PVK, COURSE ON MEDITATION, 1998 - CONTINUED FROM =pvcm2531.txt
LESSONS 32-46 INCLUSIVE
As far as I can tell, this doc includes the full text of Lesson 46, and as far as I can tell Lesson 46 was the last lesson in this Course.
But there is no signoff, so I'm not sure.




Lesson #32: Signposts Toward Awakening

The clue that we shall be pursuing here is embodied in a
principle culled from Tibetan and Sufi methods of meditation. The
Tibetans word it thus:
"There is a gross mind and a subtle mind, and an even more
subtle mind. The mind rides the wind, hence for each mind there
is a corresponding wind."
The Sufi Niffari also distinguishes between three types of
cognizance:
1. "ilm" - conceptual thinking - the mind is limited by
language;
2. "ma' arifa" - an inspirational knowledge, not derived
from experience, generally projected in the form of creative
imagination;
3. the wind as the energy of the cosmos, the energy that
moves the stars and the atoms or manifests as the magnetic field
which builds up as we inhale, and scatters, diffuses, radiates as
we exhale. We need to distinguish between the different levels or
frequencies of this energy: gross, subtle, or more subtle. Each
of these corresponds to a level of our being, for example, the
subtle body instead of the gross physical body, or the very
subtle body. For each body, (gross, subtle, very subtle) there
is a corresponding mode of thinking, namely, the gross, subtle,
and very subtle mind.
1. At the basic level (gross), we attribute reality to what
consists in physical phenomena.
2. At the level of psyche, we interpret phenomena and
situations according to our assessment which is conditioned and
is caligwated by our personal consciousness. Since consciousness
in sentient beings is focalized into a center by our physical
perceptions, it represents only one out of an infinite number of
vantage points.
3. At the level of the world of metaphor, we project images on
the screen of the mind that reveal the moods of our soul.
4. When we identify ourselves with the very subtle wind (which is
pure spirit), we grasp meaningfulness, not interpretive of
perceptions or mentation, but spontaneously (ex nihilo) out of
pure intelligence which is the ground of our being. At this
level, we understand voidness (Sunyata) as the latency which
manifests as both matter and mind. We find back here the
Christian idea of ex nihilo, out of nothing. Actually, one may
look upon it as the potentiality of a fullness structuring itself
as it manifests.
Exercises
1. Check: if you identify with your body, the existential world
will appear to you as made of objects outside and other than your
body. The same will apply to your assessment of your problems.
You will consider yourself as the victim of your problems and
fail to see the connection between the problems and the
unfoldment of your potentialities.
2. To proceed: can you feel your magnetic field expanding and
contracting as you exhale and inhale? Identify with it; consider
your body as just a formation within this field, rather like the
froth at the top of the waves of the sea. Now, at the
exhalation, let your force-field, which now you take to be
yourself, dissolve in the humongous energy of the immensity of
space. As you inhale, you (inasmuch as you are a force field or
magnetic field) are reformed like a wave in the sea.
Your mind is now interpreting your perception of the stars
in a new way. In your present acquired perspective, you envision
them as emerging from an immense interplay of force-fields rather
than as just the physical objects which you are perceiving. 
Clearly in this case, if indeed for each type of energy
corresponds a type of mind. Since you now identify with your
energy field instead of the matter of your body, the subtle mind
comes into action by the activity whereby the mind projects
images in order to concretize what it is sensing intuitively. For
the Sufis, the forms of the universe are expressions of the
divine thinking.
To reinforce this subtler mode of thinking, let us now
practice with visualizations. Turn within. Imagine that you are
sitting in a large crystal tetrahedra. You could either
visualize whether you are sitting with your back to one of the
angles, with two faces in front of you, or if you are sitting
with your back to one of the faces in which you have the angle in
front of you. Now imagine that this tetrahedra was originally a
globe but four force-vectors arose within it, pushing the points
out in four directions. This was a geometrical formative process
expressing a four directional symmetry, manifesting in a form.
You could imagine a different geometrical symmetry forming itself
into a cube.
If you wish to strengthen your powers of visualization,
imagine an extension of the tetrahedra such that each face is
adjacent with the face of another tetrahedra. The symmetry
manifesting in the elaborate form thus obtained would be a more
complex one than previously considered, and therefore, the
formative forces would be like a variation of the simpler one.
Now consider a flower as the expression of a still more
complex interplay of formative forces. Or consider a more
asymmetrical balance of forces manifesting as a church spire with
say, six or eight faces. Now envision our planetary system as the
crystallization of a still more complex interplay of symmetrical
and asymmetrical formative forces, now the galaxy, eventually,
the whole universe.
Let us now apply this way of thinking to considering our
problems.  Envision situations in your life as formative
processes that have become sclerosed, just like the crystals.  In
similar manner, one's assessment of the problem is a formative
process of thought forms that have indeed become sclerosed,
consequently, one finds oneself in a bind.  The bind is in the
mind.  The problem now appears to be in one's assessment of it. 
Should one apply the normal course of thinking (gross mind
thinking), one is now going to interpret the problem first in
terms of cause, secondly in terms of purpose, e.g., how one's way
of thinking played a part in bringing it about, perhaps by
determining how one handled a previous situation. Second, what
was one's objective that eventually catalyzed the situation?
3.  Now we shall identify with a finer form of energy than the
force fields.  First of all, we have to grasp that there are
different frequencies of energy, for example, high voltage
electricity as compared with low voltage or high frequency
vibrations or sound-waves like ultra violet light as compared
with infra red, or x-rays as compared with radio waves.  So now
identify with those frequencies within your force-field that are
very high-key. The experience seems like a subtler field within a
grosser field (sometimes misleadingly called subtle body). You
will begin to think differently. As you inhale, visualize that,
in as much as you are a force-field in the semblance of a vortex,
(that is, without boundary), the density of this field graduates
more finely the closer on gets to the hub until it reaches a
threshold (a singularity) where it reverses.  Not only is space
reversed, at least our notion of space, but also energy (-E), a
challenging paradigm in physics.  Now see if you can earmark a
subtle form of energy, and extricate this subtler field from the
grosser ones.  Identify with this subtle component of your force-
force-field within the grosser magnetic field. Can you see that it
is the universe's thinking that thinks as your thoughts, though
limited by the focalization of your consciousness, so that it is
less effective, albeit of the same nature?  Let the universe
think as your though.
At this level of thinking, you will grasp an aspect of your being
that seems more real now than your commonplace personality.  The
Sufis call it your real being and Hazrat Inayat Khan, your
divine inheritance.  Project it in either a concrete image of your
body transfigured or in the form of the way you would like your
personality to be as you could be if you would be what you might
be, irrespective of your concern about adapting to the situation. 
That is, imagine yourself to be sovereign, or dancing with joy,
luminous, loving, or peaceful.
 
Lesson #33: Wazifas: Reaching Out and Turning Within

Now, I want you to experience very clearly the contrast
between the joy of reaching out and the peace of turning within.
And then, a peace beyond understanding, a freedom that one
when one turns within. And we need both. But if we
want to find our divine inheritance, then it is helpful to turn
within. If we want to express it; we turn outward. So we have a
contrast here between Ya Hayy (high-ee), which expresses a lot
of life, expenditure and then Ya Salim (saleem which is being
very peaceful.
You mustn't think of them as two separate things. The joy
arises out of peace, a peace that's very powerful. It's
potential joy. Don't think of it as withdrawing but as getting
in touch with a power station. So think of Hayy as you exhale,
and Salim as you inhale. When you think of the word Salim, think
of a hermit who is sitting very peacefully in his or her cave.
One has to be very, very peaceful.  But it's also a need to be
free, not just a need to be peaceful. It's a need to be free from
conditioning. So we just whisper, Hayy/Salim, not too loud. All
right, do it without saying the words, just think the words
as you exhale and then as you inhale.  Now think of yourself as a
pendulum and one end is moving in time/space and the other is
immobile. So Hayy is the point that keeps moving and Salim is the
point which remains still.
Now, as you breathe, you hold your breath between the
inhaling and the exhaling. You must breathe out fully when you
exhale. Then you can hold your breath longer after inhaling. Just
during the time when you are holding the breath, roll your
eyeballs upwards and curl your tongue, press the bottom of the
tongue against your palate, only during the period of breath
retention. When you exhale, bring your eyeballs and tongue in
their ordinary position. You must hold your breath as long as you
possibly can and that depends upon the length of your exhalation.
While you inhale you're aware of the motion of the pendulum; when
you hold your breath, you transfer your attention to the point of
application of the pendulum where it is not moving. Then when
you're exhaling, you are again conscious of the motion of the
pendulum. That is, you don't just imagine the pendulum, you
become aware of the notion of your blood flowing in your veins,
everything. There are a lot of processes moving in your body.
When you hold your breath, you think of the continuity
behind the change. That means, like the continuity of the river,
even though it's not the same water. So if you were
concentrating on one of the atoms or molecules of water, you
would be conscious of it moving but if you concentrated on the
whole river, you would be aware of it's continuity.
It's just as though one feels the gravity pull of the
existential condition and the buoyancy of one's higher being.
There's a kind of tug between the two. Somehow, if we give
expression to that nostalgia, we have a feeling of being
emancipated from that stress, what I call gravity pull. We often
give satisfaction to our bodies and our minds; let us also be
kind to our soul. So the word is Ya Ali (al-ee), the most high.
Of course it expresses an emotion of very high glorification. And
this contrasts with the glorification of the way that that very
high condition tries to break through in the existential state.
That word is Ya Azim (az-eem).
So we have Ya Ali/Ya Azim. The word, wazifa, acts as a kind of
signal which sets the pace of your attunement. You notice that
it's all emotion. The emotion of Azim is outgoing and Ali is
uplifting. So now, as you exhale Azim and inhale Ali, say them
softly and breathe very, very slowly. Remember once more that you
are getting into the consciousness of a contemplative.
Our attunement during this practice is on Christ. First of
all think of the words in the Bible, "Everything is full of His
glory." That's Ya Azim. And then think of the words, "God
glorified me in the beginning of time." That's the Gospel of
John. God glorifying a glorious being, manifested in creation. We
have a kind of intuition of that high state of glorification
because we participate in the divine consciousness.
Now, when you look at your personality as from a bird's eye view,
quite objectively, then it must be clear that much of it has been
inherited from your ancestors. Think of the personality as
something that has accrued to you, just like your body. At the
same time, it is somehow being infused with your eternal being
which carries the Divine Inheritance. The important thing is that
you identify with your eternal being and for that you have to get
into that state which is the point of application of the
pendulum. And you consider your personality as something that has
accrued to you and yet it does carry a kind of
protection of one's eternal being to it. It's trying to come
through. So the word for this is Ya Qaher (kah-hair). And in the
end, as you evolve, it prevails upon the inheritance from the
ancestors. This is your true being. And the word we use is
prescalence; it prevails. All you have to do is to keep on
concentrating on always having existed. Avoid slipping into your
personality identity. Think the word Qaher.
This is where you have to have a lot of insistence, just
like Buddha sitting under the tree. Just keep your
concentration. If it's helpful, think that you're now becoming
aware of a very high level of your being because you exist on
several different levels. You don't lose contact with your
personality but it seems like a projection of your being. So you
can observe your personality objectively only if you don't
identify with it. Now one thing becomes very obvious to you, that
is, that your eternal being is of the nature of splendor and
therefore, belongs to a level of reality that is pure
splendor out of which the whole existence seems to have sprung.
So that word is Ya Majid. The accent is on the a: Ma-jid. If you
like to think of the word majesty, that's helpful. It's good to
associate these two words: Ya Qaher/Ya Majid. (practice)
Again, one gets very easily into words unless you think of
it as you inhale Qaher, and as you exhale, Majid. It might be
easier to concentrate on the meaning if we do it out loud. Also,
remember the attunement.
Now we have the problem of reconciling the pride of our eternal
being with the humility of our personal idiosyncracies. On the
one hand, how great is the glory that I'm invested with and the
other is, how inadequately do I manifest it because I've gotten
into habits through conditioning and yet, the personality is able
to allow that splendor to come through. But it's a question of
being aware of how it's coming through.  So that word is Ya
Mawjud (mau-jude), accent is on jude.  Ya Ma-jid; Ya Maw-jud.
(practice)
Now it must be obvious to us that the whole purpose of our
existence is to manifest and to actuate the splendor of our
divine inheritance. That's Mawjud. God becomes in us a reality.
So we should do it on the breath thinking; you can be more aware
of the meaning. We bring it through as mastery.  May control be
in charge of situations. The clarity of our eternal intelligence
becomes insight applied. In our personality, we are always
capturing that which is enacted behind the appearance of
situations.

