooner one extends consciousness, one acquires a warm, oceanic feeling as though one were dispersed in space, while entertaining a sense of vastness and immensity.  One may find oneself so inextricably enmeshed with the universe that one identifies oneself with it.
We are now applying the principles outlined in Lesson #2, under "Baptism with Earth", to consciousness.
AS you exhale, stretch out your consciousness, or, rather, let it be defocalized, decentered.  Since we are accustomed to looking at things from our own personal center, it seems as though we are now expanding our own consciousness, but if one were to see things from the converse point of view, one would realize that it looks as though the vortex is being resorbed in its ground.
Now, imagine that you ar looking at yourself rom the vantage point of the stars or the galaxies - through the immensity of space-time.  St. Francis pointed out that the universe is looking at us:  "That which is seen is that which sees".  This is best done as you inhale.
A further exercise would consist in envisioning that the universe is looking at itself through your eyes, and may be looking at you through your eyes.
The above exercises will help one to overcome the limiting factor in one's commonplace experience owing to the focalization of consciousness, and supplement one's experience of the universe with vantage points that are complementary to the usual.
Having learned how to expand or, rather, decenter consciousness, the next step consists in freeing oneself from the constraint of one's personal self-image. Imagine your nature to be like a vortex, a whirlpool, without boundary, co-extensive with the many-splendored bounty of the universe.
Exhale. As you expand your sense of identity in infinite regress, you lose that very sense of personal identity and acquire a sense of being impersonal or cosmic. Ponder the words of Rumi: "I am the nameless and the formless and the timeless and the spaceless". Although a vortex does not have a boundary, yet as you zoom back towards the center of your notion of yourself which we now represent as a boundless vortex, as you inhale, you recover your personal image, yet as envisioned in the wider context of its universal ground. At this juncture, you realize that you are actually processing in your personality the infinite wealth of attributes, qualities and potentialities of the entire cosmos in a unique manner. You now realize that you are not just a vortex, but a template, more so a mutating matrix (a template is static - a matrix dynamic), not only self-formative, but impacting the environment with the stamp of your personal signature: your idiosyncrasies, your own special originality.
You are not just the convergence, confluence, conjugation of all those ingredients that have come into the confection of your being (in fact, these are infinite, including ultimately the bounty of the whole universe), but you are the congruence of that whole process. You are the goal that the universe intended to manifest by thus composing itself. You are not just the unpredictable outcome of an inexorable process, but the objective of that process. What is more, you act not only upon the environment, but upon the very formative process that forms you, altering it as it forms you, participating in your own creativity.
How one gets in touch with this formative matrix will be the subject of the next lesson.

Lesson #5:  Shaghal Breathing Practice, Part I


(The best time to do Shaghal is in the morning with 3 breaths in and out through the right nostril.)
Dawn is the time to reach very deep into that space inside of you. At sunrise, there is a lot of ultra-violet light reaching you, not just from the sun, but from the center of the galaxy, so concentrate on violet light as you turn within while doing the Shaghal.
After completing three Shaghal breaths, open your eyes halfway, so a little light trickles through. Concentrate on the stars, although you may no longer be able to see them in the sky. There is also the practice of looking at the stars while they become less and less visible as the dawn comes. If you do this over an extended period, you will be able to see the faint light of the stars even while the sun is in the sky.
Realize that we are floating in a universe of light and not only the stars, but space, is filled with light waves and light rays. Imagine that the earth is a kind of spacecraft and remember that even our bodies are made out of that same light. It is a question of discovering one's light identity.

Repeat the Shaghal practice.
This time, when you partially open your eyes, you cast the light from within toward the outside. You are sending your light out toward the stars, toward the galaxies. The morning is the period most conducive for meditations on illumination. Therefore, imagine a state of illumination where you are absolutely radiant. Having worked with the body in the breathing, we now complement the practice with a corresponding mentality. 
One has to smile to the sun. One has to remove all kinds of displeasure and dissatisfaction. The dawning of the sun upon the earth leads us back to our original state. One returns to a state of innocence combined with the wisdom one has acquired. The great artists have learned how to recover something of the state of the angels. The great beings are conscious of being both an angel and a master. There is no use doing these practices unless one finds joy in oneself'.
Close your eyes and put Your fingers on your eyes and ears as you inhale. Hold your breath. When you exhale, remove your fingers from your eyes and ears.
On the inhalation, be conscious of drawing light from the universe, especially into your heart center. While holding your breath, become aware of your aura and the light surging upward from the depths. While exhaling, send the light of your aura to the sun.
This practice may also be related to healing when the following themes are coordinated with the breath:
Upon inhaling, open not only the pores of the skin, but imagine you open all the cells of your body. As you exhale, discover a healing power and realize your potential for healing people, plants and animals. While exhaling, extend the hands forward. In one palm, receive the light of the sun, and focus upon the healing power in the other palm. This healing concentration can be applied by sending out healing thoughts of those in need while you extend your hands.
There is a great Sufi dervish who represents the fulfillment of discovering our solar inheritance. His name is Shams Tabriz; Shams means the sun. The practice that he did was to let the rays of the sun penetrate into the cells of his body with the power of truth. For him, the soul of the sun entered his psyche and lighted up every little creek in his psyche so that there was no room for any lie.
One can become like an open book when there is no guile in one's heart. The greatest power is the power of truth, for it eliminates any darkness in us. Purified of dark thoughts and shady emotions, one becomes sun-like in one's aura, one's mind, one's psyche and one's soul.
For the Sufis, the sun is called Prince Huraksh - who is the Prince of generosity. He is burning his own substance in order to give light and we, too, are burning our bodies to a certain extent. One can increase that combustion, which is a process called phosphorescence. Psychologically, it is linked to the generosity of the heart. If you give of yourself out of generosity, you radiate a lot of light: just like the sun.
Sometimes one talks to a person all about one's problems and how difficult things are. That is not generosity. The generous one is interested in the person one is talking to ("How are you?", "Can I help you?", "What can I do for you?"). You cannot be illuminated if there is dissatisfaction. One can give to another through the vehicle of conversation. There is no use in working with imagining light unless these very deep psychological attitudes have been dealt with. The key is indifference for oneself and interest in others.
Humor may also be used as a form of meditation which evokes a flash of illumination (laugh therapy). As soon as you laugh, you radiate a lot of light, providing it is not sardonic laughter. Prince Huraksh is always represented as laughing. His laughter comes from the confidence that ultimately,from the divine point of view, everything is for the best, even though from the human point of view, things appear as though the programming has broken down. It is confidence in the divine which enables one to become a solar being. When you experience that confidence, you participate in the soul of Prince Huraksh.
According to the Zoroastrian Magi, our souls are - Fragments of the soul of the archangel of the sun. By smiling at the sun, we express our gratitude for the gift of light and life. We can smile all our resentment away and especially our self-pity. If you cannot smile, it may mean you have self-pity and therefore are unable to give. If you take yourself too seriously, it is an affirmation of the ego.
Check yourself and realize that every time you smile mentally, your aura burns more brightly. Sit straight when you are facing the sun so the spine is erect and your head is not bent over. Hold the shoulders back so your heart may be fully exposed to the sun. There is a confrontation, an encounter, between you and the sun. According to the Sufis, you are sitting at the court of the King, and tradition holds that one only turns one's back to the King when setting off on a mission. Now you can turn your back to the sun and know the King is always behind you, supporting you.
 INDEX FINGER OVER EYE MIDDLE FINGER CLOSES NOSTRIL RING FINGEROVER TOP LIP LITTLE FINGER UNDER BOTTOM LIP
1. Exhale fully.
2. Place corresponding fingers as illustrated.
3. Place thumbs on the flaps of the ears.
4. Be sure not to press too strongly on the eyes with the index fingers.
5. Press lips together with the fingers as illustrated.
6. Close left nostril for inhalation; Close both nostrils while holding breath Open right passage for exhalation.

