Truth and Fallacies About the Art of Meditation

Our title for this morning, it says here, is Truths and Fallacies about the Art of Meditation.

Now, as you know, I've been attempting to tie each of our talks in to some degree or other with the Qabalistic chants, the invocations we've been doing through this particular period in order to help you understand just what forces we are using, why we are using them, and just what is involved in the usage of the forces that have to do with what we call the Qabalistic mantra, which really involves the use of the vibratory powers involving, incidentally, along with it, the meditative principle. Principle. So we will discuss the ideas of meditation with the usage of our invocations along with whatever ideas come from you. In the tarot, we have tarot key number 17, which is called the star and is related Kabbalistically to meditation. And remember, we're going to be speaking about meditation, and we have been speaking about meditation.

And meditation, as such, is something that seems to confuse an awful lot of people.

So many have written to us, or come to us in various ways and have said, well, I really don't know how to meditate.

Others have said, I don't know how to concentrate. Trait. Others have said, I don't understand what meditation really means. Some people think they know what it means, and then they decide they don't know how. And you have your variations. And of course, as I've often told you, one of the best questions to ask when these complaints are given is this. Do you know how to worry?

Have any of you ever failed to know how to worry?

If you can worry beautifully, and who has failed to worry with genius, then certainly you know how to concentrate.

Because what is concentration?

Concentration in itself is being focused on one thought or idea, just focused. And when we're worried, don't you admit that we are focused? We try to tear our minds away. We try to tear our hearts away from the problem. But does it work? Immediately after fighting and struggling and using what we call our willpower. We find ourselves right back with our brows wrinkled, if we are prone to a wrinkled brow, or our lips and face showing the various expressions that are involved in worry. And we find ourselves right back worrying our heads off, no matter what, whether it be about ourselves, our health, our state of finances, a loved one, the loved one's state of health, or state of love, or lack of love, etc. I mean, we will focus with the most extraordinary power power when we are worried. And so the real question I have felt that one has to ask oneself at all times is, have you ever had a problem worrying? Now if you haven't had no problem in learning how to worry, and you didn't really have to learn how to worry now did you? You were born with that capacity and don't you think we're all geniuses? Every single one of us.

And we are. Now if we were born with this tremendous genius knowing how to worry, then we were born with the genius of knowing how to concentrate, because worry is concentrating on an idea, on a fear. And then the next question we ask is, all right now, now, just look back into your life and you will find how adept you are and have been at worrying. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with your ability to keep your consciousness focused on one thing. Is there now? Since I'm sure none of you will say to me, or would you, that I have never worried in my life? In fact, I'm sure none of you will even say to me that my worries haven't been a good portion of the major problems of my life.

And perhaps we should remind you then, in terms of meditation, what Job had to say, that which I feared has come upon me. Because from the concentration of the idea of worry, and I just bring this up because I know no one has ever had any problem here. We can go to its opposite, which is its constructive aspect. Instead of worrying, we have those who are perennially optimistic.

In other words, they're so determined to be optimistic that they refuse to look at anything. They refuse to look at reality. They refuse to look at truth.

And so they bumble around they do not take care of the situations at hand and although they refuse to worry they give nervous breakdowns to everyone who's tied up to them haven't you known some such at least one such so you see extremes in a cult ism are not such a good idea but now concentration is is not exactly the same thing as meditation. Our Eastern brethren tell us that we have to start with concentration. And then, after we've learned how to concentrate well, we graduate on to meditation.

But the question is, what is the difference between concentration and meditation? And is it necessary to go in for the sort of techniques that some schools of thought give us? Now, I know when I first started to look into the Eastern school of thought, I couldn't imagine anything that would bore me more than to concentrate on a flower pot with a flower on it or in it.

It just didn't send me.

Therefore, it didn't hold my concentration, which is what? But it didn't hold my attention. You see the magician, that is the symbolic representation of concentration, which is what? Attention.

And just being told that we should learn how to give attention or concentration to something doesn't do a thing. Haven't you tried it? Especially if you've been given things like a flower. Now, I can meditate on a flower for ages and ages. But if I had to make a formal meditation of the flower in order to develop concentration, my attention would go off into every area that you can imagine, and so has yours, I'm sure. Because if we've tried it, we've all found the same thing to be true.

The point is, concentration in itself is the power of attention.

And the power of attention is focusing on one particular something. It could be a thought, it could be an emotion, it can be a condition. Now when we're worrying, we're concentrating with meditation, though. And I'll try to explain that. When we are expecting, whether it's something happy or not happy, we are concentrating with with meditation.

Concentration in itself is the ability to hold the attention on something because of the fact that that something is interesting enough to hold it.