Lesson #34:  Moving Toward Divine Purpose

Think of Yourself as One of the Stages Moving Toward
the Fulfillment of the Divine Purpose
I started as a mineral, then I became a vegetable, than I became
an animal, then I became a human.  I will continue in the
heavenly spheres.  Perhaps one should do the reverse:  I was a
pure vibration and manifested as a mineral, as a crystal and then
the molecules in my being began to seek for new modes of life. 
There was all that energy that proliferated into my plant state. 
I am the bounty of my heavenly condition and began to manifest
into forms, how great, and colors of great variety.  Then I
evolved into and was suffering from being tethered by roots and
I sought to be able to move about in freedom and my heavenly
counterpart was beginning to feel the need to involve myself
deeper into matter, with more freedom.  Then I became human and as
I became human, the whole universe of the heavens met the universe
of the earth and I was born out of the encounter between heaven
and earth.
When my consciousness was vibrating like an Eolian harp, the
molecules of my body as a crystal could not grasp the meaning of
my existence.  When all that restless energy began to seek more
expression in the condition of the plant, I remember as a flower,
picking up the flashing of a star and longing to understand what
a star is.  As I evolved into a plant, and into an animal, I
danced to the full moon, and I marvelled at dawn and I
contemplated the stars.  Somehow they had become more real to me
than when I was crystal and when I was a plant.  But as I became
human, I realized that I was the stars, that I had become them
and that my thoughts are the thoughts of the universe.  And I
sought to awaken beyond my human condition.  As I awoke, I
discovered a universe in me.  I was free from myself.  And now,
being free, I'm able to look right into the molecules of a
crystal.  
Now this is what we can do, experience again what it was like to
be a crystal.  Visualize the tremendous effervescence in the life
of a crystal:  the molecules vibrating, the atoms juggling, the
electrons whirling, sparkling, the orderliness and the sense of
being the expression of an almost purely mathematically perfect
being, somehow manifesting the vibrations that constitute the
language of the universe, frozen into crystals, the vibrations
frozen into the likeness of crystals and yet still throbbing at
the sub-atomic level.  We can do that; we can penetrate right
into matter and experience the life in it because we were that
before; we were crystals before.  Can you experience the rigor of
the irrevocable laws of the universe in giving the crystal its
very fundamental quality?  Some electrons manage to escape the
limitations imposed by that rigor by absorbing light.  They feed
themselves with the energy of light and it gives them the poser
to free themselves from the original orbital and they begin to
reach outward, away from the pull of the proton.  When they use
all the energy, they fall back to where they were and radiate
light.  You see how the electrons are excited by being enriched
with light, the energy of light.  The crystal is in its excited
state, sparkling, dancing, even if, like Cinderella, for a short
while.  The electrons have their moment of glory.  It is the
intelligence of the universe coming through very rigid
constrained frameworks and seeking freedom, yet very restricted
in the measure of freedom.
And now, can you get into the consciousness of a flower,
particularly, a beautiful flower like some of the succulents in
the desert of Arizona that might take twenty years to build up
enough sugar to produce a flower.  It starts as a bud and you
can almost see it opening up.  Within a few hours, it has become
a fully fledged flower and one hour after that, the petals fall
apart and the plant has died.  A moment of glory and all of those
colors are coming through; an elaborate building up of amino
acids and proteins ha expressed itself in that extravagant array
of colors.  Then the seed remains and the perfume is diffused in
the atmosphere.  Can you imagine the nostalgia of that plant, to
express the splendor that was invested in it and the limitations
with which it can express that splendor?  It can't move very much, is bound by its roots and the only way it can
express that splendor is by colors and by shapes.  Within its own
species, that form has been elaborated over aeons of time.  You
feel that nostalgia towards manifestation to overcome all the
constraints and obstacles in order to break through in a moment
of glory.
Now see how consciousness has made a tremendous leap forward in
the animal.  Think of the very elaborate support system of the
digestive system, and the nervous system and the respiratory
system, the circulation of the blood and brain, the tremendous
intelligence of nature to have made it possible for intelligence
to rise to the state of the animal, the state of the elephant or
the falcon or the horse or the deer or the lion or the dolphin. 
It has taken aeons of time for that crystal to have become a
plant, and for the plant to have become an animal. 
Now there's the need to manifest the splendor, but not just in
form, in the skills, in the ability to survive, the ability to
transform the plants into flesh.  The support system has become a
very elaborate consciousness that has been able to leap forward. 
Dolphins and otters will play little pranks of humor, the
elephants will express something of the power that moves the
universe and the falcon rides through the air, flies through the
air, manifesting peace and freedom.  So now, the divine qualities
are beginning to come through.  Now think, that out of all that
tremendous evolutionary advance, you have emerged as a human
being.  And now, not only can you - are you aware of the
twinkling of the stars, but you can actually visualize them as
luminaries, radiant and life giving, supporting civilizations
that might be even more advanced than ours, millions of light
years away.  Somehow, our minds, the mind of the animal, of the
crystal and the plant, has now reached a point of extending beyond
its limits, surpassing itself, a reaching into the thinking of the
universe, not just receiving the light of the stars but having
access into the thinking, the programming of the cells of our
bodies, the programming of our brains. The brain discovers its
own functioning and now we begin to awaken and this is what we
are doing in meditation.  We are awakening to all levels of the
universe, not just the physical and we are discovering the
qualities that are coming through, like power and compassion.  It
wasn't to be found in the mineral, nor much of it in the plant
but than, one begins to feel it in the animal, a little
compassion sometimes, not much, sometimes.  And you'll find humor
in the animals, compassion and love, magnanimity, and more
qualities.
As one evolves, more and more of the universe begins to come
through.  One becomes more and more cosmic.  One attains a
monumental stature in one's realization.  One can see one's past;
one can anticipate the future and one can prepare for the future. 
One is deciphering the code of the universe because one is that
code oneself.  What is more, we are able to feel emotions that
became the universe, that manifested as a flower or crystal or
falcon or deer.  It's an emotion manifested as a being.  And now,
can you feel the emotion that has become your being?  The divine
emotion is a cosmic emotion.  If only you could grasp the
countenance of your being, which is a form, I mean a form without
a frontier or a boundary, but it is an effort to express splendor
without being sclerosed by a boundary or a profile, like a face.
Now can you hoist yourself into the levels of your being?
You can explore the world of metaphor. You'll find that new
thoughts emerge spontaneously, prompted by emotion that you could
project into a form, into a landscape. The landscape is just a
sclerosis of these thoughts. It's not the same thing as random
thoughts; it's thoughts that are provoked by the discovery of
cosmic emotion, like a composition. A theme comes out of the
intensity of emotion. Can you do that? We feel the emotion of the
body and the emotion of the heart; be kind to your soul. The
emotion of the soul is ecstasy and it is prompted by an intuition
that behind all this, there is great splendor and that you're
born out of that divine nostalgia to manifest that splendor in as
many ways as possible and you are one of the ways. You accept the
divinity of your being and accept the beauty of your being. Do
not become mired in that very misleading sense of false humility
that is self denigrating and self defeating. You have already
human and to be evolving as a human being towards the next world,
into awakening. So it is awakening to the divinity of one's
being, as Pir-O-Murshid says. That's the awakening to what I call
that investiture in which the flower was held but the flower was
so limited in its means of manifesting this investiture, this
legacy. But we have incomparably larger means, almost unending
means of giving vent to that splendor invested in our being by
our high attunement, by our ability of our intelligence to beat
its records. By being aware of the divine nostalgia that spurs us
into becoming the fulfillment of the divine purpose.
So instead of thinking of yourself as a person, think of
yourself as the fulfillment of the divine purpose. Or let's say
you are one of the stages moving towards that fulfillment, just
like Leonardo DaVinci would make different sketches before making
the final picture. So think of yourself in your present
condition, as one of the sketches leading up to the perfect
picture whereby one finds fulfillment of his/her being.
You can only get into the crystal by imagining what it
would be like to be the crystal, or the flower by imagining what
it would be like to be a flower, or an animal. You can only get
into the feeling of the universe by experiencing what it's like
to be the universe, that is, by discovering yourself in the
universe, as the universe. That was the great moment when Abu
Yazid Bastani, the great Sufi dervish, said, "How great is my
glory!" Because the word me does not mean the individual any
more, and therefore, one can say that. It doesn't mean the
personal self anymore. One becomes cosmic.

Lesson #35: Harmonic Convergence

Harmonic convergence is one moment among different
conjunctions, points of resonance in the history of the planet.
The Mayan Calendar ends in the year, 2012, which is twenty-five
years from now. At this moment, there is what they call a break
in the beam. That it means is that the predictable in the minds
of the Mayans will be ending at that time and after that, there
will be difficulty in forecasting because there will be much more
free will than ever before, consequently, it makes predictability
much more difficult, in fact, eventually impossible.
In the Pythagorean mathematics an example of harmonic
convergence would be the resonance of the chord of a violin or a
harp. There are certain mathematical points or proportions of
that chord, nodes in which when the chord resonates, it
fluctuates from its middle point, but at the point of those
nodes, it remains stationary. That one could say, if you think of
Prigogyne's theory, is that all creativity is a fluctuation from
a position of rest; it is like a return to headquarters. If you
are improvising and you make variations and you are a little too
far from the theme, then perhaps the person who is leading you
will say, "back to headquarters again." Refer back to your
center; get centered again.
In the music of Bach, for example, at moments when the two
themes are very free, like two eagles flying in the sky,
listening to each other hut still, it's not always evident, that
they're not conforming to each other, "Back again." That's a
moment of convergence. It's a moment when we gave to be
together; we have to be conscious of our togetherness. Our
freedom has to be constrained in the interest of the commonality.
It is a moment when we feel our common legacy as denizens of
planet earth, a moment when we see the absolute incongruity of
war. We underplay our differences and acknowledge our commonality
of belonging to one family. In this case, the harmonic
convergence has implications for planet earth and it has
implications beyond it. For the planet, it marks the time when
the consciousness of humanity begins to become aware of the
oneness behind all the different religions; that is convergence.
That's the teaching of the message of Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat
Inayat Khan. We are able even to see how, as Murshid says, "Unity
is not uniformity." There's a tremendous difference between them
and yet, somehow one can see the unity within that diversity. Of
course, it applies at all levels: industry, art, in every way, we
feel that the planetary reality is something that is emerging out
of the different nations and civilizations.
We can read in it the same meaning as the word used by Dr. David
Bohm, enfolding. For example, if you drop gravel on the surface
of a lake, each little bit of gravel is going to cause an eddy
but those eddies form together what one calls a wave
interference pattern. So one reality is created out of those many
different sub-realities. That's convergence. And each one of us
as a human being is, in a sense, a convergence of the universe at
all levels: the physical reality of the universe, the psychic
level, at every level of our being, we are like the wave that
represent the convergence of the whole sea because it's the whole
sea that emerges as each wave. That's when we become aware of the
bounty that construes together in our being.
First of all, there's the word convergence. Rays of light
converge through a lens. There's the word confluence, rivers
start coming together as in Alahabad in India, to form one
river, a confluence, perhaps a more intimate intermeshing. Then
there's the word congruence, which means that a new
meaningfulness arises out of the interfacing, interaction and
inter-meshing of different ideas. Sometimes creativity is just
that: the way that one is able to process a lot of thoughts but
in a way that has never been thought of before. In innovative
thought, there is hope for the future. The thinking of the
universe goes through a breakthrough into new horizons.
In its supra terrestrial dimension, the meaning of
convergence lies in the evolutionary process. Let's just think
about the lovely reference in a poem: the fluttering of a flower
in resonance with the trembling of a star. That's a beautiful
thought. What does a flower know of the stars? Then, as
evolution advances, we human beings are able now even to start
exploring the stars, not only at the physical level but by
doing exactly what Shahabuddin Suhrawardi was teaching, by
getting ourselves into the consciousness of the stars. This
practice develops a whole new dimension in our evolutionary
process. That the eye of the human being should be able to grasp
a light that has been cast forth from star that has disappeared
many hundred thousand light years ago is one of the most amazing
things. That we should be able to supercharge our consciousness
to such an extent that it is able to enter into the consciousness
of beings like Buddha or Christ, and in addition to that, that we
should be able to enter the consciousness of Prince Huraksh who
is the Archangel of the sun, and eventually into the
consciousness of the galaxy and then the universe, that is the
greatest feat. It represents the evolutionary process of the
human beyond the personal vantage point of the individual into
what is called "the Divine Consciousness" because that is exactly
what is meant by Divine Consciousness.
In meditation we learn to get literally into the
consciousness of the universe as a being, instead of interposing
a concept of God between ourselves and that consciousness, It
starts by realizing that the plants are beings and the minerals
and atoms are beings. There is nothing in the universe that is
not beings and therefore, there is a conscious counterpart of the
somatic aspect of matter which has been ignored during the last
century and we are just beginning to realize that today under
what is called ecology. This represents progress in our
conscience, in our acceptance of our co-responsibility for what
is happening in our universe.
So, I would like you to consider as the target of your
meditations, to be able to see yourself in the universe, have the
significance of your being in the universe, whatever that means,
instead of thinking Or yourself in your personal vantage point.
At this point, something happens that destroys our mental
constructs because we realize that if we are able to have the
slightest understanding about the motion of the stars or the
interplay of the atoms and electrons, it is because our mind
thinks the way the mind of the universe thinks. Our mind is not
reading the mind of the universe; our mind is, as Pir-O-Murshid
says, is the mind of the universe.  It is the convergence of the
incredible intelligence of the whole universe in all its
richness. It converges in each one of us. One uses the word
focalized; it gets focalized just like the convergence of beams
in a lens.
It is this awareness that is at the basis of your
meditation. Instead of isolating yourselves and encapsulating
yourselves in your psyche, you want to enhance your
consciousness beyond the personal vantage point to such an extent
that as you see yourself in the universe, you discover, at least
in the cosmic dimension of your being, that one is the universe.
The universe cannot be the object of one's knowledge because one
is the convergence of the universe oneself. The Sufis speak about
the light that sees instead of the light that is seen. That is
the ultimate knowledge - of the light that sees.
Indubitably, we shall be making the next step in the evolutionary
process, that of reaching into the convergence of the thinking of
the universe and the emotion, the consciousness, and the
intelligence of the universe.
We know that the sun has an impact on our weather, but
that is the physical sun. The Archangel of the Sun has a
significance for us in our ways of thinking; that is something
that we need to discover. In the teachings of Shahabuddin
Suhrawardi, there is what is called the solar initiation.
(Refer to Lesson #5 for breathing technique and looking at the
sun.) Next, learn how to expose the different chakras to the sun
by imagining that the point in your chest where your heart center
is converges in a flat surface like a sheet of paper. There is
just one position, a point on a sheet of paper which would
be exposed to a central beam of the sun hitting that paper at
absolutely right angles to the central beam issued from the sun.
When you do that, you will experience the way that your heart
chakra opens up under the effect of the light of photons that are
being sent by the sun. You can do the same thing with your third
eye and with your crown center and solar plexus.
You can turn your back to the sun and do the same thing with each
of the chakras if you know how to position your body exactly in
such a way that the particular chakra that you are
concentrating on is in exactly the position to accommodate the
sun's ray at a right angle to the main beam. You will feel your
chakras opening up. This is a very basic practice.
The clue to the more advanced practices of looking into the sun
consist in realizing the meaning of the words of Plotinus, the
Greek philosopher in the third century, "To look into the sun,
one has to have eyes like the sun." That is, the photons that are
issued from your eyes are strong enough to protect you from being
burnt by the photons of the sun, provided you very consciously
send out very intense beams of light from your eyes. This is
linked with becoming aware of one's aura, identifying with one's
aura, considering the body as a hard core within the aura, like a
crystallization of the aura and knowing how to concentrate on two
centers: the heart center and the crown center. Think of the
third eye as the crown center, which sends out high frequency
rates of light like ultra violet, which again, protects the eyes
from the input of the infra red rays of the sun because they will
burn your eyes.