Lesson #6:	Shagal Breathing Practice, Part II

 NOTE: This lesson begins with the Shaghal breathing practice explained in the previous lesson. You may want to review the essential elements of this practice before beginning the teachings given below which focus upon the Sufi practice of creative imagination.
Put your index fingers on your eyes, your thumbs in your ears, fourth and fifth fingers on your lips and middle fingers on your nostrils and, as you breathe in, think of yourself as a wave in the sea of the universe. Remember, the wave does not have borders, so it is the whole universe that builds itself up in you. Then as you exhale, the wave recedes back into the whole ocean and forms a wave interference pattern with all other waves. It continues to exist but it is intermeshed into all the rest of the ocean.
You inhale only through the right nostril and exhale through the right nostril. Now we think of ourselves as a tapestry that is made up of the strands of the universe that interweave. As you get closer to the center, it is more like the tapestry, and further away, it is the separate strands.
Now as you hold your breath between the inhaling and the exhaling, there is new growth that is taking place in the depths of your being, irrespective of what is converging from the universe.
Now exhale and relax.
Remember how you feel when you are dreaming. You are still conscious of the noise in the street, the furniture in the room, of yourself as the being that you think you are, of your memory, and of people. At the same time, in a sense, you are floating a little bit so it is like a double image. The kind of images thatpass before your mind are like a kaleidoscope. You are just vaguely conscious of the physical environment which has a sense of unreality. If you try to bring forth images, they won't come. One has to be in a rather uncanny contra state, moved by cosmic emotion. very Passive and attuned. in harmonY. That means just letting go.  There might even be an undertone with everything rather silent and - mysterious, uncanny.
Now to start with, I am going to suggest images, but eventually you will just let the images come without my suggesting them.
Imagine a desert landscape at dawn, flat, in the cool of dawn, but still there is something remaining of the heat of the day before. You are there alone. You see the very diaphanous light at the horizon. It seems to be on the increase. The whole sky begins to light up and so does the surface of the sand and everything around you. The surface is absolutely flat so that you can see that the planet is round, a sphere. There is nothing inside except the dawn with the emergence of light, which fascinates you and draws your attention. Now it is getting brighter and brighter and you have an urge to walk towards that dawning light. Now all of a sudden, there is a very small but enormously bright little point of light that emerges over the horizon. Suddenly the whole environment is transformed and the point of light starts getting bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter. Your whole body is illuminated by that light, by the glow of that light. You open up the palms of your hands and the pores of your skin and are walking towards that light. You are fascinated by it, thrilled by it, exulted by it. Eventually you realize that you are a being of light and that the light of the sun has made you aware of your own being of light. Now you are running towards the sun, attracted by it as one would be attracted by a magnet.
You discover an aspect of yourself that is perhaps latent and it manifests as a result of this experience of your solar nature. It is discovered in your encounter with the sun.
Now I am going to choose another scene. Suppose that you are wandering next to a lake which is absolutely still. There is no wind and it is the evening. There are still stars in the sky, a full moon, and it is drizzling. You are endowed with an uncanny clarity of vision and you are zooming on the surface of the water. You can see each drop that impinges upon the surface of the water, which forms an eddy that moves, and becomes larger and larger until it starts encroaching on the eddy next to it. Together they form a wave interference pattern.
If you follow each wave, each eddy, as it starts and then it eventually intermeshes with the other eddies, you can see a kind of pattern being formed which is a moving, shimmering pattern, continually changing, empowered by the drops of water, scintillating in the moonlight.
Somehow your whole being is drawn into this scene. In so doing,you are discovering the water aspect of your being, which is flowing and tends to merge and interfuse, intermesh, interweave with all things. For example, it is like cooperating with people and forming networking and new patterns of society. Patterns within patterns, all beautifully dovetailing and integrated.
I am going to suggest another image. Imagine now a mountain scene. You are climbing beyond the forest and foothills until you come to more and more rock formations with streams of water. There are no paths any more. The rocks are more abrupt and sharp. There is a mist formation underneath you, shrouding the valley below. Only little patches are visible in the depths of the valley, with conglomerations of houses. The sky is an array of the most vivid colors with a bright orange, red, green, sepia, brown, vermillion and a silver grey. It is changing continually with a very strong wind, drawing the clouds into various formations. Behind it all, an effulgence of the sun emerges from time to time, with a golden disc behind all those cloud formations. You just have this precarious foothold on the rocks beneath, but you are so much part of the whole glorious, incandescent scene of light. You keep on climbing and are thrilled by the freedom from the lower regions. The exaltation of communion with the sky!
Now there is a thunderstorm beneath you, lightning and thunder. Where you are, there is a blue sky and it is absolutely serene. In the distance, a rainbow is contrasting with the lightning below. You discover that you are reliving several aspects of your being: the freedom, the ecstasy, the explosion of energy, the glory of the rainbow, being part of the outburst of the forces of nature or being enlightened and liberated.
Now yet another scene. It is back down to us again. The lush vegetation, after the rain, the lovely smell of the earth, a sense of the growth, the profuse giving of the earth of itself: generosity, reliability, bounty. You can relate to this as being the root of your being emerging from the earth bearing fruit and again being recycled. The earth, absorbing pollution, transforming, reprocessing, recycling all waste and making something beautiful out of it - the gift of life! Even going in and plowing that earth and experiencing the magnetism of the earth as one plows it. Then the joy of sowing the seed that carries the hope of new birth, trusting the seed to the earth that may be covered by the snow in the winter, and knowing that it will germinate and burgeon and flourish as the snow is thawed. The light of the sunshine of spring will invite the seed back to
This could be followed up with the bears, tortoises, insects, hedgehogs: all are hibernating and abandoning their activity in search of food and doing precisely what happens to the grain buried under the earth. The life in the earth is silenced by the snow and the winter is set in.
You discover an aspect of yourself that needs to lie low, recover, feel and blend itself to the region and the forces of nature, in the stillness, protected from all activity of the surface, a need for peace.