Now you can fight with yourself from now till doomsday, and you will not succeed in getting your power of attention concentrated in any area that does not happen to interest you.

I'm sure you've tried it.

When you're not interested in any specific thought or idea or condition, your mind will wander off into what it is interested in, usually a worry, but sometimes a hope, but unfortunately usually a worry, or a resentment, you know, where back and forth in the consciousness we fight with each other, he said and she said and they said and all that sort of thing. But the mind just automatically, the consciousness, the concentration, automatically floats down into its area of interest.

Therefore, what you are interested in is where your concentration will go automatically. Now, if you are going to attempt to develop your concentration by picking something that doesn't interest you because somebody gave you a technique, you're going to get very discouraged.

And so you should, because you have to find out what the principles are that are involved relating to the powers of consciousness as such.

Therefore, in Qabalah, working with the tarot, we do not utilize the abstract methods or ideas for developing the ability to understand your consciousness and its powers we work with the symbols we work with the symbols as such because every one of these pictorial images remember these represent a certain focus of consciousness which is your focus whether you know it or not. In other words, we have a group of characteristics because we are on a specific level which expresses the divine consciousness in a specific, specialized way. And the Tarot keys were brought into a manifestation by those who knew and understood and understand these forces. And it certainly was known and it is known that if we want to learn how to keep our attention focused in the area that we really want it to be focused in what we must do then is utilize some method that will hold our our attention and furthermore will stir our emotional interest because please bear in mind, interest is the emotional side of consciousness.

Interest.

If you're interested in something, it's because, why? You care. If you're interested in somebody, why? It's because you care. In other words, suppose you want to know anything in the scientific realm. The fact that you want to know want is caring you're excited about it this is power therefore again I'm just trying to show you that concentration as such will go only where we care or because we care about whatever the outcome is going to be. And therefore we have a need to know, and therefore our consciousness concentrates itself down. It's foolish to try to develop concentration through techniques that do not work in harmony with the way our own consciousness works. Consciousness works in terms of pictorial imagery. There isn't anything you think, there isn't anything you feel that doesn't have a certain kind of pictorial imagery involved.

But that is only one part of it. Along with this pictorial imagery, there is emotion. Emotion, and there's no amount of mental concentration as such that can be divorced from the feeling area. This is where so many mistakes are made. So we have to work with these feeling levels in order to charge the concentration levels with the only thing that gives the power to concentrate to begin with. That is caring. I care. As I have so often told you, we never have any trouble at all concentrating on anyone we're in love with. It goes all by itself, doesn't it? Why? Because we care. And so this caring is really what gives the power to focus the mental stuff or the mental aspect in whatever direction it is being focused.

Attention, therefore, to anything or concentration is not an intellectual process.

And this is the big mistake that has been made by people who love to pay tribute attribute to one aspect of deity and to think or feel or want to kick or destroy the aspect that is the real livingness that's involved, truly. Therefore, bear in mind, you cannot pay attention to anything unless you are interested. And if you are interested, it's because you you have an emotion, because interest in itself is an emotion, and caring is an emotion. Now then, in terms of meditation, what is the difference between concentration and meditation?

Actually, there is a difference, but it is not what we've usually read about in at least certain schools of thought. Concentration is one half of meditation or well maybe I shouldn't give you a 50 percent measurement there since after all measurements cannot be trusted but let's say that concentration is a vital portion of meditation nevertheless meditation is not only concentration So many people say, those who are spiritual aspirants particularly, I don't know what meditation really is, as I pointed out earlier.

And I think that the secret lies in trying to understand first what concentration is.

Understanding that, then we can go ahead and understand together a little more what meditation happens to be.

We should therefore realize that knowing how to worry means we know how to meditate because concentration is really one portion of worry. For instance, when you're worried, what is it you're doing with your consciousness?

First of all, your consciousness is focused or it's giving attention to one point or one area. That's the concentration attention part.

But the consciousness going round and round, deciding what it's to worry about in terms of what might happen, this is the meditation.

Are you starting to see the difference? Meditation is creative, using concentration as its focal point.