Lesson #36: Plotting Our Lives for Direction

Perhaps one of the most crucial meditation techniques I have been
teaching has been recalling events in our lives while
recapturing the kind of personality we exhibited at the time of
each occurrence. Then we can see the impact of our personalities
upon an event. The conclusions we arrive at help us to
realize the extent to which our qualities, foibles, fictions and
fears, beliefs and motivations contribute to the structuring of
the event. This is important to preclude the tendency one easily
slips into of considering oneself to he the victim of the
occurrences wreaked upon one by circumstances outside one's
control. But more importantly, the insight we gain by plotting
our life's curve will act as a step forward, structuring our
future more congruently and creatively.
By plotting our life's curve, we can scan the framework.
This gives us an understanding of the issues in our lives and
their implications in respect to our motivations and
expectations, and a handle in our free will to shift the
structuring process the way we wish and restructure our life's
pattern accordingly.
The framework which we plot our lives will be divided into two
sections
A: the events and our psyche's processing of them, that is, our
perception of the events, and the changes in our personality
registering the impact of the event, interpreting it, assessing
the situation, and adapting and adjusting to the resultant
acquired information and learning skills.
To each of these modes there will be factors in which
correspondences may be discovered. So for each occurrence in our
earlier life, we will need to observe the effect of both modes.
Following are the factors and corresponding meditation
lA: Recall the event as objectively as possible.
lB: Recall the personality traits you remember having at the
time.
2A: Relive the impression you retain thereof; for example, if it
was a dramatic event, write down the event diary-fashion, as an
autobiography. By recounting it, the wording of the
narrative will often give a clue to the impression (which is
crucial in the value of a novel, play or work of art).
This evidences the subjective ingredient that we projected
and still project upon the event.
2B: This might be difficult to determine since the event is so
subjective: Check whether that early impression has
continued to live in you, even while the memory of the event lies
dormant, and see how it has tainted your personality,
determined the direction of your life's thrust, and shaped
its course throughout the years. Check how the impression
of a personality has influenced your whole
3A: What we saw in the occurrence was a measure of the picture of
the world (imago mundi or Weltanschauung) we had
constructed so far in the developmental stage we had reached at
that time (the enzymes we meted out to process the
ingesting of psychic food).
3B: If we wish to arrive at clarity, we will
between our thinking at the time when the event occurred
that distorted our impression of it, and the unbroken chain of
interpretations recurrently reviewed up to the present
(and presaging much more) that were triggered off by the
event. In philosophy, it is the difference between proto-
critic knowledge and cognitive input-processing.
Check to ascertain how these pigeonholes in which we
accommodated impressions have been updated in the course of the
years, so that it is clear that our current recollection of the
past is tainted by our present view of the world.
Consciously and intentionally reinforce this updating of
your "Weltanschauung" (picture or representation of the
world) to match it with the new vistas arrived at in your
input processing so as to leave no discrepancy undealt with.
4A: Remember your emotional attunement at the time or the
emotional background in which the event erupted. Say, for
example, that you were in a depressed mood and failed to
respond to a helping hand, or see the potential of the
situation offered by destiny.
4B: Now recall your emotional response or reaction to the event
just interpreted; for example, it heartened you, raising you out
of your depression, or it triggered off or reinforced
latent fear, suspicion, sardonic judgmentalism and mistrust,
resentment, or guilt.  Did it elicit a desire that one had not
yet encountered?
5A: Could you detect the influence of your family background in
the way you responded or dealt with problems - and still do?
Similarly, the influence of the cultural background in which you
were brought up?
Could you earmark the first situation in your life in which you
took an initiative that marked a departure from your
ancestral inheritance, or your culture?
5B: Could you ascertain whether the occurrence triggered off
those idiosyncracies (family, culture) that were previously
latent, making you aware of these? Mow did it enrich your
personality?
6A: At which stage in your life, sparked by which event did you
become aware of an essential individual identity
transcending your incarnation (genetic inheritance, culture)
mediated by your personal incentive, yet which could not be
attributed to your will as representing the personal
dimension of your being, but to your investiture of the
creative impulse, bounty of metaphors, splendor, archetypal
qualities and ecstasy of the whole universe envisioned as a
composite Being? This is what Christ meant by your divine
inheritance.
6B: Describe which qualities surfaced as a result of this break-
through. Can you see that, although these qualities were
transmitted to you in a mitigated form through your parents or
ancestors, or exemplified in your culture, the discovery of your
transcendental and cosmic dimension endowed you with a whole
other level of the same qualities, unlimited in
their scope.
7A: You may now check what your motivation was at the time, in
terms of your scale of values attracting the event.
7B: Check whether your interpretation of the problem then,
together with your assessment of the implications of the
problem at the time, lead you to re-evaluate your
motivation. Now look back in retrospect in terms of your
current scale of values, which indeed, one keeps reviewing as one
advances.
8A: Recall the beliefs you entertained at the time of the event
and how that belief affected how you reacted to the event.
For example, your sense of sacredness or respect for the
spiritual status of a human being preserved you from
retaliating toward someone who hurt you, or a certain kind
of stoicism preserved you from the despair of a financial loss.
8B: Now recognize if the event shattered your belief or led you
to refine your belief, shifting it from a belief to becoming a
faith. Did you achieve a higher understanding, not constrained by
information-processing, but realization of an essential
purposefulness in the programming and reprogramming of the
universe?
9A: Anticipation: Recall if at the time the event took place,
you had an uncanny sense of an encounter with destiny, or a
preview of unexplored potentials for the future, or a l.~ind of
premonition of future events. Did you have a hunch of a
whole new development in your life, or a foreboding of an
impending disaster that indeed was confirmed later on?
Recall whether, instead of being stymied by the trauma of
the event, you enjoyed that quintessential moment Or truth
where you could see yourself in the universe, with all its
implication, in an overview - in a supreme flash of clarity,
realization - a moment of awakening.
9B: Decision-making: Monitor that attunement into an overview
right now, consciously and volitionally , so that you have
the feeling of extreme alertness, awareness, clarity,
honesty.
In light of the above: reschedule your life, undertakings,
activities; reassess priorities; redefine orientation. It is
crucial to use the information and wisdom we have gleaned by past
experience to shape and schedule the direction or patterns of our
life in the future, yet encourage your sense of intention,
orientation, purposefulness and meaningfulness to lure yourself
forward to the extent that the pull of the future will aver
itself stronger than the push of the past. Affirm expectations.
This will lead you to a recommitment or rededication
formulated as a vow or promise or covenant with the Being
of which the physical universe is the body, whose mind
pervades your mind, and whose love arouses your
glorification.

Lesson #37: Confecting the Body of Resurrection

Buddha says, "Seek liberation in order to be able to liberate
others, rather than just for yourself."  I think that ultimately
it means liberation from the illusion that we are caught in our
usual vantage point.  But then how can we take the opposite view? 
For example, where the Sufis say, "Why do you seek for God up
there?  He is here.  Where can you find God if He is not in man? 
By glorifying God, you create Him in your being."  The opposite
truth, isn't it?
As Pir-O-Murshid says, "What would be the point of life it your
whole purpose is to liberate yourself from it?"  There's a
wonderful sense of fulfillment, even discarding the body and
considering it as just a support system.  It will help you to
shift your consciousness up beyond existence.  But if you have
one of them in which you can see the living cell and the marvel
of life.  If one could see even beyond that, the sparkling of the
intelligence of the cells, their interaction with each other, and
even the emotions of the cells, then one would think what a
marvel it is that one has, in some mysterious way, been so
involved in the fabric of the planet which is the fabric of the
universe.  One is able to have some impact upon it by one's free
will and transform it like one transforms the metal of the earth
into a spacecraft or a computer.  The interaction between mind
and matter, which are the two poles of the same thing, what a
marvel that it is!  So one isn't fulfilling the purpose by
removing oneself into a search for freedom and for peace.  But it
is true that, having touched upon peace, one derives a power that
one cannot find if one is simply reacting to the challenge of the
world.  That is where turning within or reaching upwards will
help us to deal with the world.
At a certain point in a retreat it becomes a rehearsal for life,
instead of the retreat.  Samadhi becomes what is called in India,
Sahag samadhi.  It is a word that is used by Rama Krishna when
Vivekananda asked him, "Could you give me Samadhi?" And he said,
"Can't you experience samadhi with open eyes?" So, ever since that
time, it's been called samadhi with opened eyes." And that's the
second awakening, in life.
So what Murshid is saying is that wisdom is the interaction
between, and perhaps even the conjoining of those two forms of
wisdom, of knowledge: the knowledge that's gained through
consciousness, if you like, and the knowledge that is gained by
intelligence, both coming together. Now remember, I said if you
want to use your intuition you must totally reject any clues
because that will stand in the way, so that linking these two
forms of knowledge is very, very difficult. The way to do it is
to see how the everywhere and always comes through in the here
and now. That is, if you just live in the here and now, you are
encapsulated into that narrow vantage point, which is just caused
by the unenlightenment of ignorance the cause of all our problems
and our suffering. If you are in the everywhere and always, you
are totally out of touch with the here and now. You have to see
how the everywhere and always manifest in the here and now.
Your present problem and how it is related to other problems
becomes clear. This has a consequence and that is that when you
are looking into people, you're looking right into their soul,
into their conscience, into their realization. You can just see
where they are at. That's part of alertness, of awareness. You
can see exactly what they can't see, where everyone has a blind
spot. You can see the divinity of their being trying to come
through. You can see how they stand in the way of all that
richness coming through because of their way of thinking. And why
their way of thinking?  Because of their conditioning, and so on.
You can see the whole thing. That's being aware.
So awakening in life, one could say, is where consciousness now
emerges out of intelligence while being illuminated by
intelligence, and where, instead of letting consciousness be
focalized, it keeps on incorporating vastness rather than seeing
things from one vantage point. It's seeing how you would look if
you were someone who is flying in the sky in a helicopter You'd
see how the planet looks from outer space, for example.
Consciousness is not focalized now; it is spread out; it's
So far, I have described these wazifas hut I think it is
important to feel them. You can't describe them; you have to feel
them. So one is awakening beyond life and I hope that you
experienced that feeling of remoteness and aloofness and
attachment and otherworldliness. The world seemed an illusion and
you were grasping at intention. But then, the opposite is like
Kabir.  Alim is like, think of all that is gained by looking from
the point of view of the earth. Think of what is gained by,
instead of flying in a helicopter above the city, walking in the
streets of the city. Something is gained. Think of what is gained
by the personal creativity of people, by the multiplicity, by the
manifold variations of the total being.
There's an argument by the personality that it couldn't be the
ultimate achievement because it is transient, just like the body;
therefore, one should free oneself from everything that is
transient in order to just identify oneself with Purusha, which
is that which is permanent. In the new ways of looking at things,
we discover that even the body continues to live after death in
some way, at least the electrons of the body and the photons. 
The belief in reincarnation is based upon a kind of intuition
that there must be a continuity, even of the personality after
the disintegration of the body.  
There are meditations that the Sufi teach, which consist of
working with the confection of the body of resurrection.  I think
the way of understanding this is by taking the example of a
flower.  The flower is a transient formation but, like all
formations, Buddha says, are bound to disintegrate.  But out of
that, the perfume emerges which is able to live eternally.  So
that is the most perfect model of resurrection.  It wouldn't make
sense if what we have collected in terms of know how on the
planet earth should get lost, quite apart from the fact that we
can communicate with other people through books and talks.  That
there should not be something gained by the individual, doesn't
make sense.  So we are somewhat a cross between a vortex and a
cell and even though that cell has some kind of transiency about
it, there's a continuity there, which must be honored.
How does one work for the confection of the body of resurrection? 
What the Sufis say is, "Die before death and resurrect now." 
Don't wait for death to resurrect.  That means that already at
this moment, we are going through a kind of death and if we know
how to do it, we can also start working for our resurrection.  We
die a thousand deaths in the cells of our bodies, in our defeats,
in our lives, in our disappointments, relationships that are
broken, our mistakes, and particularly, the kind of
disenchantment that sets in amongst so many people, resentment
and a sense of inadequacy.  The desecration that our soul
undergoes is sullied without being stained.  These are deaths and
there's a death of a lot of our theories and a lot of our
principles and even a lot of our emotions in our pursuit of
shadows.  It is true that there are practices in which one
experiences for example, the way that the magnetic field gets
integrated, dissolved in the total magnetic field in the planet
and then in the world.  Our aura gets defracted into the wave
interference pattern of the light of the stars, so our thoughts -
in a Hindu vies of the cemetery of thoughts - is that thoughts
eventually start degrading and open up into parts that are sort
of frayed and eventually, die a natural death.  The process of
thinking is alive but the thoughts are the waste products of the
process of thinking.  So there are practices in which you can
experience the disintegration of your body and your mind and your
consciousness, your emotions and your thoughts.  Take time to
practice letting go of each of these elements of your being.  
 
