And it’s remarkable how many meditative efforts there are being launched by groups today to bring enlightenment to humanity, to bring a redirection to human affairs. There are meditations for peace, for right human relations, for goodwill, for international unity that are going on constantly and in a tremendous variety by many different groups throughout the world that are organizing for that purpose. So there’s this awareness that in numbers we do have the capacity to make a difference and we can use our mind to think into being the new world. Visualization is an essential aspect of meditation. Being able to visualize the world we would choose, the world that we would see given to our children. We have to begin by visualizing that world, imagining it. What would it be? What would it contain? What would it not contain? We build that mental image through meditation and gradually it becomes anchored.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner Sight is simply seeing that which is always present but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way, with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with Inner Sight. Our topic for today is meditation. We have to give some credit to our founder, Alice Bailey who wrote twenty-four volumes of literature, and the main inspiration for the dialogue on the show comes from the works of Alice Bailey, as does the following thought: “The basic objective of meditation is to enable an individual to become in outer manifestation what he or she is in inner reality.” We hear a lot about meditation these days, but what is it really intended to do?
Sarah: There are many different types of meditation and I suppose a lot of people think of different things, stress reduction, personal development, relaxation, perhaps psychic awareness. Those are all possible objectives of meditation. The kind of meditation that we practice in our work is essentially to unite the soul, the inner being, with the outer personality or who we seem to be. In other words, to make a complete unity between who we really are inwardly as souls and who we are outwardly as we present to the world. There’s often a disconnect, and this is part of what I think causes so much suffering and anxiety in people, this awareness that they’re not their true selves, they’re not “authentic,” so to speak. Meditation is a way of bringing about an integration of the various aspects of our nature, finding the appropriate place for our physical life, our emotional, aspirational life, the life of the mind, and the inner life, the spiritual quest, bringing about a real unity between them. Last time we discussed the role of the mind in the awakening of the spiritual seeker, and the mind is the means by which we learn to meditate, so it’s terribly important.
Dale: Right, meditation acts as a doorway into the inner planes of reality, and it enables one to traverse, I guess you’d say, into this inner realm by way of the mind. And meditation is the means by which one accomplishes that.
Sarah: To me, an image of the effect of meditation is the boomerang that is sent out and then returns upon itself back to the person who tossed it out. Meditation is a way of roping in and bringing back the objective outgoing tendency of the mind, which we talked about in our last program. The mind tends to fixate on the outer concrete world of forms and tangible objects and tangible events. That becomes the dominant reality to the mind because it can be touched and seen and smelt and felt and experienced through the senses. But the mind is called the sixth sense and the development of that sixth sense through meditation leads the mind away from the outer objective realm to the inner realm of cause and of meaning and significance. You were wondering how we develop that higher mind: I think by learning to identify cause and significance.
Dale: And it opens one up to the level of the soul, which is located—as we said before— on this plane of mind, in the higher reaches of the mind, the more very subtle reaches of the mind. Meditation is a way of creating an alignment with the soul and providing a channel for the soul energies and qualities to come through, first into the lower mind and then the brain consciousness and then into the personality self, the little self.
Sarah: Channel is an interesting word. We often use that in our discussion of meditation. A channel is an open passageway through which water or air or whatever can flow. And it’s also the means by which radio programs are sent out on the airwaves. If you want to hear a program, you have to be able to tune your radio to the appropriate channel or frequency. And that might be a good analogy for what meditation does. It tunes or adjusts the mind to access this higher frequency of the inner subtle realms and to bring through with clarity, the reality of that inner realm.
Dale: And the way that one accomplishes this is by first achieving that point of stillness…
Sarah: Not easy.
Dale: …first in your physical body—the way you sit and whether you can sit cross-legged or whether you sit in a chair doesn’t really matter that much because you’re working in the mind and the mental nature—and especially in the emotional body, the emotional self. All of that having to do with the sensory apparatus or the sensory part of us must be brought to a state of quiet because all of that can be an interruption and a hindrance to any alignment with the Higher Self.
Sarah: It doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t meditate until you’ve solved all your emotional problems, but it means that you have to train yourself to be able to disconnect or detach from them. At least for a given amount of time during which you want to meditate, you have to be able to turn your attention away from whatever exists in the emotional nature at the time. And how you do this is through training, through effort, through awareness, through learning to recognize that you are, in fact, thinking, feeling on an emotional level. A lot of people may not realize when they are. They may not realize how big a part the emotions play in their life, in their consciousness until they start to identify, and that’s the first step to disengage from these sensations, is to identify them. Right now, anger is bothering me, fear is bothering me, greed, resentment, whatever. Be able to identify it, and you learn to do that through the mind. Those are little exercises that you can practice.