The meditative principle is really involved then with the attention getting focused in a specific mapped out area, and the imagination or creative principle going to work, creating and reaching for certain answers. Now, there are different levels of meditation. We'll go into that now. There is the meditative level, which we've just been talking about, about, where one is quite a genius at worrying the hypochondria or the relationship levels and areas. We have this much that we experience. We experience because we meditated it in a previous incarnation. And some will say, is this just? Well, where a soul has no concept of time or space, but as a beginningless, endless evolution. This waking up and going to sleep and waking up going to sleep. Do you think you're being cheated because you go to bed and go to sleep and then wake up the next morning to take on your sighs and moans and groans or your hopes and joys and aspirations, whichever you decide to focus on? Well, in the reincarnational aspect of evolution we have the same principle working really we rest from the uh shall we say living out of our creative meditational principle the point is we are all meditators we can't help meditating just like we don't have to learn how to be uh good concentrators because I just pointed it out how well we can worry. We really do not have to learn how to meditate in the usual sense, or in the sense that people think it means. We do have to learn how to meditate constructively, and elementary metaphysics won't give it to us. Now, let me then try to help you see how this meditative principle works, so that you can realize you already know how to meditate, that you don't have to learn how, but what you have to do is work with that which will help you to use your meditative powers in the direction of your own evolution and the evolution of life itself and towards real fulfillment.

Now, worrying, as I pointed out, is a meditative principle because it combines defines the concentration or attention on a special area and the scanning of the consciousness back and forth or round and round, hunting and bringing in the images, charging it with the emotions. Mind you, worrying is full of an emotional force. Is this not so? Now, we've all worried enough and we know an emotional force gets tied up and it gets tied up in an image and this image that the emotional force is tied up into is really the meditative principle because you're concentrating on an image and you're charging the image with emotional force or power and that's the power of life in the universe and growth and then on top of that you're holding yourself open as a cup of expectation because naturally if you if you're meditating yourself a worry you're expecting it I hope you can see this because this is the whole secret of understanding meditation if I show it to you in a way where you've all done it so beautifully that is on the worry side then I hope I'll be able to help you to see how we can reverse the process because those of us who are spiritual aspirants of course have come to see these powers that reside in us and having come to see them there are some who become afraid temporarily anyway to even think because you know they decide to meditate on what they want and then they get that plus whatever else they didn't bargain for.

And you go through your various stages of learning how to understand the power of your own beingness. That is, the power of your own concentrating, meditative consciousness, which is, which is, and which you have.

You have it in any case.

All right, then. Once you can admit to yourself that you are the way the creative principle works to bring tomorrow into manifestation once you can realize that whatever it is you are or have today is what what you have charged meditationally from the past. Not necessarily this incarnation, mind you, though usually it's a mixture.

And so never blame past incarnations. We're a growing selfhood, and we will have responded in this incarnation to our tendencies from the past, all part of the total process. Once we can see that, We should be able to see then that meditation is something we should learn to use consciously instead of letting our consciousness fall into the traps of creation, which our consciousness will do.

And how do we use our meditative creative principles consciously?

Well, of course, as I pointed out, first of all, we have to see that we have been using it all along. Until we're willing to recognize that we have this power, we haven't got enough focus of attention to bring the realization into expression. Bear in mind then that you are meditating all the time you are. Every time you hold an image that has emotion in it, this is the meditative principle. Now in formal meditation, of course, we train you in using the tarot, in learning how to take a negative emotion and lift your emotion to a positive emotion with the imagery so that you can become a trained and conscious meditator in, with, and through God instead of the negative meditators that we are so much of the time.

But if we realize that meditation as such really involves, although there are different levels, of course, of meditation. I say that we have reached a point where we can and should hold our minds and hearts in that meditative state which is always scanning for the happy outcome.

Now, meditation is the emotion and expectation expectation, and the reaching of the mind, the caring. In other words, it's like a consciousness opening itself up like a cup. And when we walk out in the street, for instance, we open our consciousness like a cup to whatever our emotions determine we shall do. We are are building our tomorrow with everything we feel and scan meditatively. Meditation, then, bear in mind, really has to do with that yearning to understand that which we are perceiving as a concentration. And it has to do also with the yearning to expand our perceptions and insight and to grow ourselves.

And meditation is something that should not be just a formal thing.

We do formal exercises to train our subconsciousness, but meditation should be something we are in 24 hours a day. There should be a portion of our consciousness holding itself like a cup to the divine will and the divine inspiration and pointed with discipline to receive the divine beauty and to rest and seek and express, to rest in and seek and express the divine love. This is the meditative process which uses our power of concentration. Instead of falling into the other and negative areas which we spoke about. So remember then, my darlings, reach with that which you already have. You don't have to learn how to meditate, just like you don't have to learn how to concentrate. Learn how to use the methods we have here so that these powers that you have and are will be utilized constructively for yourself and all others, and thus I, if I be lifted up, shall lift all others unto myself and thus will we keep adding beauty upon beauty and light upon light and fulfillment upon fulfillment and we owe this to ourselves and all others to meditate consciously, constructively, inspirationally in, with, from and through the Lord of Life.

Thank you.