As you exhale, the old petals at the surface start fading
away, falling apart. There is a renewal from inside as you
inhale, and the fresh petals unfurl in the heart of the flower.
One needs to promote the breaking away of the outer petals
otherwise there won't be room for the fresh pedals. So you can do
that. Scatter your thoughts. You know that it is your
attention that holds your thoughts together. Then if you adopt an
attitude of detachment, indifference, your thoughts will
disperse. The same thing with the emotions. It is our desire that
keeps our emotions going. If you become very peaceful, the
emotions will stop scattering. You can do it with consciousness.
Those are the steps towards samadhi. Consciousness is maintained
by what Buddha called a flame. It needs a combustible. If there's
no combustible, there's no consciousness, so it is
maintained by its object. If you are thinking of or perceiving an
object or you are thinking a thought, then your consciousness is
alive. But the ultimate nirbikalka samadhi recalls a point when
thoughts are dismissed, the emotions are dismissed, and
eventually, consciousness breaks up, dissolves, and intelligence
takes over. So that would be like dying.
Now how do you resurrect then? Start from the bottom.
Take, for example, your memories of your experiences in life.
Nature already does provide for some kind of resurrection in the
sense that one tends to remember the essence of an experience and
forget the details. As one gets older, the less relevant things
are forgotten: names and a lot of details. One remembers the
essence of an experience. That's like the essence of the
flowers, retaining the essence, 'quintessentiating' one says. One
doesn't have to clutter one's mind with so many things.
Now the same thing is true about life. One has to trim
one's life. One starts with a lot of interests, and why not? One
realizes that one cannot do everything, so one has to make a
choice. That choice is made upon one's scale of values. So
there is already some pruning that life forces you to make. But
if you want to work for the confection of the body of
resurrection, you really have to cut out a lot of things and
always be conscious of what is essential in what you are doing.
Like a very good businessperson who has a clear desk, you must
deal with every detail but somehow, grasp the essentials behind
it all.
The emotions become very fine emotions instead of gross.
One becomes very highly sensitive to the emotions of people. As
Pir-0-Murshid said, "The finer one becomes, the more one needs to
be able to tolerate those things that are difficult to tolerate.
That's really the secret of resurrecting in life: to love people
who are very difficult to love.
There is a paradigm here that I would like us to keep in
mind. It can be found in the Hindu tradition. It is like being an
oyster that carries a little bit of grit of sand and transforms
it into a pearl so it becomes a little more acceptable in the
body because it is rounded off. So consider people that you
dislike as little grits of sand in your body, yet you have enough
love for them to be able to accommodate them. That's the meaning
of Rahman. You accommodate them; you don't close the door in
their face and say, "I don't want to have anything to do with
you." But you don't let them just lay their trip on you either.
Curiously enough, you would have to have a lot of patience, of
course. It might not happen in your lifetime, but they will,
eventually, be transformed into a pearl. We must hope for that,
anyway.
Love itself has so many aspects. It can become passion and
there's nothing wrong with that but as you resurrect, love
becomes very noble. The experiences we gather through our
bodies: the experience of the sunrise or mountain climbing or
hang gliding or listening to music, whatever, love, those
experiences started with a physical experience, they happened in
time and space, and they continue to live in our psyche as
impressions. We call them impressions. That's our way of saying
it. So our psyche is made up of the way that the physical world
is resurrected in our psyche. There's even a further process of
digestion within the psyche in which the quintessence of these
experiences is digested further, just as after the digestion of
the stomach, the liver carries the digestion even further. So
this is embodied in the visionary experiences of the Sufis of
landscapes of the soul. Somehow, one explores areas of the
psyche that have digested the universe into and drawn the
quintessence of it, like the perfume of the flowers. So the
landscape becomes very ethereal. The Impressionist Monet, for
example, is able to communicate a mood using the similitude of
lakes or trees or whatever, just as a means of communicating
something much deeper than the actual experience. He communicates
the experience of the soul.
We get into that state in which you are really living at that
level of your being and communicating with other beings at that
level too. In a sense, you are doing the opposite of
incarnation; you are moving up the scale of planes. This is the
realm of metaphor but it's a higher level within the world of
metaphor. There you have this wonderful ebb and flow of the
impressions of the earth that have been sublimated on one hand,
and then, the spontaneous creative impressions that well up from
some high level of your being. And there is an encounter
between these two. This is where we make use of the feedback of
the planet, of the earth, instead of discarding it. This is where
you implant these two things and they are blended together. The
wazifas are: Ya Alim: Ya Kabir. Alim is the knowledge in life;
Qahr, the higher knowledge.

Lesson #38: The Body of Resurrection (cont.)

If you wish to pursue resurrection further, you will
function much more at the level of splendor than at the
qualities or metaphor. So you are in a state of ecstasy but it's
the ecstasy of resurrection. It's a particular brand of ecstasy.
The ecstasy that the flower experiences in being able to escape
the perishability of its body is by becoming perfume. There's an
ecstasy in it. That's the ecstasy of Christ on the cross, or Al
Hallaj on the cross. Al Hallaj called it "the moment of truth."
When you realize that this is what it is all about, that after
all, it was not the personality or one's achievement on earth
that was the ultimate issue because they are temporary. It is the
quintessence that is gained from all of life's experiences that
is eventually offered to the universe. That is the real host of
the Mass: your personal contribution to the universe, the way
that the universe has been processed through you, sublimated, so
that your essence is recycled and offered to the programming of
the universe.
So this is a totally new way of meditating. Instead of
working with developing qualities you are asking, "What is my
personal experience contributing towards the universe?" Believe
me, however unimportant you think it is, it is important because
it is your experience, because it is unique, your contribution.
You can't figure it out with your mind but it wouldn't make sense
if you came and went and nothing happened and people forgot you
and your being was all over.
It is our assumptions about death that stand in the way of
even believing in the resurrection. We think of death as a
really bad thing that we have to try to postpone as much as we
can. People are kept on respirators and artificial machines and
are reduced to the state of a vegetable. The insights of
contemplatives are now reinforced by the latest views of science.
If we want to be part of what is happening in our time, our
spirituality must be updated to view life holistically, instead
of compartmentalizing spirituality and science. Let's see what
science has to say that will help us to understand death and even
meet death with a feeling of harmony and security.
For all intensive purposes, the cells of the body are
practically eternal, that is, they are not subject to decay. They
do switch over from electrons to photons but there's a continuity
there. After death, they are scattered just like our aura is
scattered, travelling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second so
they cannot send signals to each other. You would think that
since they are scattered, they are not in touch but that's
because that is the way we have understood things, until 1
scientists picked up the hunch of Einstein, Podonsky and Rosen,
confirmed by Professor Aspect, that electrons live like married
couples, in pairs, like companionate stars. If one spins to the
right, the other spins to the left. You can separate them
artificially so that they are not within such a distance that
they could send signals to each other. You can artificially
change the spin of one, and the spin of the other changes
automatically, even though they can't send signals to each other.
What we are saying is that all the aspects of the universe are
linked together by a kind of network which defies time and space
and which is exactly what we experience when we turn within. Do
not think that after death, your electrons are simply scattered.
Those are aspects of the fabric of your body. Those electrons are
still in contact; they carry information in their spin. In other
words, your memory is still being carried by those electrons and
photons, the whole past. There is, as Dr. David Bohm says, mental
counterpart to matter. In a test which physicists have devised, a
screen has a double hole for electrons to go through. How does an
electron know which one to go through? Somehow there's a tacit
assumption that there's some kind of awareness or consciousness
or volition within the atom itself or the electron itself. They
carry information and are endowed with a certain choice, so that
even after the cremation of the body, the electrons and the
photons continue to exist, to relate in a way that defies our
understanding. The body does continue to live in a new way.
The body is not the only reality. There's a theory in
science which is called negentropy: information is built up at
the cost of energy. The computer is an example. If you are
using up batteries or current but are building up information,
energy bodies are running down but information is increasing.
That's a good example of resurrection. In meditation, you
experience that your psyche is a reality that has an existence
per se, without depending upon the physical body. You can't prove
it but you experience the fact that you can think and feel
without involving your body in it. If you do astral travel, then
of course, you realize that you don't have to have eyes to see. 
If you are able to overcome the fear or your concepts of
death, then you will find that working with the confection of the
body of resurrection makes more sense to you. It becomes more
convincing and more enticing. You now see that this is not
reflecting what has been achieved by deriving the essence from it.
It's an economy of nature.
The word that the Sufis for resurrection is Ya Qayyum. This
practice meant very much to me in my life when I was doing a lot
of retreats. The triple wazifas:  Ya Qadem, Ya Qaher, Ya Qayyum.
Ya Qadem: the beginning of time reminds you of the Big Bang, the
whole evolutionary process. Ya Qaher:  the quintessence,
dominates the scene; it's like what you experience in Samadhi. Ya
Qayyum: is resurrection. All that has been achieved is
quintessentiated and it is offered back again, recycled into the
whole programming of the universe. The evolutionary process is
like a spiral instead of a circle. The divine programming is
dynamic. It keeps on improving, thanks to the experience of each
one of us. We contribute towards it; we're not puppets in the
hands of God. That's why Einstein said, "God doesn't play dice
with the universe.
[This practice can be done as a Zikr. During Ya Qadem, move your
head from your left shoulder, down across the solar plexus to the
right shoulder and up to the zenith while exhaling.  Concentrate
on your human and solar inheritance from the Big Bang to the
present day. On Ya Qaher, inhale and bow the head into the heart
and solar plexus, aware of your quintessence. Continue to inhale
as you raise your head and say, Ya Qayyum, aware of the
transformation of all that you have been and are to new life,
resurrection.
When saying the practice as a fikr (on the breath), eliminate the
word Ya. The third stage is to sit silently and be the wazifas.
This is called the fikr-as-sirr. Allow the qualities to enter
your being. You become the practice.]