Dale: Right, and those little qualities, they tend to be magnified the moment you sit down and start to meditate because then you suddenly become aware of all of these intrusions on your quietness. They’ve been there all along but you’re just perhaps not conscious of them but they all start to come up to the surface the minute you start to quiet down or try to quiet the mind.
Sarah: You realize to your shock that you’re a mess. (laughing) And for quite a number of years, many people who try to learn to meditate deal with the realization that they’re a mess in their consciousness.
Dale: Yeah, the first thing you have to do, of course, is achieve concentration. That’s the most difficult part of it; if you can begin to realize how to concentrate. People in this thinking world that we live in do concentrate a lot, but they concentrate on facts and figures and analyzing this and that. It’s a matter of quieting all of that, stilling that lower thinking mind and letting the quiet, higher qualities of the mind come through.
Sarah: But you make an interesting point that many people in the world today probably do in their way meditate without realizing it. Businesspeople, scientists, executives of all sorts who direct their minds to the solving of problems and the working out of plans are in effect meditating. They are creating, they are ruminating, they are pondering, reflecting and developing ideas. It’s said that to be successful in meditation you must be very interested in what you are meditating upon and maybe that’s why businesspeople do so well because they are very interested in being successful in the financial and business field. And the same with scientists. They work with experiments that mean everything to them. If they didn’t, they’d give them up. And so should we, when we meditate on spiritual matters, be deeply interested in the subject matter. That’s a start. That helps to concentrate the mind.
Dale: Right. And one of the definitions of meditation—at least the meditation that we follow in our work—is sustained concentrated thought. And it’s that sustained thought on a single idea or thought form that provides the basis of meditation.
Sarah: Maybe this is a point to address what some people might be wondering; if they think meditation is blanking out the mind. Emptying it out, shutting off all thinking processes and being just basically a blank slate for something new to be written upon. That’s not meditation as we practice it and in fact that can be a rather dangerous practice because it opens one up to at the worst level, possession by mischievous energies and spirits that are looking for minds they can dominate. It’s not a good idea to try to blank out the mind. What you try to do is to focus it and concentrate it, render it still and poised, and then it can be directed towards whatever subject you want to meditate upon. It’s a really advanced stage of meditation to be able to truly empty the mind and prepare it for what’s called contemplation, which is the state beyond meditation, the purely receptive state in which the still, poised, meditative mind receives energies and impulses from much higher realms. That’s extremely advanced and I don’t think we should even discuss that in an introductory program on meditation.
Dale: No, the type of meditation that we suggest right now is especially for the thinking type of intellectual here in the western world and is called Raja Yoga. It’s the princely science of the mind. It’s a very ancient technique, but still it’s very applicable today because it does involve the use of a seed thought and focusing on an idea, a single idea, and trying to work back towards the very meaning of that idea, not just reflecting on the words themselves, but getting behind the words to the meaning in what we call “the world of meaning,” because that is a practice that enables one to move in the direction of cause. So that’s a very important stage to try to develop.
Robert: What are some other thoughts that we can set forth about meditation? I find that it’s brought me a great amount of peace and it’s calmed me down a lot, so that’s been a very practical use of meditation for me. It’s been better than a sedative and also, I think lately I’ve been getting into some much better levels of thinking through taking time out to meditate every day. But what else can we say to more or less encourage people to try this useful mental tool?
Sarah: Well, actually, the kind of meditation that is called Raja Yoga can be anything but a sedative. It can be extremely energizing. And it’s a means of contacting energies that might not otherwise be available, and the response of our brain, our mind, our emotions to these in-pouring energies can be kind of disruptive. So meditation, as we practice it in the Arcane School, is not particularly calming or relaxing unless one has become very skilled at it. But it is a means of service. And I think this is an important recognition to get across to people: that meditation is not meant to be just something that you do for yourself, but something that you do for humanity. We talked before about how the plane of the mind is on its higher levels, universal, that everyone has access to certain truths and recognitions that exist in that borderless realm of the higher abstract mind. And they are not in the possession of any one individual. They exist beyond the level of individuality. They’re higher than that. Meditation can help you to direct the mind toward that realm and bring back the essence of those recognitions and energies and relay them into human consciousness through group meditation in particular. It can be a means of serving human consciousness by bringing in energies of light and love.