Lesson #7:  	Lanscapes of the Soul

A perspective rather familiar is a flock of geese migrating, thousands of them flying in formation.  Now we see them from the earth, but imagine what it would be like to be one of those geese carried in that impulse that moves them to seek for a tropical climate and escape the cold winter. It is the perspective of the earth as seen from above, and instead of it being the engine of a plane that carries you, it is your own ability to fly. The perspective of a bird instead of the perspective of the human walking on the planet on the surface. The freedom, the buoyancy, the ecstasy of being part of this whole thrust of nostalgia for other horizons. Breaking into new horizons, flying above the clouds at dawn or at sunset. Not the dawn that we know, where the sun rises above the horizon of the earth or sets underneath the horizon of the earth, but the dawning of the sun above the cloud formations when the surface of the clouds is lit up by the sun. Instead of being a landscape, it is a skyscape. You are scudding this luminous skyscape which is not solid, of course, and is very volatile. Blown by the wind in tufts of cotton-like mist formations, you feel part of the sky and of the light, discovering an aspect of your being which is unearthly, buoyant, free, ecstatic, evanescent, elusive.
And now, for another scene that is unrelated to any familiar landscape, one composed of different patterns of light. There could be spirals of light, beams of light, flashes of light, kaleidoscopic formations, geometric formations that are continually changing. Now it is a total departure from the familiar scenes in the world such as we know it. The colors of the spectrum are coming through, assuming all kinds of patterns, a mixture of form and light and color. Instead of sitting back and watching it, you take the plunge and enter into the scene. You might even let some of those colors come off on you so that you can feel the blueness or the redness or the yellowness on your clothes. Your whole being is lit up by all these different flashes of light. It could even be fireworks. If you go into the scene, give yourself up entirely without holding back. You can imagine that you are a firecracker that is exploding into millions of sparks and colors, shapes and patterns, and then defracting, creating a kaleidoscopic scene.
You can move into this world of light and discover the horizon of light - brighter and more magnificent than those that you have encountered so far. It is just a matter of letting yourself go into it and abandoning your identity, or previous identity. Thebreakthrough comes when suddenly you can grasp that you are a being of light and these are familiar spheres that you have forgotten. If you have the courage to advance further and leave the familiar world behind, then you will discover landscapes of light of overwhelming splendor, a different kind of light than the light with which we are familiar. There is no way of describing it adequately. This time, instead of the rather random light formations that we came across - kaleidoscopic - it seems like the patterns of light represent the blueprints of the physical world. They are meaningful, beautiful, with a harmony about them. They look like temples of light with beautiful symmetrical and harmonious patterns that are not stationary; they are moving. You feel the temples are inhabited with beings of light. You can only do that if you identify yourself totally as a being of light. Consider that your physical condition is just borrowed and transient, even, to a certain extent, illusory.
You have left your body behind and you do not know where it is and it does not matter. One has to be intoxicated with light, thrilled, exulted by light, radiant, burning with light, incandescent. The beings of light begin to come into focus, angelic beings with very pure faces. Not the kind of romantic faces that are described by some artists but more like the icons of the ancients. Not like those dull and rather disagreeable faces but very pure, very immaculate. A countenance that is an impression which we perhaps translate in terms of familiar faces. It is more like a state of consciousness that you grasp rather than a structure or outline. Your face lights up in a moment of joy, a moment of exultation, an outburst of splendor transfiguring matter.
Now this is self-discovery. Aspects or one's being that one had never dreamt of, beyond one's wildest imagination. One recognizes the self that one had forgotten. And there is even more beyond that, but it takes us so far away from the life with which we are familiar. There is no way of saying it. It is beyond existence.
There seems to be an infinity of spheres, not seven or nine, but endless spheres. One can experience a state where there is, first of all, just spirit, and then intelligence. One can see that there is a core of your being that is immaculate, unchanging and untarnishable, like a mirror that can be exposed to all kinds of reflections but when you turn the mirror, the reflections have gone. So experience that aspect of your being that is like the mirror. It cannot be tarnished, it cannot be sullied, it cannot be marked, imprinted. As one lifts oneself into higher planes, beings are more and more like mirrors: neutral, immaculate, impersonal.
We have been reviewing a few of the components which form the tapestry of our being and we have been able to identify them by conjuring the scenes corresponding to their attunement. Let us say they are the different attunements that form the symphony of our being. We were discovering by experiencing self-discovery. Inso doing, we were manifesting and activating the latencies in our being by the power of creative imagination.
Now I would like to suggest that you make up your own scenes. Do not forget that you are present in this image and that you are the nature of the landscape. You are not just the observer but you are moving in it and eventually merging into it.
The thing that you can do as you descend back into your personal consciousness is to think of what you have been experiencing as a reminder of what you have always been. I want to establish your connection with the earth again without forgetting what you really are.
All right, now breathe heavily, extend your breath.
God bless you.
The following phrases, from Nature Meditations by Hazrat Inayat Khan, are offered as a means to carry the atmosphere of the creative imagination meditations presented by Pir Vilayat into our daily lives. They may be contemplated as seed thoughts throughout the day and can bring forth the remembrance of one of the landscapes created by Pir Vilayat in Lessons 6 and 7. One may also coordinate the different parts or a phrase with the inhalation and exhalation of the breath.
I feel Thy presence in this landscape which draws my heart so close to Thee.
This landscape in my heart is a reflection of Thy beauty.
Fill my heart with Thy beauty as Thou fillest with Thy creation empty space.
Envelop me as in the light of Thy divine spirit, Raise me from the denseness of the earth.
Let the sun of Thy glory shine in my heart.
Let me reflect Thy light through my thoughts as the clouds reflect in color the light of the sun.
Let Thy beauty shine through my heart as though the clouds come and spread out the rays of the sun.

 
Lesson #8:	Creative Imagination, Part I

Now, let us continue putting in practice, the method that is used by the Sufis in promoting creativity by giving a certain amount of vent to the creative imagination. All creativity starts in an internal state where one is protected from the environment and one can concentrate one's energy on what is emerging in the depths of one's being. Instead of trying to earmark creativity with one's mind, with the danger of conceptualizing and therefore distorting it, one is bypassing the mind by projecting it forward in a series of images. These images are simply the way that our mind translates its impulses and nostalgia in forms that are familiar to the body, that is, landscapes on the planet earth. That is why in dreams, there is not much psychic activity; it starts really with imagery but the images give a clue to the state of one's psyche. If we try to imagine forms, they will not be expressing the moods or the attunements of our deeper selves. But if we just let go in a state of dream, of reverie, where there is no will, then that image formation will begin to take place as it does in our dreams.
Now it is true, that in order to become yourself, it is important to see yourself in another yourself, who is better able to manifest what you are than you. Consequently, we are discovering ourselves in those images of the sun, or the light or the earth or the heavens. On the other hand, what is coming through is new and is trying to manifest in known forms. What I'm trying to do is unmask an error in our way of thinking, which is to think that all we have to do to be creative is to actuate what is already potentially there in our being. To be creative, one has to freewheel, do some brainstorming, and find new ways of being instead of being limited by one's inheritance, even though this inheritance contains all the levels, including one's divine inheritance. As you might have noticed, what we're doing corresponds exactly with the second phase in the alchemical retreat process which is the alchemical marriage of heaven and earth. To do this, one has to think of oneself as a hybrid in which something new is emerging. A hybrid means, of course, the product of the intermeshing of different beings, tendencies or inheritances. 
I find in myself, for example, a very good hybrid between the east and west. I can see in myself and you can see in yourself, that merging or interweaving or intermeshing of two very different races - the Indian and the American. One's identity becomes a composite through the manner in which one integrates many different elements, forming a homunculus reality that results not just from the interweaving and intermeshing, but even the confluence. Let us say it is a very intimate blending, so that eventually the components have lost their idiosyncrasies.
Think of yourself as being a composite of all the different elements: parents, grandparents, ancestors, people coming from different parts of the world, the animal, plant and angelic realms, then, ultimately, even your divine inheritance. All those elements are intermeshed, interwoven, confluing, like a tapestry.The closer you get to the center, the more it makes sense. and the further away you are, the more you can't see what those different elements have to do with one another.
Picture how, in the middle of this convergence of all those elements, there is the emergence of something totally spontaneous and unpredictable, not the result of causality but your own creativity. Suppose you were able to take an old barn and make it into a new house, or take an old composition and refurbish it so that there's something of the old, yet the new elements are coming forth strongly. There was an old melody and it's all of a sudden transfigured into a new rendering. Or take a painting that you are working with. You can recognize the old painting; still, there's something quite new in it. Speaking metaphorically, the new seems to emerge from the center and the old seems to desegregate from the jagged ends, just as in a rose. The outer petals begin to drop away but the new petals are formed in the center.
There's no use trying to earmark those new elements with your consciousness. You would kill or distort them by observation but you project them. You don't try to do it but the dynamics of the psyche work in such a way that these new elements project themselves into images. This is how the unconscious attempts to tell us something that we would distort or limit by our minds and therefore it is communicating a message under the cover of images. In those images we recognize ourselves. I hope you will remember this light motif in the words of Plotinus, "That which we fail to discover in contemplation, we seek to experience in the universe." What one fails to discover of the bounty of one's being, one seeks to discover in another oneself.
What we are doing now is a process of self discovery. We are using experience but purely to trigger off discovery. The images are the mirror in which you discover yourself. One is used to thinking that what one is experiencing is other than one's self and therefore, it's easier to project it on an image.
What we're doing is exactly what the painters and the musicians and all different kinds of artists are doing in being creative. We have to enter into a very deep place and let unconscious and impersonal forces take over from the personal will. Let the divine operation facilitate circumstances that are favorable to the divine operation. In Egyptian mythology this is represented in a drawing where the personal ego is sitting on the top of a door, out of the way of the process. The ego is observing rather remotely without interfering in the state of reverie.
Now the personal ego comes in at the end of each scene of the reverie, a kind of autopsy, if you will, like the scientist who is able to draw some conclusions from what has happened. When the reverie has been completed, at least one scene of the reverie, then you could reflect upon it as one remembers one's dreams. You can discern certainLesson #l: 	Introduction