Lesson #39: Cosmic and Transcendental Dimensions of Breath

What we're going to do now presupposes that you do have some basic knowledge of the practices that we've done in the past. There has been a lot of groundwork building up to the point we're reaching now. Basically, I'll say the main points in their sequence:
There is a relationship between the rhythm of breath, the grossness and fineness of our breath, and our attunement. Withdraw from activity to prepare for the next step. If the breath is fast, then we're more in the catabolic state, ready to spring to attention. If the breath is fine, we're much more in the state of being able to look at things in a different kind of perspective. We've been doing most of the practices with breath on the assumption that we are not just the physical body but also the etheric body and an aura. Consequently, when we say we are working with breath, what we are really doing is working with energy. We are availing ourselves of the energy of the universe. We are converging the energy of the universe then we are expanding and transforming that energy from denser to more fine, from finer to more dense energy. These are the words you are familiar with if you have been following me for some time.
Now we are going to make the second, a further step. Basically, adopt a typical Sufi attitude which could be defined in the words of the early Christian Fathers, "significatio passiva." We are at the passive end of the divine action. Breath is called Nafsa-ar-Rachmani by the Sufis, compassionate breath, a manifesting principle of the divine and it's looked upon not as energy but as the transducer or the transformer of energy. Instead of thinking of space as made up of air, think space as being a capacity that could contain the air or void. But let's say we are at the passive end of the divine breath. So when we breathe, we don't think that we are breathing but we are participating in the cosmic act of breathing. Thus we will be able to apply passive volition, instead of using our will.
The consequence is that the power that comes through is much greater. We limit whatever happens by the finitude of our will. One can think of the example of the Archangel Gabriel breathing the breath of the Holy Spirit to the Virgin Mary. That's a way of looking at breath, not as a physical phenomena. The physical phenomena is the consequence of something much deeper which is happening at the level of pure spirit. So far, we have been talking about two dimensions: the cosmic and the transcendental so that when we are breathing, think of breath either as converging energy from the universe or as extending energy of the magnetic field. We work with different levels of energies as we breath in, drawing earth or telluric energy upwards and making it very fine, and then the opposite: bringing pure spirit down into the physical body. Those are the two dimensions as we have beenenvisioning them so far.
Now we're going to approach this a little bit differently. What we call the cosmic dimension is also called the manifestation of the so far non-manifest. For those of you who are familiar with the wazifas of the Sufis, you are moving from Ya Batin to Ya Zahir and Ya Zahir to Ya Batin. That would be the cosmic dimension. For example, in the Batin stage, the non- manifest, we are in what I've already defined as inverted space where everything is everywhere. In our minds we are attuned to the implicate state, the implicit state where we are aware of what we imply behind what we express. An example would be radio waves which are everywhere, they're not specific by their location in space and they can be transduced into sounds that can be heard and are broadcast, radiate from a definite loudspeaker and consequently, are located in space. That would be the first mode of breathing: participating in the divine act whereby the non-manifest becomes manifest. If you think in terms of physics, waves are waves of energy and in certain circumstances they can behave as particles. The reality behind the universe is very different than the way it appears manifest is a means of expressing reality which doesn't have a form at the surface. Let us say the reality which doesn't have a form and is not located in space and time.  We start with this first form of breath in which, as we breathe in, we withdraw from the appearance of the physical world and also our interpretation of our problems and find peace and serenity, feeding that back into the original pure intelligence beyond consciousness. It's much more like the pure spirit was breathed into the womb of the Virgin Mary by the Archangel Gabriel, the breath of life. In fact, it is that kind of breath that heals, vivifies. It is the secret of the power of miraculous healing by the Holy Spirit. It's not energy, you see, it's the transducer of energy, the tide that carries energy and transforms it, the catalyst. nut you realize too that in order to experience this more profoundly, we need to become aware of our existence on several planes, consciously. So we need to extend our consciousness to the higher planes on which we have our being and eventually get some kind of clarity into what these planes are, something about the nature of these different planes. The planes are not a matter of space; they are a matter of attunement. We can pass in review each different plane as we exhale, and again as we inhale.
In computer work, for example, we distinguish between the software and the hardware so that we see the connection between the program and the material support system that makes the program work, makes physical facts at the existential level. At least we distinguish those two planes. But of course, if you go more deeply into programming, you find that there are layers also. What is your objective in designing that software? Of course, one could go beyond that:  What are the motivations? What is the nostalgia? Actually, the real impulse behind everything is the impulse of nostalgia. So the Sufis call this not the nostalgia for manifestation but the nostalgia towardsexistentiation, which is the most basic impulse behind the whole of existence. Let us say it is the longing for dreams to come true. Remember Martin Luther King. "I have a dream." Existence as the fulfillment of a dream, the divine dream, and we participate in that dream because our nostalgia is the divine nostalgia--customized, limited, distorted, all you like--but still, the original Ishq. So you experience that as you exhale. Then you find that the dream, in the process of being materialized, existentiated, well it gets limited, distorted, the divine perfection suffering from human limitation. You have a need sometimes to have the courage to destroy your work of art and start again. You can't refurbish it and piece it up again. Make a new start. The Sufis call it "the recurrent recreation of the universes," continually destroyed and created again. Therefore, the breath represents that alternation between the return to the oneness and then, a new dispensation. We can experience this in our personality when we can get back into the archetype of our being and now recreate ourselves anew, as a new person, the new man (or woman) being reborn, as it is mentioned in The New Testament.

Lesson #40: The Child Within

To get into this meditation, become aware of your breath. Close your eyes, and as you exhale, cast your glance at infinity and simply extend your exhalation as long as you can by contracting your abdomen and then your chest. As you inhale, imagine a spotlight that's a foot in front of your eyes, dilate your abdomen and chest, then hold your breath as long as you can. During the hold, you feel as though you are like a pendulum that had come to a halt. That is the moment when you have a hunch about the eternity of your being. You can see very clearly that that is one end of your being - one pole is involved in the process of becoming and the other one remains unchanged through- out the process of becoming. That's a breakthrough - if one re-members who one is.

When we turn within and inhale, we transmute the impressions of the environment instead of cutting them out all together. The accent is on refusing to be conditioned; we want to be free. If we remember, as we hold our breath we are right into that network behind the whole universe and we experience ourselves as not having a clearly defined boundary, therefore, we have that experience of "participation mystique" as the French call it - a kind of underlying reality behind all things. In so doing, we are in touch with our deeper drives, emotions, motivations, and intentions. As we exhale, we enjoy involvement, relationship, achievement, radiating, expressing ourselves. So we alternate between these two states.  
We shift a little bit and are much more into our emotional attunement as we inhale peace. One has to reach a very advanced degree of relaxation, almost like a point of relaxation that is found in auto-hypnosis. It's like the state you are in when youare about to go to sleep (as you inhale). The keynote to this is vairyagya, which means detachment, indifference. One is immune to the turmoil of the emotions that are aroused by one's involvement in life. It's a kind of therapy, that moment of peace. We have to breathe very slowly, of course - inhaling and exhaling - between the peaceful state and as we exhale, what is called by psychology, arousal, could be called euphoria. I would like to call it a state of exaltation, glorification. The wazifa is Ya Azim! How glorious everything is, the Magnificat.
I find that in order to remember my real being, to find it back again, I have to enjoy a wonderful sense of peace, can't attain if I am concerned that I am not doing what supposed to do. If we have a guilty conscience - or many elements that stand in the way of finding that peace - there is only one thing that helps us to be able to touch upon that peace, even though we aren't too happy about aspects of ourselves that we can't describe to and that cause a certain disturbance in our self esteem. The only thing that makes it possible to touch upon this peace is a thought that I found in the teaching of Pir-O- Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan when he said, "The inner core of our being is like a mirror which cannot be tarnished by the impressions upon it." So if you can find that inner core in your being, then however much you feel that your personality has been tarnished by life, you can trust yourself to that inner core of your being. That inner core of your being is the child in you. It's like the fresh petals of the flower which have not been tarnished yet, whereas the outside petals have. We could say that our personality has developed one sheath after the other - built up. The outer one is what Jung cal is the mask, the persona, but the inner core is continually welling up. These are the new qualities which emerge in our being and which are absolutely pure, absolutely unpolluted. It's the child in us. I want you to know that the child is still there in you. You don't always know how to find it but it still is there in you. The ideal would be to be able to reconcile the beautiful spontaneity and innocence of a child, together with the wisdom of a mature person. As you know, children trust themselves to their creativity and when they get derided by their friends, they tend to lose confidence in their spontaneity and become less creative. Creative people are very often those who keep on honoring the child in themselves, even Bach and Brahms who were very mature people.
Try to listen to the Requiem of Andrew Lloyd Webber - the child singing the Agnus Dei in "Pie Jesu" like an angel - to get into the attunement of the child in you. You see that it is your innocence that opens the door to your peacefulness and you still have it in you. It can never be undermined. It is that innocence that will wipe out the sins of the world like the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. That's what the child is singing. Remember that it is true that the past continues to live but it lives in us and in the people that we have been involved with. As we change, we change the past. It continues to live but it transforms. It's not the same as it was. So remember, if there's something that you'vedone that you don't feel happy about, if you wouldn't do it today, then the past has been changed. It isn't the way it was. This is the only way to find peace in yourself.  
I would like to balance this state of peace with a state of arousal, exaltation, glorification. Both of them are needed in order to remember what one is eternally.  It's not what one was; it is what one still is and will always be. I don't know whether all of you do feel like, on the one hand, you are the man or woman of the world who needs to answer responsibilities, and on the other hand, there is something in you which would like to be the priest or the priestess. Somehow you could figure yourself participating in the great cosmic celebration. It might even be that for some of you it would make the ultimate sense. I remember once attending one incredible cosmic celebration; that's what I call it. It was a service where the representatives of different religions were invited - the gurus of the times - in the sixties. It was in a Catholic monastery and was an orthodox service and somehow I felt, well, this is it, the ultimate sense of the universe. One comes out of that transformed, full of zest for the marvel of life. This need in us is expressed in a sense of bewonderment before the marvel of life, despite all the laws and disasters. Behind it all, there is a miracle which is overwhelming. Sometimes scientists are absolutely overwhelmed by the intelligence - they also call it the elegance - behind the programming of the universe. At moments like that celebration, you realize the tremendous privilege you have to be invested by all this bounty at all levels of the universe. There comes a moment where one recognizes in one's self, what Christ called our divine inheritance when he said, "Be ye perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." What he was saying is that all of us do carry within ourselves, the divine inheritance. We may not be aware of it. In fact, if we're not aware of it we have a very bad self image. The real break-through is the moment when you can actually earmark in your being the seed, your real self, and the plant, your personality. The qualities get limited in your personality but if you are able to shift your notion of yourself, your sense of identity from your personality to your real being, you will discover qualities that are so sublime. This is where you have to overcome that kind of false humility. Humility is important in order to protect us from megalomania. False humility denies who we really are. We have to reconcile the greatest pride in our divine inheritance together with the humility of what we have made of that inheritance, or even, the limitations to this perfection which are written right into the nature of life. Instead of exulting in the marvel of the universe as one imagines it to be outside oneself or beyond oneself, you exult in the investiture of that glory, that splendor in the very seed of your being. Now you can say, "Oh God, thank you for having invested me with such splendor."