Dale: Yes, that’s an aspect of meditation that perhaps not everybody is aware of: that it is a tremendous service and it’s something that every individual can do every day. And if it can be done working with a group of meditators, all working together either in the same room or at the same time in different parts of the world—which is going on, by the way; we practice that at the Lucis Trust and in the Arcane School work—it generates a tremendous amount of energy. We can’t prove that, but we know that this is taking place.
Sarah: Well, if people believe that prayer by a group of people can be effective, then I think they can easily understand that meditation by a group of people can be effective.
Dale: Right, because we’re working with energy, and mental energy is very potent, as we’ve said before. The symbol of the mental energies is often fire. And it is that. They’re fiery energies. And you mentioned that meditation isn’t necessarily peaceful—at least the type of meditation that we practice isn’t necessarily all that peaceful—because it’s a working thing. It’s a working tool, using the mind as a working tool to stimulate and create these thought forms that contain the new ideas that must take place in human consciousness.
Sarah: It could be said that meditations whole premise is based on discovery of the God that dwells within each of us, of God imminent. We often think of prayer as an appeal that’s launched to the divine Being who is somewhere out there or above us or separate from us. Meditation works to awaken a recognition that God dwells not only out there beyond the world and apart from his creation—because he is greater than it—but also dwells within every aspect of his creation and within each of us, and meditation is the process whereby we awaken to the presence of divinity within ourselves and to build this integration or this unity among the various aspects of ourselves so that as our opening thought said, we become who we really are. We are divine in origin and divine in destiny as human beings and we need to awaken to that divinity within us that seeks to express itself in its fullest.
Dale: And we’re divine mediators. We are mediators between that universal energy of the Mind of God to the lower kingdoms, to the human kingdom. We act as a mediator in meditation by reaching up and establishing a rapport with the soul, setting up a two-way bridge of communication between the soul and the outer personality, the outer life of humanity. So we act as a mediator of divine ideas that come through and project these ideas through the thought currents that are constantly moving about through the world and into human consciousness.
Sarah: Most of us are not skilled enough as meditators to really make a significant difference to the world on our own. But when we work within a group, in a group context, then we can contribute to something that can truly help to inspire and uplift humanity. And it’s remarkable how many meditative efforts there are being launched by groups today to bring enlightenment to humanity, to bring a redirection to human affairs. There are meditations for peace, for right human relations, for goodwill, for international unity that are going on constantly and in a tremendous variety by many different groups throughout the world that are organizing for that purpose. So there’s this awareness that in numbers we do have the capacity to make a difference and we can use our mind to think into being the new world. Visualization is an essential aspect of meditation. Being able to visualize the world we would choose, the world that we would see given to our children. We have to begin by visualizing that world, imagining it. What would it be? What would it contain? What would it not contain? We build that mental image through meditation and gradually it becomes anchored.
Dale: That’s a very important aspect of meditation, the visualization part, because that is creating a fresh thought form of what is possible.
Sarah: And maybe each of our listeners could begin—if they wanted to try to start meditating—on a daily level, visualizing what they hope to become as human beings, building an image of that inner divine being within them and bringing it into outer manifestation. What does that mean? What would be the qualities of that inner self? This can be a place to start in meditation.
Dale: And that’s kind of our destiny, really, I think, as human beings, because we have a destiny to work with God in bringing through these divine ideas, and that’s the kind of mediating position that we hold.
Sarah: Yeah, He depends on humanity to wake up and clearly intuit and form the ideas on which His world is intended to be built. The lower kingdoms are said to be dependent on humanity’s awakening to its responsibility towards the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. It’s not just for us, but for the whole planetary scheme that we have to awaken. Maybe to close, we could just give a few pointers to our listeners on meditation as we practice it. You begin by finding a time and a place where you can meditate on a regular daily basis. Early morning is usually best because the airwaves are clearest not only in the world but in your own mind. You sit with your back straight. Don’t lie down to meditate. Sit with your back straight and erect in a chair if you’re more comfortable. Take a few slow, deep breaths and try to still the consciousness, emptying it about anything that might be bothering you or concerning you. Just put it aside for a few moments. And then using the creative imagination, you put your focus visualizing it slightly above the head, and you see this as an opening to the energies that are available and that you seek to tap in meditation. You see a line of light pouring into your mind and develop an idea according to your understanding and release it then by sounding the Great Invocation.
Robert: You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called the Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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