The present course is programmed as a set of instructions intended to be carried out by the pupil daily. The lessons are meted out progressively and cover a vast range of practices, based on the traditional teachings of the esoteric schools that developed through the ages against the religious background of the great civilizations. The lessons will be dispatched at a regular monthly pace, but it is left to the discretion of the pupil whether to continue practicing the previous lesson in addition to the new one or simply to concentrate on the new one or to consistently refer back to earlier practices.
Pupils are advised to preserve the lessons by collating them in sequence in a loose leaf ring folder. Also, it is intended that pupils include in the book their own daily curriculum of practices, which should be reprogrammed in an ongoing way.
May we be reminded here that, while the present trend is toward dealing with real life situations and confronting personal problems, it becomes obvious to the more enlightened that one cannot assess situations reliably while one is too engrossed in them. (One cannot see the woods for the trees.) Moreover, one's personal vantage point in a situation cannot but prove relative, just like the landscape gets distorted through a lens: "the map is not the territory". A more holistic view of our problems would ensue from alternating the focus of our consciousness, viewing ourselves and the situations from this perspective. Most of the time, we are grappling with our concepts of our problems instead of grasping where the real issues lie.
This is where meditation proves to be invaluable, not just as a stress-alleviating technique, but as a training in a more apt use of consciousness. Furthermore, meditation could be applied to fostering the creativity of our personality - an objective which we shall continually keep in mind throughout this course.
Meditation is the art of modulating consciousness beyond the middle range (in which most people most of the time are entrapped) and therefore marks a step forward in the evolution of the human species. It is as skillful and elaborate an art as learning to play a musical instrument, compose, paint, dance, or act in the performing arts, or train in the skill of the artisan or scientist or technologist. Perhaps even more!
There are certain preliminaries that must be taken into consideration before we start our course. First of all, as soon as one reaches beyond the middle range of thinking (just as in non-Euclidean geometry or relativity), the commonplace logic breaks down and proves itself inadequate. We are dealing with complimentarity instead of thinking in terms of categories. For example: there is no boundary to our being. Rather than beinglike the section of an orange, we are like a whirlpool - inextricably enmeshed in a wave-interference pattern. Such a realization shakes our self-image drastically! Or, again, we are a continuity in change - which does not mean that a part of us, the spirit, is eternal while another part, the body, is transient, but that our being - considered as a whole - (that is, holistically) is without boundary and in a state of ongoing transition. The next point to consider when meditating is that we cannot induce transformation, nor even concentration, by our will, since our individual will is as limited as is consciousness when focalized in the individual setting. The approach to the problem is a subtle one; one may train the unconscious by dint of one's will or one may learn how to enlist an impersonal will into action.
It might be helpful to understand this if one were to borrow the metaphor of l cone. We may imagine that we are the apex and the universe is the base: we converge the physique and thinking and consciousness of the universe. But there is a more advanced model: we are the whole cone, not just the apex. We can shift our identity to include the whole cone. This is the ultimate in meditation. When one achieves this, one's will becomes overwhelmingly powerful because it customizes the will of the universe. Perhaps we feel sometimes the immensity and bounty behind our limited action on ourselves. It is this hunch that will spur one to strive to discover and marshall this cosmic dimension of our being. The art of training oneself to do this is meditation.
There is yet one further noteworthy consideration before we embark on our work: it is emotion - not the will - that triggers off a shift in the focus of consciousness. Once more, to invoke our metaphor: it is not the personal apex of the cone, but the whole cone, that is the ecstasy that breaks through every time that we are suddenly freed from a constraint, be it our biased assessment of a situation, our emotional dependence upon a person or circumstances, or our limited self-image.
The art of meditation has been devised and elaborated in the course of history as the findings of men and women who have explored inner spaces of the psyche. This required solitude and austerity - the way of the recluse - which seems incompatible with the way of the "householder". Many sects and charismatic groups have been imputed of encouraging other-worldliness in their disciples. It has been hailed as the "spiritual bypass". We are endeavoring to grasp the techniques and know-how that the contemplatives have culled and apply them to dealing with our problems in action, in worldly life. It is worth the challenge. Suffice it to imagine how it would be if we could maintain a stalwart peace and serenity in the midst of a stressful situation, grasp the hidden springs behind the programming of our lives, and develop intuition, mastery, radiance.
This will require of us to instill something of the hermit intothe way of the knight. Our need for freedom is as imperious as our need for involvement. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive? There is a way of reconciling the irreconciliables. An example! -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 described as self-transcendence.
Our practice will start with the second lesson - following presently. 