Lesson #41: Planes of Existence and Wazifas

You can notice in yourself those elements that you have inherited from the different planes, and you know how to refuel those particular qualities by reestablishing contact with those planes. It is not good enough just to have a mental representation of the plane; one has to find a counterpart of the representation of the plane in one's being, and one has to sense the emotion of the plane. Those are two things that we have to observe. And having started with perhaps a figurative representation of the plane, one must let oneself be carried into the ecstasy of each plane.
For each plane there is a type of angel. For the first plane, it is beings who are very active and for the galaxies. The second plane is the plane of the djinns and also nature spirits. And then third plane, of course, they're the angels, beautiful angels. The fourth plane is the plane of the seraphim, beings of fire. The fifth plane, kerubim, beings of light. The sixth plane, the archangels, like Gabriel and Michael and Raphael and Ophiel, and so on. And then the seventh plane is called hayoth, the four cardinal principles of the
I would like you to make a point of capturing something of the being of each one of these archangels, and relate it to your own being, like finding out what heritage you carry in you from those archangels.
The important thing is to discover in the trait of your character those things that pertain to each one of those planes. And the clue is a sense of familiarity, like this plane is familiar to me; I remember this. This memory is in the unconscious so just imagining it is not good enough. One has to recall one's experience in that plane and, I like to say that we have ancestors in each one of these planes. So there's l memory of having lived in that plane, or having even been born several times. So if you can recall the moment of your birth in each one of those planes that is part of the rebirthing process. Now what happens with us is that we have so much inheritance that we find it difficult to manifest all of it and so much of it remains recessive, that is, not fulfilled, not expressed. And that is within our power. That is what these practices are, to express those features that we are able to sense, to grasp, and this only happens if we are attuned to the emotion of that particular plane.
For each plane there is a wazifa. We should concentrate not on the meaning of the wazifa, so much as the attunement of each wazifa. And so, of course, at the top is Ahad, seventh plane. Sixth plane, Quddus. Fifth plane, Azim. Fourth plane, Haqq. Third plane, Ishq. Second plane, Alim. First plane, Hayy.
Now you may, of course, wish to add wazifas to some of those that I suggested. One could add Jamil, for example, to the third plane, and one could add Ya Fatah to the fourth. And Jelal seems to me like the fourth, whereas Ykram is the fifth. Wajid means existence, but as all these wazifas apply to the adjective of theDivine Being, Wajid, is the Existent One.
There are other attributes that you could ascribe to the different spheres. For the third, Isqh Allah maboud 'lilla, and for the fourth, qayyum. For the second Ya Mussawir, which is the molder; this is where the plans and blueprints of the architects of the universe are being made.
I don't think there's any point in making a system in one's mind. One falls far below the attunement that is required of us. Just experience what you can by drawing that experience from the memory of the unconscious of the past, the memory of the past which has been consigned to the unconscious. Actually one is still living on all these planes now. It's just like one passed through them, one is still submerged in each one. But as Murshid says, there is a veil that separates the planes and that veil is our ignorance, and so if we lift that veil we will realize that aspect of our being that is functioning on the fifth plane and that is continually influencing our being on the that finally we come to the view that we live on all planes simultaneously.
A great clue is if instead of thinking that you are like vehicle in which all of this inheritance has come, if you think of yourself as being that inheritance, that makes all the difference. In other words, I am my father who continues to live; I am my grandfather; I am my mother who continues to live; I am my grandmother who continues to live; I am my ancestors who continue to live, and so on. I am all those animals who were my ancestors who continue to live. I am the plants that continue to live. I am that whole past. I am the minerals. I am my whole past. I am the past of the universe. I am the present of all the planes, and the divine inheritance which I am supersedes any other inheritance. The inheritances through ancestors and angelic ancestors have accrued to me in the course of time.
We are able to earmark those idiosyncrasies in our being that we owe to our heritage in the different celestial spheres.  That would be moving upwards along the heavenly spheres from low plane to the highest.  You are absolutely free to become what you want to be irrespective of whether the idiosyncracies are that you have inherited, whether from your parents or from the angelic parents, and even directly from one's divine inheritance.
But of course one is using the material that one has inherited, exactly like a modern artist uses the same paints that ancient artists used to use, but what he makes of it is different.
Let yourself explore how you feel about these different planes.  What we want to do also is draw the energy or the attunement of one plane and place it in another, and we start perhaps with the most typical example of that which is Ya Azim/Ya Alim.  The reason for this association of Azim and Alim is that it is only when one is in love that one can see things clearly.  It is only when one is in a state of ecstasy that one can perceive thatwhich is hidden behind the appearance of things.  That is the reason why I don't think it is very useful just to work with Alim except in relationship to Azim.  Azim is very closely associated with the vision of dhu'l jelal wa'l ikram.  If we want to really contact these planes, we have to realize that these planes are a reality in beings, and although all beings have all planes in them just as we have, still qualities of a certain plane come out extremely intensely in certain beings who are really like the epitome of that particular attunement.
Ya Azim means how glorious!  That is why it is the word that dervishes are saying to each other when they see the splendor coming through each other.  The splendor is the result of meditation, contemplating for hours daily the being of God.  The consequence is that one's self becomes glorious and magnificent by losing oneself, absorbing oneself so totally in the magnificence of God.
This is the knowledge that God had without using the consciousness of people, or rather, His/Her consciousness fragmented into a number of focal points.  It was this original form of understanding, the divine intelligence.  The divine glance is functioning through our focal center, but does not allow itself to limit itself by our focal center that is our personal consciousness.  So there are two modes of understanding that we describe as Hu and Ana.  The first mode of understanding is where there's no duality; it is not based upon anything that we can contribute to the divine understanding by being the eyes through which He/She sees.  And the other one is where we do contribute, and by this fragmentation of the divine consciousness something is gained.  
We are no more the individual subject who sees. We are the divine being who sees. And our particular vantage point is infused with the divine vantage point; it's transfused by it.
And so when you are saying, Ya Alim, what you are saying is that God is the Aware One, is the One who is Aware. The Knower; He/She is the Knower.
What Alim means is that God does not allow His/Her understanding to be limited by the understanding that He/She gains through us, those parts of Him/Herself that are being focalized, or fragmented, and somehow He/She transfuses this knowledge with His/Her transcended knowledge. And every time that we start perceiving that which transpires behind that which appears, we are participating in the divine action whereby He/She transfuses the knowledge of beings by His/Her transcended knowledge.
So the divine glance then cuts through the perspective of the faction that is the human, the personal, with another perspective, and the consequence is that one sees the cause and the purpose behind every situation, instead of just seeing the situation. And that is the precise meaning of Alim.
What gives one this ability to let the divine perspective break through one's perspective, is ecstasy. One could also say this the other way around; it's a vicious circle because from the moment that one begins to perceive that which transpires behind that which appears, everything appears so beautiful that one is in ecstasy. And then being in ecstasy one sees even more what transpires behind that which appears. That is how one departs; one starts in the fifth plane, emotion, and it gives one insight into the situations on the planet. And you see that as soon as one lets oneself slip into one's personal consciousness, vantage point, one has lost one's ecstasy.
I want to draw your attention to the relationship between Quddus and Haqq. You get a very very high state of high altitude, rarified state, with Quddus.
Don't experience yourself as a body; experience yourself as a soul. The body is something that is added. That is how you get into the feeling of Quddus. Because Quddus is like the catalyst that triggers off the forces of life.  But Hayy is right down in the first plane, energy.
Murshid speaks about the human spirit; not just the spirit right up there. He speaks about the human spirit. That is, standing for what one believes at the cost of death. That's the human spirit. And of course you see that what it does to a person is that it makes a person truthful. And that is the rapport between Quddus and Haqq.
We are in a very very high plane when we touch upon pure spirit. And so quite apart from conferring a tremendous amount both body and mind, the action of pure spirit makes a person turn into truth. And that is an attribute that is to be found in all planes but its connection is seen very strongly with the fourth plane because, it is a plane of reckoning where one is facing oneself; one is facing the truth, what they call a judgment scene. Quddus/Haqq is a very powerful practice.
Another practice is Ya Ahad/Ya Wajid, which are the two ends of the spectrum, of the spheres. Ahad is the vision of oneness. It is easy to see in an ant nest that the ants are not really individual beings, but they are all the cells of that one ant nest. But you can see it also amongst humans, and that is wajid - one is seeing the multiplicity and unity. But then, ahad is higher than that, of course. That is, there is absolutely no multiplicity remaining.
But the counterpart is Ya Wajid, where you realize that this is all one, it is all the existence of God. That's exactly what it means, that this is the being of God, this is the existence of God, and therefore, it is God Who exists as me.  I do not exist.  It is not true that we exist.  The only truth is that God exists.  And that means that one experiences oneself as being the being of God.
I believe that that was the consciousness of Murshid. That is what Murshid calls God consciousness on Earth. So it is the precise opposite of samadhi; the opposite of Ahad. It is seeing the unity of existence, not the kind of crowning unity in the never--never up there, but it is right down here; this is where the unity is, despite all the differences. It is all God. And when one realizes that, one realizes that one is the being of God. And the consequence is that the divine qualities begin to come through. In fact maybe one might say that this is the secret of unfoldment.  It is to cease thinking of oneself as a personality, because there is limitation there, but keep on being aware of the fact that one is the divine being. And the more one is conscious of being the divine being, the more the divine qualities come through.

Lesson #42:  Awakening to the Divine Intention

Abdul Jabul Nefari says that awakening to the Divine intention is a revelation. There's no use trying to understand the intention. It is revealed to you when you have given up trying to understand it. If it can't be the object of your subject, then you can entertain it by your will. There's no use trying to understand but it is revealed to you according to your readiness to understand it. I would say that somehow that readiness is linked up with one's dedication. My sister told me that it is a principle in the secret service that one is only allowed to know that which one needs to know. So if you are dedicated to a purpose there are things that you need to know and they are revealed to you. But you can't expect to know unless you need to know. Need to know is linked to your readiness to be of service.
The link is between dedication and power. The same thing is true about understanding as in power. Somehow what the sufis say is the word "uns" - that one is invited into the intimacy of the king. What one means is that the people around the king are appraised of the policy or the strategy which is kept secret. So to be in the intimacy of the king means that you have access to the secrets of the Divine intention. There are the popular stories that you find in Sufism that tell about that very inadequately. For example, Moses was learning from Khidr and there were people being drowned and he wanted to go to rescue them and Khidr said no because they would have killed other people. I'm not very happy about that story, but what they are trying to say is that there is a method in God's madness and we just have to know that it is difficult from our point of view to understand what the intention is. It seems absolutely contradictory or defeating. Some things happen that are so terribly unacceptable. How could God have wished that?
Perhaps the problem is that in our limited minds we think of God as other than ourselves. If you understand that it is a composite will, we are all part of that will, then it is a very composite intention too. So it is our simplistic minds that try to think that God up there is a separate person who is manipulating ourlives and doing things that don't make sense. The clue is freedom, that what is gained is freedom. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point. If you were invited to create a universe and you made it so that things would happen according to your will, then no accidents could happen, everything would be foreseen, there would be no evolution; there would be nothing gained by it. It was all in your mind; what was the point? But if you create a universe in such a way that you delegate freedom to the building blocks of that universe, then something is gained. That's freedom; that's the ultimate magnanimity. You hand over the most precious thing that you have, which is your free will, to other people. That's true of any institution. Instead of being a dictator who governs it, you give a certain amount of freedom to people who are within it so that they will develop their own potentiality. If we try to assess our lives from the other end, from our personal vantage point, there is no way we can understand it. We must be very clear.
So I would say first of all, that in awakening to the Divine intention, you give up your assessment. That is still negative. Secondly, perhaps the clue is in that middle mind, which is in the creative imagination. If you were to make a statue, for example, you would find that in the course of making the statue you saw things, discovered aspects of the statue that you didn't see or couldn't have prefigured before making the statue. In other words, it's discovery by doing, instead of thinking you have to first know and then do. So being creative in your life is a way of making your awakening a reality instead of sitting back and trying to assess your problems. In other words, instead of being at the passive end of impact of your existence, you are at the active end, making things happen. So this would be awakening in action. We can understand that Samadhi would be awakening away from the existential realm, where you will know more and more about less and less. Awakening in life would be knowing less and less about more and more.
Let's follow this up with some of the practices. Sit up straight. Remember what I said. If you are very peaceful, be clear about the fact that at some time, and it's a definite time, you were conceived. Prior to that, you were not the same as after you were conceived. So let's say that something has accrued to you at that moment in addition to what you were prior to that. So at least there's a very clear distinction to that aspect of yourself that we can call the existential aspect (that you inherited from your parents and from the whole universe) and then that aspect of yourself that was prior to that, let's say, non-existential or eternal.
So the great clue in meditation and to awaken a sense of Samadhi is to totally question that your existential being is the way you think it is. But in practice what the Tibetans do is something similar to what one would do ii one were to awaken while sleeping and dreaming. That is, that you remember your existential being - body, mind, personality - you remember the circumstances the wayyou thought they were but you realize that lt wasn't the way you thought it was, so you have awakened to what seems like a dream. Now the experience seems like a dream to you. You remember how it seemed but you think, I was caught in a hoax.
Then you make the second phase, which is awakening from sleep with dreams and to sleep without dreams, that is deep sleep, when you remember not only your assessment of your problems, but you remember your creative thoughts, like the way you would like to live and the way you would like to be. If you are a musician or a composer, you remember how your compositions were expressing an aspect of yourself and somehow you realize that your imagination was just projecting into a form, understanding that cannot be limited by form. So you awaken from the dream world into deep sleep. What the Tibetans are saying is that while you awaken from one stage to the next, in order to be able to move to the next stage, you need to keep in your mind the voidness. It's not altogether void because the space is filled with neutrons; there's some kind of voidness that is difficult to explain. Your creative ideas are merely projections, much the way your dreams form. It's a form that portrays something that is beyond form so lt's a secondary reality. The essence is what is behind perfection.
Now then, if you follow this up, there's a further point, but that's a very difficult point to reach, and that is that when you forget that it's void; you go through a dark night, and then you awaken beyond the dark night. That transit is what most people are afraid of. In the first stages one still remembers the physical world, one's questions and one's assessment. One remembers one's metaphors; one questions their validity, but one still remembers them. But at this next stage one forgets them. So you are not conscious of the environment at all, not conscious of your thoughts, not conscious of yourself. That's the dark night. That's the transit. And if you can make it through that transit, then you impinge to a state of awakening. But it's just very difficult to pass that stage because we have an instinct of preservation. Just think that you are in deep sleep so that even your dreams, well, the physical world and your dreams appear now as dreams, fantasies or whatever, maya.
I don't know whether it ever happened that you found yourself walking the streets and asking yourself, "What on earth am I doing here? What is all this? Is it real; am I real? Is this body me?" When you reach that point you think you are going crazy. You think you must try to avoid that. But that's exactly what you have to do.
The strong moment is when you think, I've been caught in a hoax all this time. All of a sudden 1 have awakened. I see that everybody has been caught in that hoax as if everyone were dreaming and I'm awake. That used to happen to me when I was making my retreat in that cave in Jerusalem. At night they would kick me out. I wasn't allowed to stay at night. I would walk onthe streets thinking, what are all these people doing, walking on the streets here and there like flies in a bottle. They have no idea what's happening. They are just caught in their trips. That's how you feel. I used to be like that too. And now I'm awake.
That's how Hazrat Inayat Khan describes awakening. Actually the real hoax is that one is caught in one's mind. For example, a man thinks he's a king because people say, "Your majesty," and he's sitting on a throne and thinks he's a king. Then suddenly he's thrown off his throne and he wonders if he's a king or an ex-king or what he is. He's only an ordinary human being. Or an old man thinks he's old because he's got white hair and some people think he's old. It's in the mind. You think you're old. For example, a young man thinks he's poor but doesn't know that his father has put a fortune in the bank for
In psychotherapy you will find that people are caught in their assumptions. Now I would say that the positive way then, of countering the negative aspect would be to say, "I am pure luminous intelligence." Intelligence became consciousness when interfaced with the existential underpinning of my being and then I forgot that I was intelligence. That's what remember. And that is the moment of breakthrough, what Tibetans call the Clear Light of Bliss. That's what I am - luminous intelligence. Everything else is something that has been added. It's scaffolding, underpinning, a support system-- body/mind/personality--all that. But that's not what I am. I am pure intelligence. So for example, you walk in the streets of New York and you say, "So, you think you are walking in the streets of New York but nonsense; you are pure intelligence. Or somehow you are flapping that body in the streets of New York but that's not who you are. You are pure intelligence. That's being awake. So you see there's a shift one's sense of identity.
And then, when one isn't afraid of death anymore, you can glean my body all you like; it doesn't take away my intelligence. The body is something that's been added to me, so one can take it away but that doesn't change me because Fm pure intelligence. If you look at it that way, that's what is called liberation. It's freedom, not just from your assessment of your problems; it's freedom from your identity. And that's the catch 22, our sense of identity. So you see, we are dealing with very ultimate things.
 Now when you awaken, the energy that comes through is so enormous that then you can heal. So why try anything half way. Go for the big thing while you still have a chance. Life is short; believe me; when you reach my age, you realize that it is really short. Every minute constitutes a choice in time. Why waste time playing bridge? That's my own personal feeling. Use your time well to discover your part in the Divine Intention.

