53 - The Temple as Refuge for the Sacred

Fashioning the Temple of Light out of the Fabric of your Aura

People used to prepare a place to invite the presence of God.

Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan

On a certain night where there was sunlight, Hermes was at prayers in the Temple of Light, when the column of dawn blazed forth, he saw an earth about to be engulfed, with cities upon which the divine wrath had descended, that fell into the abyss. Hermes shouted: "You are my father, rescue me from the enclosure of those near to perdition!" And he heard a voice replying; "take hold of the cable of our irradiations and climb up to the battlements of the throne." As he climbed up there, beneath his feet, there was an earth and a heaven.

Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi

Perhaps our greatest need of which most of us are unaware is that of the sacred. What does this mean for us? To most it is our connectivity with that ineffable reality mysteriously concealed behind our lives that traditionally formulates under the ready concept: God.

In our personal purview, it is embodied in our sense of the dignity of our human status that we may treasure as our divine status, of which we become ostensibly aware when, being insulted or humiliated, it is flaunted. When the boundary of our self-respect is trespassed, we fell defeated, betrayed, devastated. Perhaps the most sickening examples of this total violation of this most fundamental human value are to be found in the psychic degradation meted out to prisoners in those shameful blotches on our civilizations: the concentration camps.

The watchdog of the threshold of the sacred area of our being is outrage. Contrasting with personal rage, the whole of humanity, nay the whole universe seems to join us in solidarity for any kind of abuse of the dignity of the human status which is what we mean by the divine principle invested in our being.

Traditionally the demarcation between the sacred and the profane was and is still somewhat defined by the threshold of the temple or place of worship. Purification and other rites mark the passage from the profane to the sacred. In some churches several thresholds are delineated, culminating in the "sancto-sanctorum" reserved for the priests.

These outer manifestations of deep inherent principles evidence the need of the human being to protect that sacred from sacrilege. Some hermits or monks consider the profanity, selfishness and guile experienced in the "the word" with contempt and seek refuge in a physically and psychologically protected zone, in the cave, the cloister, or just a psychological aloofness or seclusion. A clear delineation between the sacred and the profane is to be found in the Hindu tradition of the "sannyasin", the anchorite, who is supposed to be celibate. He is not allowed to possess anything, nor get a job, (he may carry a beggar's bowl, although he is not supposed to beg) as opposed to the household who has a family and is supposed to grind the mill.

Nowadays, there is a tendency to relax this compartmentation. Many people aspire to bring spirituality into their lives, to honor their highest ideals in service of their fellow beings in real life. Still a few, disappointed in their circumstances, followed by some disenchantment in "the profane" seek refuge in a spiritual environment. Some judgementalism may lurk behind this altitude, and causing one to disassociate from fellow beings in their strifes and sufferings.

However, exposed to so much grossness, greed and vulgarity, and the effects of immersion in the power games and materialism becomes addictive, the more sensitive souls nurture a desperate need to protect the sacred zone of their psyche, honor it and exult in it. This is why people meditate. There is a way of building an inner temple to house that sacred dimension of our being, within which it can be nurtured.

The Sufi practice of the "dhikr" lends itself favorably to this deep felt need of the human being, because it is a meditation in motion. By churning one's magnetic field: that is rotation the upper pole, namely the head of that magnet constituted by our bodies around the center of gravity that is the solar plexus, one is churning the magnetic field of the Planet and of the universe in a vortex. This a reality in terms of an energy field structured as a personal sanctuary.

As one seeks to turn within, one naturally tends to cut the input of impressions from the environment, as for example one does as one falls to sleep. Understandably the yogis covet this inner harbor from the turmoil of profane life in "Samadhi" where all sensory and even mental impressions are silenced. Yet, if presently we ascribe some value to achievement in life, then we must find a way of incorporating the environment, both physical and psychological. Those elements that we wish to access may be selected, and even transmuted as they flow into the deeper recesses of our being where we harbor and treasure that dimension of our being which we deem sacred. This process of selectivity (filtering in alchemy) followed by transmutation (distillation in Alchemy) is effected by affinity: to the like, the like accrues.

In the view of Sufism, this input processing yielding speculative knowledge cannot compare with the intuitive, emerging from within, knowledge. But we are talking about a revealed knowledge that cannot be acquired, and this is the programming of the mind of the universe, that one can only receive "signs" of it in the silence of inner contemplation. There is some little facilitation that one can provide by preparing oneself (like the proverbial five virgins).

A thought-raising clue to what some dervishes do to enlist this paradoxical divine knowledge is to be found in a Mazdean practice. It is one more indication of the transmission of the knowledge of the Magi to the Iranian Sufis. The clue can be deciphered from a cryptic story: in the early legends of Eran Veg - the pristine Aryan paradise, Jamshed, a famed Mazdean magus is ascribed a bowl punctured by 7 holes (obviously the seven sensory inlets in one's head.)

That magical bowl was endowed by ten straps; and here comes the riddle: when he pulled on the straps, the bowl opened (instead of closed) and revealed to him "signs" of the invisible. Now try to figure that one out! One obvious clue; the seven holes, taken as the seven sensory apertures in our head - you grasped that; the next one: by being closed, it opened from inside; the senses as Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan says were turned inside. You guessed that? Have you guessed what are the ten straps? I hope you did if you are ready to practice it. The riddle does not end there: he found a way of rotating the bowl, thus fashioning a temple of light! Here was the site of revelation.

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 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 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.