Lesson #2:  	Breathing Practices: The Purification Breaths

It is advised to commence all meditation sessions with a breathing practice. Adopting a holistic view, the action of absorbing oxygen from the environment and expelling polluted gases from the lungs is only one factor in an overall ebb and flow of exchange of energy between the organism and the universe. The human being may be looked upon as a vortex (or whirlpool), that is, without boundary,which is only able to maintain itself by continually dispersing, and conversely, processing the environment.
Amongst the unteemed ingredients of the universe so converged, processed, radiated and spoliated, the magnetic field (more specifically, the geomagnetic field) assumes in the human being the form of personal magnetism and is greatly enhanced wherever one reaches out with one's consciousness into the vastness of the universe. Another factor is the light of the universe converged in the form of one's aura, then radiated. For these practices, references will be made in the lessons in preparation. Of course, there are many more factors related to the ebb and flow of breath.
One of the reasons for the importance of controlling breath in spiritual practices is that by the sheer fact of becoming aware of one's breath, one unwittingly slows it down. In the normal diurnal rhythm of breath, the organism is in a state of readiness to spring to action; animals are alert to catch their prey or defend themselves. This is called the catabolic state, whereas in the state of rest called the anabolic state, the organism can rebuild energy, digest food in protected conditions. The human mind can indulge in an overview, taking stock of situations rather than having to keep in a state of readiness to spring into action. Thus the slowing down of breath favors the state of meditation.
Several breathing practices will be described and prescribed inthe present course. We will start with the one that is called, in the Sufi Order, "the purification breaths". It is advised to practice these every day, first thing in the morning. This practice has 2 objectives in view: cleansing the energy field from pollution picked up from the physiological and psychological environment, and recharging the energy from the environment, with special reference to the elements: earth, water, fire and air. They are based on a hermetic knowledge embodied in alchemy. I like to consider these as both purifications and baptisms with the elements by reestablishing our covenant with nature - the ground of our body.  
1. Baptism with the Earth: Inhale and exhale through the nose 3 or 5 times, slowly without retention. The breath should not be overly slowed down. If indoors, it is advised to do this before an open window if your health allows it. Accentuate the exhaling, extending it, while ejecting all impurities in the mind and emotions that might tarnish your magnetic emanation. Identify yourself with your magnetic field rather than your body. Envision the magnetic field of the Planet Earth as resorbing any pollution in your magnetic field. I believe that one might say, in terms of physics, that any irregularities in an open system get balanced out in the larger system in which it is immersed. Toward the end of the outbreath, extend your consciousness into the vastness of outer space, and think of the whole universe as an enormous force field partly crystallized in the fabric of the galaxies. Now, if you can envision yourself as a vortex, that is, without boundary, you will see yourself inextricably intermeshed in the cosmic immensity. When consciousness becomes thus all-encompassing, the amount of energy converged into the vortex of the magnetic field becomes incomparably greater; energy builds up. The clue is freeing oneself from one's limited self-image. Here one discovers the relationship between consciousness and energy.
You may notice that, of all parts of the body, the bottom of the spine (if you are sitting cross-legged) or the soles of the feet (if you are standing) or both (if you are sitting on a chair) are the areas in which the updraft of earth energy are most felt. This energy is felt as triggering off Kundalini, unless balanced by a "descending" current, which we will call "celestial" or pure spirit. If, rather than concentrating on the geomagnetic field, you concentrate on the magnetic field of the entire universe in all its vastness, you will feel as though energy were impinging upon the body from all azimuth simultaneously.
As you exhale now, not only does your notion of yourself disperse into outer space, but simultaneously, you are aware of radiating energy into the environment, farther and farther, but at the same time, any pollution (irregularities) in your life field are earthed and drained away.
2. Baptism with Water: Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. Instead of simply identifying with a pulsing field, become sensitive to the variety of frequencies or wave lengths ofenergy composing the field, particularly a very fine form of energy traditionally called pure spirit. From the moment you experience yourself as an open system, merging with the universe, you realize that spirit is both a component of your field and interspersed in the entire universe. Rather than being quickened by it, you try to earmark it in yourself, or rather, as a component of yourself. Experience it when you consider matter as something that accrued to you in the course of your biographical becoming.
You will need to draw your memory back to your pristine condition when you were like a mirror, devoid of impressions. This will require you to systematically clear away all impressions whatsoever, good or bad, and transfigure joy into peace. You will first feel yourself to be like gossamer, then diaphanous, then as a highly refined energy that acts like a catalyst, triggering the latent cosmic life force into motion. This high powered brand of energy seems to break through as an outburst, rather like lightning. Consequently, one has the impression that it descends upon one - shattering one and regenerating one. Yet it is already part of one, at least virtually, not unlike lightning, which is the release of the tension built up between two poles. One also has the impression of water traversing one's magnetic field like the river Rhone filters through the lake of Geneva.  It is good to link this practice with the previous one: draw cosmic magnetic energy in as one inhales through the nose, and experience the outburst of pure spirit as one exhales through the mouth. Practiced thus, Kundalini is enured of any danger.
3. Baptism with Fire: Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the nose 3 or 5 times. Fire is a very drastic form of purification. Think of your most detested, and maybe resilient, defects: guile, deviousness, manipulation, cheating, deceiving others - any form of accommodating or compromising that humiliates one's spirit because it is below one's ideal. One's own imperious urge for truthfulness calls one's innate fiery nature to the fore. It may manifest itself as hot flushes or bouts of heroic resolve. Knowing that the temperature of the body is evidence of the fact that organic matter is in an ongoing state of combustion, one may imagine a "bioplasmic effusion" emanating from one's body while permeating it. One may even identify with this "igneous body" which pulses as one inhales and exhales. One might experience what it would be like to be a braise, sucking air from the environment. This is what one does as one inhales through the mouth. Actually, one does not only resorb oxygen from the environment, but radiance..
For this practice, it is advised to visualize, as one inhales, the lower frequencies: infrared (or red), concentrating on the lower chakras, then visualizing yellow or a golden color in the heart chakra, green in the throat chakra, blue in the eyes, violet in the third eye, and a glistening white (or colorless) light with diamond-like hues in the crown center. The hermetic principle upon which this practice is based is called"transmuting fire into light". Such can only result from a very severe and consistent catharsis.
4. Baptism with Air: Inhale through the mouth, exhale through the mouth 3 or 5 times. In alchemy, air stands for the "volatile" state. Not unlike the second baptism, one frees oneself from one's notion of "substance". One experiences oneself as dematerializing as one exhales, then rematerializing as one inhales. Not unlike the first baptism, there is an experience of merging with the universe as one exhales, then building up the "vortex" we call the self as one inhales. But, whereas in the first baptism one thinks in terms of energy or magnetism, in this, the fourth baptism, one envisions the universe as a program, as "software", as pure meaningfulness, as a symphony, not sound (because sound is the pulsing of matter), but vibration (because vibration is an oscillation of energy - or rather the condition in which energy is modulated - that is imprinted with meaning or simply carries meaning, like radio signals). Such is the significance of the "akashic body".
Rather than being the convergence of the matter of the universe, envision yourself as the congruence of the meaningfulness of the universe. And what is more, you are contributing by the fact that the universal programming is thus conjugated in each of its relays, towards the meaningfulness of the whole.
This requires of one to lose altogether the notion of oneself as an entity as one exhales, merging totally in the "mind of God". As one inhales, one experiences oneself, not as re-emerging or being reborn, but rather as the apex of the thrust of the whole universe. Likewise, it might become clear to one that it is not true that a wave emerges from the ocean, since a wave does not have a boundary; its underpinnings include the whole ocean. Rather, one might say that it is the whole ocean that emerges as what appears to be each wave.
One's understandable aversion to losing oneself is due to the very compulsiveness of the most basic of all instincts: self-preservation. It requires courage. When this fear is overcome, one becomes an adept on the spiritual path. But this must not be confused with blanking out. As Buddha says: the personal notion of consciousness is carried over into cosmic consciousness without a break in the continuity in the act of consciousness, and consequently, of memory. Then as one inhales, one adumbrates one's personal vantage point and personal self-image with the immensity of divine consciousness, and the splendor of divine identity. In this baptism, not only undesirable thoughts and emotions are eradicated, but all conceptual thinking is dispersed and all emotions, even the satisfaction of enjoying peace, are evaporated.

Lesson #3:  	Purifying The Aura

You may have noticed how the native Americans cleanse their auras with eagle feathers. They hold their hands out like antennae, drawing energy from the four cardinal corners of the earth. They are plugging into the magnetic field of the earth and drawing energy into their magnetic field. This, of course, gives great healing power.
We are going to work with purifying our auras. By the aura, one means the life field, which includes the magnetic field, the aura of light, the akashic body and many other bodies extending far into space. The first thing that one wants to do is to be aware of the magnetic field and identify with it instead of the body. Perhaps you have seen drawings of the field around a magnet. That phenomenon is to be found around the physical body and possibly is the mold in which the body is built.
See if you can feel your aura around your shoulders and shoulder blades, extending forward from your heart. It is not an equal field, and there are areas that are more intense than others. Those are plumes of magnetic force. You can use your hands to become aware of different thresholds, quantum leaps, in your magnetic field. By placing them in front of the areas mentioned and gradually moving them away, you will note how the field tends to weaken as it gets farther away from the body.
You may recognize several plumes where one has to concentrate on drainage. Those points correspond to the wings of the Seraphim archangels. The first pair of wings proceed from the temples, as in the Greek statues representing the winged thought. When one does the Sh'ma Yisroel or the Bismallah prayers, one places the hands on the temples. This is also to be found in the movements of the prayer Saum from Hazrat Inayat Khan when we say, "Praise be to Thee...". While doing this, you can free any tension in your head. By placing your fingers at your temples, you will be releasing the tension which is due to magnetism that has become polluted or stagnant and has not been drained. Here is an effective way to drain this polluted energy: Place your hands next to your temples, holding them as if you were going to unscrew a jar. Turn each hand in a counter-clockwise position (which means they will be going in opposite directions, with the right hand turning backwards and the left hand turning forwards). Then gradually move hands outward away from the temples while continuing the turning movement. (See illustration.) You will find a point at some distance from the temples, different for each person, where there is a threshold between one level of energy and another. At this critical point, any fluctuating motion of your fingers is felt immediately in your temples.
The second pair of wings is in your shoulder blades and the arms are the physical expression of the plumes of energy. The point of junction between the origin of those two wings is the place where the King in the grail legend was struck by the lance when heturned his back and was not facing the truth. It is a very sensitive area and when we are tired or nervous, tension is felt there.
Now the wings can be folded almost forward to form what the Sufis call the mantle of light, which is a protection against evil and magic. As a practice, you can represent those wings, originating in the shoulder blades, being wrapped around you as a protection.
We have been speaking about the wings, and there are other related centers in the life field. They constitute the access of the vortex, like a constellation of centers. We will focus upon the most obvious one, the heart center, through which tremendous energy flows in a forward direction. It actually spreads, fans out, but the main thrust is forward. This is what one feels when you say the wazifa, "Ya Fatah", especially if you also use arm and hand movements that accent the radiation. While the Seraphim are using their wings, they are also radiating energy through the heart. (Here you may repeat the movement suggested before, that of making a counter-clockwise turn with your hand, this time from the heart center, gradually moving away from the body. This will release any blocked or inverted energy.)
The third pair of wings is represented symbolically by the wings on the ankles of Hermes, or Mercury, the Messenger. The messenger is the one who uses his winged feet (which means to displace oneself) in order to communicate the order of the heavens on earth, and establish lines of communication between these two spheres. The plumes of energy that finally blossom forth as the wings in the ankles start much higher up, in the solar plexus, which is the point of junction, and then divide up in the adrenal glands. Then you will find that those plumes of energy descend down through the limbs to the sciatic nerves into the feet.
You can place your fingers on your solar plexus and feel all of the tension which is of an emotional nature: worry, fear, love,despair. Once again, you can do the motion of releasing energy, this time from the solar plexus, by turning your hand counter-clockwise as it is moved out from the center. This may lead to creating a circle of light around the solar plexus, which I always recommend to people who come to me and say they are being attacked by bad forces.
For those who are aware of massage, the way of cleansing the magnetism in this area is to move downwards with the fingers, along the legs. Finally, you find that the energy gets blocked in the soles of the feet and that is where foot massage is often the way of releasing tremendous amount of tension in the magnetic field of the body that got blocked in the feet. Walking barefooted will prove to be very helpful in deblocking the bottleneck. The other thing is dancing, - the dervish dance. Then one is picking up the right foot and one is creating a current, a gap in the energy between the right foot and the left foot. The Russians do that in their very energetic leg dances. And theFlamenco, of course. You can simply concentrate on, if I can use a metaphor, - "flying without feet".
Now one of the modern ways of working with the bottom range of wings is jogging. There was a rishi in India who was 108 years old and he used to jog every morning. He could hardly walk but he could run. If you can, go jogging bare- footed. It is much better. It is good to be conscious of the energy flow between the soles of the feet and the earth when you are running. Jogging can be real yoga practice. I daresay that while you are jogging, if you would just visualize that you had wings on your feet, you would jog better, instead of stumping around as many of us do. After having cleansed the plumes of energy in one's aura, then the next thing to do is to receive a blessing or energy from the celestial beings, and that means attuning oneself to their attunement.