Lesson #43:  Healing with the Holy Spirit

To prepare for this meditation, think of your body as being made up of the fabric of the planet, in fact of the universe. Just imagine what that means, how deeply we are connected with the physical universe.
Begin by inhaling and feeling the energy of the earth rise up the central channel of your body. As you exhale, feel the celestial energy descend and at the same time feel the polluted energy drain from your body.
Now remember that the earth energy needs to be sublimated as it rises, and that the energy of your life field gets very strongly impacted by the very fine energy of pure spirit as it descends upon it. That's the feeling of the quickening of the Holy Spirit as described by St. John of the Cross. One is totally transfigured by the descent of the Holy Spirit upon one. If you think of the Holy Spirit as different from yourself, then of course you're in a state of duality. The ultimate is unity so that you see the Holy Spirit as the higher pole of your being. I know this is asking a lot, but if you want to heal with the Holy Spirit, you must go beyond thinking of yourself as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. You must identify with the Holy Spirit.
One of the ways of encouraging this is to get into the consciousness of the cells of your body. First, remind yourself of the basic structure of matter. Picture the atom as a large concert hall in which electrons are whirling about a proton the size of a cherry seed, and in between is the void. If you imagine yourself as pure spirit, then you can infuse or permeate this matter. You feel very light in comparison with your body. If you can do this with your body then you also can do it with the bodies of- other people.
However, if you want to heal others, then you need to heal yourself first. To do this, you have to not just infuse matter with spirit in a mechanical way. You have to get into the consciousness of the cells of your body, so you are infusing matter with your consciousness and your will. Each cell is dynamic of course. It has an external membrane and it has a nucleus. It has a specific kind of frequency and some means of communication with neighboring cells. It communicates with its neighbors by touch, by light, by sound, by radio waves. Each of the billions of cells in your body is endowed with intelligence and therefore will and consciousness. Their intelligence is perhaps rather elementary but you can communicate with that intelligence, just like you can communicate with the intelligence of a dog or a fly.
If you can attune yourself to the frequency of a cell, the cell recognizes that language, just like if you know the language of dolphins, you can communicate with them. So you can talk to your cells in your body. You can say to the cells that are misbehaving, "Look, I'm really sorry. I've overstressed and abused you. You're kicking up a fuss as you have every right todo and now Fm in trouble. I don't want to order you about but we need to establish some kind of communication so you understand how I feel too." You're making a covenant with nature.
Now the cells breathe in and out, as we do, not just oxygen but energy. They don't breathe at the same rate as we do but there's some mathematical relationship~ which isn't known but is very complex. You have to be in sync with them. If you are peaceful, the cells will be able to respond to your communication with them more easily than if you're trying to lay your trip on them.
The cells can be out of sync of course. Cancer is a typical case where the cells refuse to play ball; they refuse to fit into any kind of pattern that is imposed on them by the code of the DNA. It's as if the thermostat of your furnace has been overstressed and is not controlling the furnace any more so the furnace is burning totally out of hand. You can't control it and there's no use trying. Psychologically too of course the disorder in one's thinking can reach a critical point where the thoughts are out of control.
However, there is a way of disarming the adversary instead of countering it. You have to do it very painstakingly, just like in the case of the Gordian knot. Instead of cutting it, Alexander should have unravelled it slowly, painstakingly. One has to reverse the process that has led to the disorder. Of course it is a disorder because the order has broken down. There is a foreign agent, a virus or bacteria, but it is only taking advantage of the body's disorder.
So you see it's order against entropy. A very good example of entropy is if all the books in your library have been taken off the shelves and not put back into place. To put them back in order requires energy. So just being peaceful in not good enough. There's no use being peaceful in an untidy room. You have to tidy your room first. So one starts putting a few things in order and then a few more and a few more, and the cells pick it up and order is restored. There's a difference in the mentality of cells. In inorganic matter the electrons and protons are very strictly regulated. They are aligned like pictures on wallpaper, very stylized but still tied together. There is a little leeway because when inorganic matter is exposed to light then electrons will avail themselves of that light and begin to dance, to skip from one level to another.
In organic matter there's a big difference. The cells are differentiated and cooperate, not randomly but in specialized ways. There is some constraint in the sense that they dedicate their well being to the well being of the group, the organ or the body. There's less constraint than in inorganic matter because there are consequences that they begin to understand. It's like the musician who begins to understand the symphony and so is not just caught up in his or her playing. So there is intelligence in the cells of the body. They are trying to understand theintention of the whole organism.
Of course there is always a tendency to disorder. In a library, there is a tendency for the books to get out of place. In the long run of course the body runs down as it ages and dies. With entropy, nature provides for a turnover so there can be evolution. Otherwise evolution would be arrested. So by dying one is shifting towards the acceleration of evolution. One is contributing toward the continuing pool of life.
However, one would like to hang on a bit longer and the way to do it is to establish a friendly relationship with one's body. The best way to do this is to begin to get into the consciousness of the body's cells. Exactly as we can get into the consciousness of another person, to experience what it is like to be that person, or even experience what it's like to be a planet, what it's like to be the sun, one can get into the consciousness of the cells of the body.
The techniques of mediation need to evolve, just as in every other field of activity. We can't just keep doing things as they were done in the Middle Ages. To use mediation for healing, we really have to study anatomy, biology, histology. *should be able to use videos of the activity of the cells of the body. For example we could see what happens to the 'T' cells when there's cancer, see the cells moving, getting down to the job. The yogis have been able to visualize this in a rudimentary way, but now we're living in a time when we have all this knowledge at our disposal and we need to make use of it. 

Lesson #44:  Awakening & Illumination

What are the steps that lead to illumination? As you know illumination is always very closely linked with awakening. One of the more tangible features of a state of illumination is that one is absolutely radiant, so that one's presence fills the room with light. This goes together with a state of acute awareness on all levels, perspicacity, alacrity, insight, intuition. It also goes together with all the shadows which take away our light, which cause resentment and hatred, dishonesty, lasciviousness, or any kind of psychic uncleanliness. To become more radiant, we need to work at all levels of our being, the physical, thoughts, emotions.
At the physical level, practices of visualizing light enhance the radiation of photons from our bodies. The cells of our body are continually proliferating in the process of mitosis. Every time a cell divides there is a tremendous outbreak of light, of photons radiating from the body, travelling through space at the speed of 186,000 miles a second.
When you look a flower or even a tree or blade of grass, you must know that it is fluorescing light, it is not just reflecting the light of the sun. In the same way, our own flesh, the veryelectrons of the body, are being transmuted into photons. The electrons free themselves from their orbits and begin to dance the dance of Shiva. When they expend all their energy and return to their earlier state, any energy that remains is fluoresced as light. They are continually absorbing light from the sun and then giving out that light in the form of fluorescence. The other thing that is happening is that your body is burning. It is in a state of combustion, giving out infrared rays, in the form of heat but also light of all different frequencies.
The physical visualization will help, but there is a deeper work to do, to clarify the mirror of the soul as the Sufis say. If one isn't totally honest, the thoughts become confused, ambiguous. So there is work to do in meditation in order to make the thoughts luminous.
The Tibetans work with the colors of the aura to transmute the rather gross energy of infrared light into ultraviolet frequencies. Instead of the colors of the aura being random, as they are most of the time, they start ordering themselves in a sequence rather like a rainbow. We have red at the bottom and ultraviolet at the top and gold in the middle. In between we have orange in the solar plexus, green in the throat center, blue in the eyes, violet in the third eye. In the pituitary gland, which is called the bindu by the Yogis, we have crystalline, diamond-like, colorless light. Then above the head is a whole array where all the colors are repeated again. Of course, it is much more complex than this. There are beautiful colors of light beyond the visible range, frequencies which we don't interpret as colors but which are incredibly beautiful.
So in this method, as you inhale you are particularly conscious of giving order to the colors of your aura. Then as you hold your breath, let yourself be moved by the symphony of light at all revels, and that includes the ultimate level which is the light of intelligence, Nur-akhlake. The moment of illumination comes with this awakening, when you see your real being as a light of intelligence that casts its light on all things and makes all things clear. Then you see that all the different bodies of light, that have accrued to that pristine core of your being, are like a support system, like the lamp that protects the light.
When you exhale you might experience the miracle whereby the intensity of your awareness of your awakening brightens your aura. One could say the light of intelligence enhances the light of the aura. It's just like when you grasp something that you hadn't understood before. Suddenly there is a smile, an outburst of energy, and there is a breakthrough of light. Your whole aura bums all of a sudden with a brighter flame, because of the intensity of your awareness. What happens is expressed in the Koran by the words "a light upon a light." The light of your awareness (what the early Christian church fathers like Gregory of Nissa called the uncreated light) somehow impacts what is called the created light that we understand as photons.
In this way, you can see the relationship between awakening and illumination. Awakening triggers off illumination.
The same is true of emotions. We want to make our emotions luminous. I am not using metaphor when I say that emotions can be luminous. When a person expresses a generous thought, a generous emotion, a generous gesture, the person smiles. When the face smiles, physiologically the body bums more brightly. It fluoresces, emitting more light than ever. One says in science that the cells are in an excited state; the cells of the body experience ecstacy. The ecstacy of the psyche is communicated to one's body. Therefore, one's emotional attunement is a prerequisite for being illuminated.
Unconditional love is a good example of an emotion that is luminous, compared with the dark emotions of hatred, anger and jealousy. All such emotions are represented in Christianity as the fall. There is no doubt about it; there is a fall. A kind of moral gravity draws us from the sublime into the vulgar. If one wishes to attain a sense of fulfillment in one's life, one needs to overcome that gravity pull by working with oneself to clarify that whole area which is murky and dusky, and which tends to cloud the clarity of one's soul.
Through emotions we can reach the plane of pure splendor. It may be easier if you begin by imagining something beautiful. It could be a beautiful object, or a beautiful gesture, or a beautiful thought. Music is helpful because you don't have a form. You have got to make that quantum leap beyond the tangible, and it is the attunement of your emotion that will trigger off that leap. However, there's a limit to visualization. You can only take the next step if you are so caught up in the image of beauty that you are shattered to the core of your being, so you don't know whether you are crying or laughing, it is so beautiful. If one is shaken in one's emotion then it does affect the heart with its joy and its pain. Somehow the door to the emotion of the soul is the emotion of the heart.
The next step is the "ah ha" moment, the moment when all of a sudden you grasp the divine intention, not the programming, the intention is beyond the programming. You grasp beingness. I don't want to say the being of God; that is a projection. You grasp that all is one being. You don't reduce a being to its body; it is the mind, the emotion, the presence, the attunement, the intention. Now, consciously, that sudden click of intelligence triggers off an outburst of light, a clarity of awakening.
Then there is a breakthrough of light, right down to your aura, light that reaches right into the stars. The stars are beings, not little bits of light in the sky; they are beings of light. So while the photons of your aura are bombarding the stars, your being is connecting with the beings of the archangels of the stars. So there is communication at all levels. There is light upon light, and life communicating life to life, and the ecstacyof creation, and you are part of that wonder. you don't have a form. You have got to make that quantum leap beyond the tangible, and it is the attunement of your emotion that will trigger off that leap. However, there's a limit to visualization. You can only take the next step if you are so caught up in the image of beauty that you are shattered to the core of your being, so you don't know whether you are crying or laughing, it is so beautiful. If one is shaken in one's emotion then it does affect the heart with its joy and its pain. Somehow the door to the emotion of the soul is the emotion of the heart.
The next step is the "ah ha" moment, the moment when all of a sudden you grasp the divine intention, not the programming, the intention is beyond the programming. You grasp beingness. I don't want to say the being of God; that is a projection. You grasp that all is one being. You don't reduce a being to its body; it is the mind, the emotion, the presence, the attunement, the intention. Now, consciously, that sudden click of intelligence triggers off an outburst of light, a clarity of awakening.
Then there is a breakthrough of light, right down to your aura, light that reaches right into the stars. The stars are beings, not little bits of light in the sky; they are beings of light. So while the photons of your aura are bombarding the stars, your being is connecting with the beings of the archangels of the stars. So there is communication at all levels. There is light upon light, and life communicating life to life, and the ecstacy of creation, and you are part of that wonder. 