Lesson #4:  The Cosmic Dimension of Consciousness

 As mentioned in Lesson 1, meditation could be looked upon as the art of modulating consciousness from its usual Local and middle range setting. Not unlike the magnetic field, consciousness could be looked upon as a vortex: a formation within the total field of consciousness of the universe.
Just as the lens of a camera reduces much of the detail of a landscape in order to reproduce it on a small celluloid slide or piece of cardboard, likewise, by the fact that the consciousness of the universe is focalized in the human se the ordinary grasp of our consciousness is extremely poor and inadequate. In photography, by changing to a panoramic lens, one can encompass a wider landscape, albeit by losing still more detail. Our consciousness functions rather on the same principles.
Adopting a further example: the span of our vision may be extended to watch a panorama or, alternatively, we may zoom our eyesight upon a particular letter in a word we are reading.
Usually, our consciousness is conditioned by our commonplace concerns, but when it comes to grasping the implications of a situation or the meaningfulness of our lives in a wider context, our minds fail to make sense of these. Sometimes unwittingly, our consciousness tends to adjust itself to a wider range.
At this first stage in meditation, one learns to stretch one'sconsciousness. As a consequence, one gets used to grasping things in a wider context. By applying the same principle to one's personality, one may free oneself from the constraint of one's usually rather inadequate and limiting self-image. 
PRACTICE:
Imagine your consciousness as an all-encompassing effulgence rather than a beam of light.  Immediately, consciousness is modulated beyond its middle range into its expanded mode.  Think of the stars, the galaxies, the enormous expanse of space.  You could also experience what the vastness of understanding would be like in comparison with a bigoted view, or again, what a cosmic attunement of emotion would be like in comparison with wallowing in personal fretting or ego satisfaction.
You may notice that when the setting of consciousness is narrow and sharp, the universe seems outside yourself and other than yourself.  No sooner one extends consciousness, one acquires a warm, oceanic feeling as though one were dispersed in space, while entertaining a sense of vastness and immensity.  One may find oneself so inextricably enmeshed with the universe that one identifies oneself with it.
We are now applying the principles outlined in Lesson #2, under "Baptism with Earth", to consciousness.
AS you exhale, stretch out your consciousness, or, rather, let it be defocalized, decentered.  Since we are accustomed to looking at things from our own personal center, it seems as though we are now expanding our own consciousness, but if one were to see things from the converse point of view, one would realize that it looks as though the vortex is being resorbed in its ground.
Now, imagine that you ar looking at yourself rom the vantage point of the stars or the galaxies - through the immensity of space-time.  St. Francis pointed out that the universe is looking at us:  "That which is seen is that which sees".  This is best done as you inhale.
A further exercise would consist in envisioning that the universe is looking at itself through your eyes, and may be looking at you through your eyes.
The above exercises will help one to overcome the limiting factor in one's commonplace experience owing to the focalization of consciousness, and supplement one's experience of the universe with vantage points that are complementary to the usual.
Having learned how to expand or, rather, decenter consciousness, the next step consists in freeing oneself from the constraint of one's personal self-image. Imagine your nature to be like a vortex, a whirlpool, without boundary, co-extensive with the many-splendored bounty of the universe.
Exhale. As you expand your sense of identity in infinite regress, you lose that very sense of personal identity and acquire a sense of being impersonal or cosmic. Ponder the words of Rumi: "I am the nameless and the formless and the timeless and the spaceless". Although a vortex does not have a boundary, yet as you zoom back towards the center of your notion of yourself which we now represent as a boundless vortex, as you inhale, you recover your personal image, yet as envisioned in the wider context of its universal ground. At this juncture, you realize that you are actually processing in your personality the infinite wealth of attributes, qualities and potentialities of the entire cosmos in a unique manner. You now realize that you are not just a vortex, but a template, more so a mutating matrix (a template is static - a matrix dynamic), not only self-formative, but impacting the environment with the stamp of your personal signature: your idiosyncrasies, your own special originality.
You are not just the convergence, confluence, conjugation of all those ingredients that have come into the confection of your being (in fact, these are infinite, including ultimately the bounty of the whole universe), but you are the congruence of that whole process. You are the goal that the universe intended to manifest by thus composing itself. You are not just the unpredictable outcome of an inexorable process, but the objective of that process. What is more, you act not only upon the environment, but upon the very formative process that forms you, altering it as it forms you, participating in your own creativity.
How one gets in touch with this formative matrix will be the subject of the next lesson.

Lesson #5:  Shaghal Breathing Practice, Part I


(The best time to do Shaghal is in the morning with 3 breaths in and out through the right nostril.)
Dawn is the time to reach very deep into that space inside of you. At sunrise, there is a lot of ultra-violet light reaching you, not just from the sun, but from the center of the galaxy, so concentrate on violet light as you turn within while doing the Shaghal.
After completing three Shaghal breaths, open your eyes halfway, so a little light trickles through. Concentrate on the stars, although you may no longer be able to see them in the sky. There is also the practice of looking at the stars while they become less and less visible as the dawn comes. If you do this over an extended period, you will be able to see the faint light of the stars even while the sun is in the sky.
Realize that we are floating in a universe of light and not only the stars, but space, is filled with light waves and light rays. Imagine that the earth is a kind of spacecraft and remember that even our bodies are made out of that same light. It is a question of discovering one's light identity.
Repeat the Shaghal practice.
This time, when you partially open your eyes, you cast the light from within toward the outside. You are sending your light out toward the stars, toward the galaxies. The morning is the period most conducive for meditations on illumination. Therefore, imagine a state of illumination where you are absolutely radiant. Having worked with the body in the breathing, we now complement the practice with a corresponding mentality. 
One has to smile to the sun. One has to remove all kinds of displeasure and dissatisfaction. The dawning of the sun upon the earth leads us back to our original state. One returns to a state of innocence combined with the wisdom one has acquired. The great artists have learned how to recover something of the state of the angels. The great beings are conscious of being both an angel and a master. There is no use doing these practices unless one finds joy in oneself'.
Close your eyes and put Your fingers on your eyes and ears as you inhale. Hold your breath. When you exhale, remove your fingers from your eyes and ears.
On the inhalation, be conscious of drawing light from the universe, especially into your heart center. While holding your breath, become aware of your aura and the light surging upward from the depths. While exhaling, send the light of your aura to the sun.
This practice may also be related to healing when the following themes are coordinated with the breath:
Upon inhaling, open not only the pores of the skin, but imagine you open all the cells of your body. As you exhale, discover a healing power and realize your potential for healing people, plants and animals. While exhaling, extend the hands forward. In one palm, receive the light of the sun, and focus upon the healing power in the other palm. This healing concentration can be applied by sending out healing thoughts of those in need while you extend your hands.
There is a great Sufi dervish who represents the fulfillment of discovering our solar inheritance. His name is Shams Tabriz; Shams means the sun. The practice that he did was to let the rays of the sun penetrate into the cells of his body with the power of truth. For him, the soul of the sun entered his psyche and lighted up every little creek in his psyche so that there was no room for any lie.
One can become like an open book when there is no guile in one's heart. The greatest power is the power of truth, for it eliminates any darkness in us. Purified of dark thoughts and shady emotions, one becomes sun-like in one's aura, one's mind, one's psyche and one's soul.
For the Sufis, the sun is called Prince Huraksh - who is the Prince of generosity. He is burning his own substance in order to give light and we, too, are burning our bodies to a certain extent. One can increase that combustion, which is a process called phosphorescence. Psychologically, it is linked to the generosity of the heart. If you give of yourself out of generosity, you radiate a lot of light: just like the sun.
Sometimes one talks to a person all about one's problems and how difficult things are. That is not generosity. The generous one is interested in the person one is talking to ("How are you?", "Can I help you?", "What can I do for you?"). You cannot be illuminated if there is dissatisfaction. One can give to another through the vehicle of conversation. There is no use in working with imagining light unless these very deep psychological attitudes have been dealt with. The key is indifference for oneself and interest in others.
Humor may also be used as a form of meditation which evokes a flash of illumination (laugh therapy). As soon as you laugh, you radiate a lot of light, providing it is not sardonic laughter. Prince Huraksh is always represented as laughing. His laughter comes from the confidence that ultimately,from the divine point of view, everything is for the best, even though from the human point of view, things appear as though the programming has broken down. It is confidence in the divine which enables one to become a solar being. When you experience that confidence, you participate in the soul of Prince Huraksh.
According to the Zoroastrian Magi, our souls are - Fragments of the soul of the archangel of the sun. By smiling at the sun, we express our gratitude for the gift of light and life. We can smile all our resentment away and especially our self-pity. If you cannot smile, it may mean you have self-pity and therefore are unable to give. If you take yourself too seriously, it is an affirmation of the ego.
Check yourself and realize that every time you smile mentally, your aura burns more brightly. Sit straight when you are facing the sun so the spine is erect and your head is not bent over. Hold the shoulders back so your heart may be fully exposed to the sun. There is a confrontation, an encounter, between you and the sun. According to the Sufis, you are sitting at the court of the King, and tradition holds that one only turns one's back to the King when setting off on a mission. Now you can turn your back to the sun and know the King is always behind you, supporting you.
 INDEX FINGER OVER EYE MIDDLE FINGER CLOSES NOSTRIL RING FINGEROVER TOP LIP LITTLE FINGER UNDER BOTTOM LIP
1. Exhale fully.
2. Place corresponding fingers as illustrated.
3. Place thumbs on the flaps of the ears.
4. Be sure not to press too strongly on the eyes with the index fingers.
5. Press lips together with the fingers as illustrated.
6. Close left nostril for inhalation; Close both nostrils while holding breath Open right passage for exhalation.

Lesson #6:	Shagal Breathing Practice, Part II

 NOTE: This lesson begins with the Shaghal breathing practice explained in the previous lesson. You may want to review the essential elements of this practice before beginning the teachings given below which focus upon the Sufi practice of creative imagination.
Put your index fingers on your eyes, your thumbs in your ears, fourth and fifth fingers on your lips and middle fingers on your nostrils and, as you breathe in, think of yourself as a wave in the sea of the universe. Remember, the wave does not have borders, so it is the whole universe that builds itself up in you. Then as you exhale, the wave recedes back into the whole ocean and forms a wave interference pattern with all other waves. It continues to exist but it is intermeshed into all the rest of the ocean.
You inhale only through the right nostril and exhale through the right nostril. Now we think of ourselves as a tapestry that is made up of the strands of the universe that interweave. As you get closer to the center, it is more like the tapestry, and further away, it is the separate strands.
Now as you hold your breath between the inhaling and the exhaling, there is new growth that is taking place in the depths of your being, irrespective of what is converging from the universe.
Now exhale and relax.
Remember how you feel when you are dreaming. You are still conscious of the noise in the street, the furniture in the room, of yourself as the being that you think you are, of your memory, and of people. At the same time, in a sense, you are floating a little bit so it is like a double image. The kind of images thatpass before your mind are like a kaleidoscope. You are just vaguely conscious of the physical environment which has a sense of unreality. If you try to bring forth images, they won't come. One has to be in a rather uncanny contra state, moved by cosmic emotion. very Passive and attuned. in harmonY. That means just letting go.  There might even be an undertone with everything rather silent and - mysterious, uncanny.
Now to start with, I am going to suggest images, but eventually you will just let the images come without my suggesting them.
Imagine a desert landscape at dawn, flat, in the cool of dawn, but still there is something remaining of the heat of the day before. You are there alone. You see the very diaphanous light at the horizon. It seems to be on the increase. The whole sky begins to light up and so does the surface of the sand and everything around you. The surface is absolutely flat so that you can see that the planet is round, a sphere. There is nothing inside except the dawn with the emergence of light, which fascinates you and draws your attention. Now it is getting brighter and brighter and you have an urge to walk towards that dawning light. Now all of a sudden, there is a very small but enormously bright little point of light that emerges over the horizon. Suddenly the whole environment is transformed and the point of light starts getting bigger and bigger and brighter and brighter. Your whole body is illuminated by that light, by the glow of that light. You open up the palms of your hands and the pores of your skin and are walking towards that light. You are fascinated by it, thrilled by it, exulted by it. Eventually you realize that you are a being of light and that the light of the sun has made you aware of your own being of light. Now you are running towards the sun, attracted by it as one would be attracted by a magnet.
You discover an aspect of yourself that is perhaps latent and it manifests as a result of this experience of your solar nature. It is discovered in your encounter with the sun.
Now I am going to choose another scene. Suppose that you are wandering next to a lake which is absolutely still. There is no wind and it is the evening. There are still stars in the sky, a full moon, and it is drizzling. You are endowed with an uncanny clarity of vision and you are zooming on the surface of the water. You can see each drop that impinges upon the surface of the water, which forms an eddy that moves, and becomes larger and larger until it starts encroaching on the eddy next to it. Together they form a wave interference pattern.
If you follow each wave, each eddy, as it starts and then it eventually intermeshes with the other eddies, you can see a kind of pattern being formed which is a moving, shimmering pattern, continually changing, empowered by the drops of water, scintillating in the moonlight.
Somehow your whole being is drawn into this scene. In so doing,you are discovering the water aspect of your being, which is flowing and tends to merge and interfuse, intermesh, interweave with all things. For example, it is like cooperating with people and forming networking and new patterns of society. Patterns within patterns, all beautifully dovetailing and integrated.
I am going to suggest another image. Imagine now a mountain scene. You are climbing beyond the forest and foothills until you come to more and more rock formations with streams of water. There are no paths any more. The rocks are more abrupt and sharp. There is a mist formation underneath you, shrouding the valley below. Only little patches are visible in the depths of the valley, with conglomerations of houses. The sky is an array of the most vivid colors with a bright orange, red, green, sepia, brown, vermillion and a silver grey. It is changing continually with a very strong wind, drawing the clouds into various formations. Behind it all, an effulgence of the sun emerges from time to time, with a golden disc behind all those cloud formations. You just have this precarious foothold on the rocks beneath, but you are so much part of the whole glorious, incandescent scene of light. You keep on climbing and are thrilled by the freedom from the lower regions. The exaltation of communion with the sky!
Now there is a thunderstorm beneath you, lightning and thunder. Where you are, there is a blue sky and it is absolutely serene. In the distance, a rainbow is contrasting with the lightning below. You discover that you are reliving several aspects of your being: the freedom, the ecstasy, the explosion of energy, the glory of the rainbow, being part of the outburst of the forces of nature or being enlightened and liberated.
Now yet another scene. It is back down to us again. The lush vegetation, after the rain, the lovely smell of the earth, a sense of the growth, the profuse giving of the earth of itself: generosity, reliability, bounty. You can relate to this as being the root of your being emerging from the earth bearing fruit and again being recycled. The earth, absorbing pollution, transforming, reprocessing, recycling all waste and making something beautiful out of it - the gift of life! Even going in and plowing that earth and experiencing the magnetism of the earth as one plows it. Then the joy of sowing the seed that carries the hope of new birth, trusting the seed to the earth that may be covered by the snow in the winter, and knowing that it will germinate and burgeon and flourish as the snow is thawed. The light of the sunshine of spring will invite the seed back to
This could be followed up with the bears, tortoises, insects, hedgehogs: all are hibernating and abandoning their activity in search of food and doing precisely what happens to the grain buried under the earth. The life in the earth is silenced by the snow and the winter is set in.
You discover an aspect of yourself that needs to lie low, recover, feel and blend itself to the region and the forces of nature, in the stillness, protected from all activity of the surface, a need for peace.