Lesson #45:  Being a Being of Light

I'm sure that you want to belong to the tribe of people who bring light wherever they go. Actually, our beings are like those plants which photographed in ultraviolet light, are a million times more beautiful, diaphanous, translucent, radiant than they usually appear. Our representation of our body is totally inadequate, and the same thing is true of the starry sky. We think that the sky is studded with stars, whereas in fact it is a whole symphony of light. Every bit of space between the stars is filled with light. There are cosmic rays that are well beyond the range of our vision. The important thing is that the reality behind what we think of as physical reality is a reality of light, at all levels, not just the level that can be measured by scientific instruments, but at the level of the mind, the level of the emotions, and particularly at the level of consciousness, the level of intelligence.
So our meditation can start with a vision of the heavens as a world of light, from which we derive our bodies and our minds, our intelligence. Just imagine that you have descended from a world of light, and behind it the sun of the whole universe, which the Sufis call Nur-alanwar, the whole hierarchy of beings of light. This world is not just light, but beings of light.Everything is beings: planets are beings, molecules are beings, atoms are beings, electrons are beings, galaxies are beings. Everything is beings; there is no such thing as inanimate matter.
Now we have this vision of worlds of light, a whole hierarchy, and ourselves derived from it, emanating from it, descended from it into the narrow constraint of our self image. Having lost the sense of our real being, we are like the prisoners chained in the cave of Plato. The people outside would say, "the sky is blue, the grass is green," and they would say, "I don't know what you mean by 'blue,' 'green."' All they could see were shadows. So we have to break our chains, the chains in our way of thinking. That is the breakthrough that allows the memory of those worlds to come back. That ~s the moment where you can dance with joy, and say "yes, I know what I am now, I am a being of light, I have always been a being of light. How could I have forgotten that is the world I belong to." What is more, that light is interfusing what we call this world. It is not just up there. It may be found in the photons of a beer can, in the eyes of a child, sometimes in the eyes of a person who is about to die, the memory of worlds of light.
Of course, one wishes to bring the light into focus, so that it may become a reality on the physical plane. That is what one calls existentiating, becoming aware of one's aura. I would recommend a practice to do when you are walking in nature. You are aware of the light of your being. Maybe you can't see it, but physically it can be ascertained in a laboratory. Be aware of the light that is emitted from the sparkling cells of your body. Be aware of the light emitted from your hands as you touch the leaf of a tree or a flower. Be aware of the light around your head which is more intense than any other part of the body. In fact nerve tissue is much more radiant than muscle or bone tissue, so all that accumulation of cells at the top of the head causes a tremendous amount of light which is called by the Zoroastrians spardinae areola of the crown of the king or the queen.
Shahabuddin Surawardi says after their initiation those who have been invited to the temples of light don robes or mantels of light. So you may become aware that your aura is like your initiatic robe. It radiates far and wide and lights up the environment. When you come into a room you are aware of the light of your being that brings sunshine into the room.
Now the extraordinary thing is that while the aura appears rather like a tremendous interplay of rainbows, there is an effigy of light inherent in your aura. The thinking of your soul has sculptured the light of the spheres into a effigy of light. It doesn't have a boundary. It doesn't have the consistency of matter. Still, there is a structure that reflects your awareness and your degree of love and dedication and capacity for glorification and dedication. Each one is unique and all the faces are His face, as the Koran says. The divine face is coming through, trying to come through your face right down into matter.On the way it is an effigy of light.
Just imagine going through life without knowing one's real being, carrying a mask and looking in the mirror and being convinced one is what one sees in the mirror. That is the state of most of us. The miracle of life is structuring something that does not have form to start with: pure intelligence, love, nostalgia, dedication, glorification. There are no forms, but somehow the formless manifests in music as a form, or in your being as a form. That is the miracle of life. How is it that your thoughts should be expressed in words? How is it possible that the motion of your vocal cords should communicate thought from person to person? How is the ballerina able to communicate her attunement to the crowds?
That effigy is evanescent, elusive. It changes according your mood, according to your thoughts, according to your attunement. The core of it is sublime, and then there is a defilement, a deterioration, the colors of the aura becoming blurred or dark brown, grey or black. Now if you are aware of the influence of thoughts on the aura then you have wonderful feedback. You can test it and see how an untoward thought will immediately alter the colors of your aura.
Also, you can see how any dishonesty will cause confusion and ambiguity in the thoughts. You can clarify thoughts by confronting them with the power of truth. Then they become crystalline, clearly outlined, not blurred, not nebulous. You become a very clear person, and your dealings with people and with problems become clear. Just as the light of awareness can be impeded by any holding back on authenticity, the light of awareness will give you power, because then it manifests as truth, and truth is the greatest source of power.
With this awareness, you can cure yourself. The cells of your body are sparkling, emitting light; they are continually regenerating, being replaced, or replacing themselves. The intensification of the light of the aura will cause your cells to proliferate faster, and consequently to regenerate. That is healing with light. You can infuse the light of your awareness and direct the light of your aura into the cells of your body, just like casting a flashlight beam in a dark room. It is not totally dark because everything is sparkling, but you give it extra light. That light infuses your body, giving you vitality. You can also thrust that light upon your problems with all the power of that light that will brook of no compromise. The light of your being will correct the misassessment of your consciousness. Your consciousness will now be able to grasp what your intelligence is seeing, just like one has a hunch about something and then corroborates it by observing, that is, using one's consciousness.
Remember that that light is revealed and reveals. The Sufis say it is not the light that is seen, it is the light that sees. Itis not only revealing; it is creative because it unleashes the latencies in all it encounters. It is like an illusion that is dissipated by a light, like a cloudy image that you think you see at dawn and then as the light gets stronger that image is dissipated by the clarity of the light that has dawned upon it.
We start with our assessment of our problems and then the light of the divine glance cast upon it dissipates the illusion. That light is the light of the divine intention. You can only understand your problems in terms of the divine intention. I am not saying that one is a puppet in the divine programming and that all is predestined. The divine intention has become processed into your free will. However, if you disconnect it from the original intention then there is distortion and confusion. It becomes counterproductive and eventually defeats its own purpose, like a battery that has been disconnected with a charger and is on its own trip.
That light of the divine glance will cut right into the souls of people. It will not only reveal their deepest motivations and their attunement to you, but will reveal themselves to themselves, therefore relieving them of the obstacles that stand in the way of unfurling their potentials. That is why the divine glance is not only cognitive but also creative.
We need to overcome the dichotomy in our minds between the divine glance and the human glance, the idea that I am the eyes through which God sees. No, as Ibin Arabi says, God is the one who sees, and that through which he sees, and that which he sees. Instead of thinking that you are the eyes through which God sees, think that your glance is the divine glance that is looking into the universe. It has been mitigated, distorted, darkened, denigrated, but it is the divine glance, the glance of the king or the queen, that gives light and life to all things. 
Lesson #46:  Building One's Own Temple of Light with One's aura.
"This is not my body, it is the temple of God; this is not my heart, it is the altar in the temple of God."  
Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan. 
Introductory Remarks:
It is incumbent to realize that:
	A)  the cells of the body (actually the atoms) absorb light from the environment, including cosmic rays from outer space, and emit (also transmit) light into the environment;
	B)  the human aura in its purely physical aspect is constituted by the radiation of this light that sparkles as the cells divide (in mitosis), the nerve cells being the most effective;
	C)  since the brain is made of an intense concentration of nerve cells, the brain is lit up from inside.  The optic nerves, being an extension of the brain, projects the middle range frequencies of this light through the retina and cornea into space, but the high frequency (ultra-violet) passes through the skull and can be beamed by dint of visualization;
	D)  visualizing a form projects part of the aura into a real light structure in space, like a hologram;
	E)  this structure is greatly enhanced by moving the body in a regular architectonic motion repeatedly.
PRACTICES:
"The exercise of zikr sets the heart to rhythm."  
Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan.
	1)  Imagine that you are gazing into a blinding light, courageously.  ("To look into the sun, one has to have eyes like the sun."  Plotinus)
	2)  Fix your attention upon the brain, being an intense concentration of nerve cells it is as though intensely lit up from inside.
	3)  Visualize the effulgence within the brain threaded down through the optic nerves and projected into space from the retinae through the cornea as two beams of light.
	4)  Close your eye-lids, turn your eye-balls upwards, and as you inhale, concentrate on the intense light in the brain.
	5)  Visualize the corona of sparkling diaphanous light - colorless, although flickering flashes of multi-colored light that appear as a corona above your head.
	6)  Now hold your breath with your eye-balls still turned upwards, though now you focus above your head, and fix your attention on your consciousness (or better, your intelligence) that you represent as having the ability to cast light upon things, yet not a physical light.
	7)  As you exhale, imagine that the luminous intensity of your awareness and wakefulness enhances the effulgence of the beams cast from your eyes which you visualize as sky blue; moreover visualize a third beam cast forwards through the middle of your forehead that you imagine to be violet.
	8)  As you inhale with eyes upturned, visualize the corona.
	9)  Now as you exhale, converge the two beams of your glance (blue) into a spotlight suspended in the void, approximately 6 feet ahead.
	10) Again as you exhale, concentrate on the violet beam breaking through the blue spotlight.
	11) Presently visualize the spotlight as a blue sapphire being traversed by a violet beam.
	12) At this stage, as you exhale, notice the green hue emitted by your throat chakra (pharyngeal plexus), and the glorious golden radiance of your heart chakra (cardiac plexus).
	13) The moment has come when, as you exhale, you rotate your upper body clockwise around that pivot of your body that is the solar plexus, describing first a violet circle with your third eye, accompanied with a blue concentric circle, now the colorless (with flashing hues) outer circle described by your head, and the golden inner circle described by your heart.
	14) By sheer force of repetition, these circles become apparently indelible:  you have literally constructed a whole structure of light around your body - numberless bands of hues aligned in concentric circles after the model of the spectrum - like a rainbow.
	15) By widening the circles, they appear as ever extending spirals - like a vortex (a galaxy) of light.
	16) To extend these into concentric spheres instead of two-dimensional vortici, you now rotate your head and upper body forward, downwards, toward behind you as you inhale, eventually returning to the left and right motion as you exhale.  We now have two meridians building a three dimensional light structure.  You will still notice that the left-right motion conveys the impression of an ever widening sphere (centrifugal) whereas the forward-backward motion gives you the impression of drawing within (centripetal).  The protective membrane of the temple is your radiance, not a barrier; also it filters and transmutes light from the environment.  You have fashioned with your aura a temple of light.  Yet it is only a splendid vortex of light in that infinite temple of light shaped by the galaxies.
	17) You introduce a moment of retention of your breath between the inhaling and the exhaling, so that toward the end of the inhaling, you concentrate on the void in the solar plexus (the power station, the white hole from which new energy emerges into your universe).  Immediately shift your attention from the solar plexus to the heart chakra, and you experience this upward flow of new-born life-energy and radiance.
	18) Now if you were endowed with the spirit of a dervish and started revolving like the Mevlevi, the meridians being circles or spirals of light would indubitably form a sphere - or ever extending sphere of sheer effulgence.  You are dancing, revolving like a star in the choreography of light of the heavens!
	19) Last move:  still holding your breath, you quicken your heart chakra with the breath of pure spirit that you experience as descending in that temple of light that you have built through an aperture at the top.	
	20) You have the impression that the temple of light has been transfigured into a further temple of subtler light that appears to adumbrate the temple of physical light and seems positioned a little higher up, space-wise.  And this feeling may be perpetrated further and further in infinite regress.
	21) There is yet one further step:  was not the purpose for which the temple is built to provide a sacred abode in which the Divine Presence may be ideally experienced?  An idyllic environment fashioned in light providing protection against mundanity and sacrilege eminently conducive to discovering one's highest ideal:  God?
	22) Are there any further steps?  Discover that we not only need to fashion the temple, but also fulfill our human role in the temple, as priest, as knight, as hermit, as devotee, as musician, as verger, as sweeper, and many more.


As far as I can tell, this concludes Lesson 46, and as far as I can tell, Lesson 46 was the last Lesson in this Course.  But there was no signoff, so I'm not sure.

 Sa, Campra, CH-6718 Olivone, Switzerland
 20 Oct '05 - 17 Tishrei - 3rd day of Sukot - Concentration is Yakov
 17 Ramadan
 and still a cold grey day here.  Nice to be warm in a dry refurbished shipping container.  "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." (USA saying, 1900's).  I am greatful to the Vanzetti's for all they have done for me.