Lesson #7:  	Lanscapes of the Soul

A perspective rather familiar is a flock of geese migrating, thousands of them flying in formation.  Now we see them from the earth, but imagine what it would be like to be one of those geese carried in that impulse that moves them to seek for a tropical climate and escape the cold winter. It is the perspective of the earth as seen from above, and instead of it being the engine of a plane that carries you, it is your own ability to fly. The perspective of a bird instead of the perspective of the human walking on the planet on the surface. The freedom, the buoyancy, the ecstasy of being part of this whole thrust of nostalgia for other horizons. Breaking into new horizons, flying above the clouds at dawn or at sunset. Not the dawn that we know, where the sun rises above the horizon of the earth or sets underneath the horizon of the earth, but the dawning of the sun above the cloud formations when the surface of the clouds is lit up by the sun. Instead of being a landscape, it is a skyscape. You are scudding this luminous skyscape which is not solid, of course, and is very volatile. Blown by the wind in tufts of cotton-like mist formations, you feel part of the sky and of the light, discovering an aspect of your being which is unearthly, buoyant, free, ecstatic, evanescent, elusive.
And now, for another scene that is unrelated to any familiar landscape, one composed of different patterns of light. There could be spirals of light, beams of light, flashes of light, kaleidoscopic formations, geometric formations that are continually changing. Now it is a total departure from the familiar scenes in the world such as we know it. The colors of the spectrum are coming through, assuming all kinds of patterns, a mixture of form and light and color. Instead of sitting back and watching it, you take the plunge and enter into the scene. You might even let some of those colors come off on you so that you can feel the blueness or the redness or the yellowness on your clothes. Your whole being is lit up by all these different flashes of light. It could even be fireworks. If you go into the scene, give yourself up entirely without holding back. You can imagine that you are a firecracker that is exploding into millions of sparks and colors, shapes and patterns, and then defracting, creating a kaleidoscopic scene.
You can move into this world of light and discover the horizon of light - brighter and more magnificent than those that you have encountered so far. It is just a matter of letting yourself go into it and abandoning your identity, or previous identity. Thebreakthrough comes when suddenly you can grasp that you are a being of light and these are familiar spheres that you have forgotten. If you have the courage to advance further and leave the familiar world behind, then you will discover landscapes of light of overwhelming splendor, a different kind of light than the light with which we are familiar. There is no way of describing it adequately. This time, instead of the rather random light formations that we came across - kaleidoscopic - it seems like the patterns of light represent the blueprints of the physical world. They are meaningful, beautiful, with a harmony about them. They look like temples of light with beautiful symmetrical and harmonious patterns that are not stationary; they are moving. You feel the temples are inhabited with beings of light. You can only do that if you identify yourself totally as a being of light. Consider that your physical condition is just borrowed and transient, even, to a certain extent, illusory.
You have left your body behind and you do not know where it is and it does not matter. One has to be intoxicated with light, thrilled, exulted by light, radiant, burning with light, incandescent. The beings of light begin to come into focus, angelic beings with very pure faces. Not the kind of romantic faces that are described by some artists but more like the icons of the ancients. Not like those dull and rather disagreeable faces but very pure, very immaculate. A countenance that is an impression which we perhaps translate in terms of familiar faces. It is more like a state of consciousness that you grasp rather than a structure or outline. Your face lights up in a moment of joy, a moment of exultation, an outburst of splendor transfiguring matter.
Now this is self-discovery. Aspects or one's being that one had never dreamt of, beyond one's wildest imagination. One recognizes the self that one had forgotten. And there is even more beyond that, but it takes us so far away from the life with which we are familiar. There is no way of saying it. It is beyond existence.
There seems to be an infinity of spheres, not seven or nine, but endless spheres. One can experience a state where there is, first of all, just spirit, and then intelligence. One can see that there is a core of your being that is immaculate, unchanging and untarnishable, like a mirror that can be exposed to all kinds of reflections but when you turn the mirror, the reflections have gone. So experience that aspect of your being that is like the mirror. It cannot be tarnished, it cannot be sullied, it cannot be marked, imprinted. As one lifts oneself into higher planes, beings are more and more like mirrors: neutral, immaculate, impersonal.
We have been reviewing a few of the components which form the tapestry of our being and we have been able to identify them by conjuring the scenes corresponding to their attunement. Let us say they are the different attunements that form the symphony of our being. We were discovering by experiencing self-discovery. Inso doing, we were manifesting and activating the latencies in our being by the power of creative imagination.
Now I would like to suggest that you make up your own scenes. Do not forget that you are present in this image and that you are the nature of the landscape. You are not just the observer but you are moving in it and eventually merging into it.
The thing that you can do as you descend back into your personal consciousness is to think of what you have been experiencing as a reminder of what you have always been. I want to establish your connection with the earth again without forgetting what you really are.
All right, now breathe heavily, extend your breath.
God bless you.
The following phrases, from Nature Meditations by Hazrat Inayat Khan, are offered as a means to carry the atmosphere of the creative imagination meditations presented by Pir Vilayat into our daily lives. They may be contemplated as seed thoughts throughout the day and can bring forth the remembrance of one of the landscapes created by Pir Vilayat in Lessons 6 and 7. One may also coordinate the different parts or a phrase with the inhalation and exhalation of the breath.
I feel Thy presence in this landscape which draws my heart so close to Thee.
This landscape in my heart is a reflection of Thy beauty.
Fill my heart with Thy beauty as Thou fillest with Thy creation empty space.
Envelop me as in the light of Thy divine spirit, Raise me from the denseness of the earth.
Let the sun of Thy glory shine in my heart.
Let me reflect Thy light through my thoughts as the clouds reflect in color the light of the sun.
Let Thy beauty shine through my heart as though the clouds come and spread out the rays of the sun.
 

PVK COURSE ON MEDITATION, 1998, CONTINUES WITH LESSON 8, on =pvcm0817.txt
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