Advanced Meditations with Sound
If you have worked through suggestions in Simple Sound Meditations you might wish to deepen your work with what follows.
“ I AM” as it finds itself in me is an outreach of the ‘I’ of the universe. Religions are a way of presenting to people the truth of the presence of awareness in all things and its flowering in the human being as self awareness. Individualism develops this strength or it can shatter it if or when an individual forgets to notice that the sense of self arising within is not independent of the rest of the world. Once one begins to tune into this aspect of universal consciousness one can find its manifestations in all things and also in no-thing. Levels of consciousness make themselves known to the individual that have subtle strengths. If rightly attuned these can become powers that give an individual the power to enhance aspects of the world around in beautiful ways. This mediation channels such powers of becoming more than ‘self’ in the service of the awakening of all humanity.
The meditations in Simple Sound Meditations can lead to an experience of the ‘harmony of the spheres’, the music that is the flow of the All Creator through all of existence. This one is deisgned to attune the everyday self to this harmony.
Through wrestling with the experiences these meditations offer the meditant becomes Creator of new substance: Spiritual forces become available in the world and blessings can seep through the meditant’s higher love into general human life; both on a cosmic level, i.e. at great distance usually unknown to the meditant, and on a specific level, into the lives of people the meditant sets out to assist.
Through exercising these meditations and facing the challenges that becoming a servant of Love, of the True I AM of all humankind calls up (1) forces are created within the meditant that work on, even into the next life becoming talents and powers that play a positive and creative role in the development of Mankind as a whole.
I offer my thanks to Rudolf Steiner for his initiation of these guidelines and confess my debt to him while also saying that I speak from my own practice and experience.
Tune your bowl to a harmonic minor for this meditation then retune the 4th down one semitone to give a major third next abov the minor third. Both will be needed.
This is a meditation, prepare yourself accordingly.
Pluck/stroke the key note and listen carefully, what can you actually hear? go into it deeply, allowing all the different sounds that you hear to become the soul you are in that moment. Within you let the spaces of the whole note resound, become the spaces between you and everything that you are and are not.
Now sound the seventh above. Sound them together or following so that they sound together. This is a whole new world. Speak inwardly the space from one sound to another, not in words, but like a lover looking across the river to the beloved calling across where words wont reach. How can the spaces within this interval be seen, be felt, what can you find as source of this interval, what comes through the space between these notes? In normal music this interval is experienced as a cliff, a difficult edge that seeks resolution in the octave and will always tend to fall off towards it. In meditation it can be very different, this interval can open up the Singing Spheres as none other, the spaces in this sound seem able to hold the spaces between the planets themselves. Here in this sound space the whole cosmic I AM may be sensed, a solar system aware of itself, aware of it’s beloved progeny: The Human Being. Again do what you can to hold the space in this sound, repeat as required till you can stand in the gateway, observing the cosmic Human Being out there and the incarnate self in here.
Coming down two strings play the fifth together with the key note or directly following. By itself the fifth is a sort of sunrise interval, a flowering of the awareness of self into the light of the whole, used following on to the seventh this interval gives a new experience, immerse yourself carefully, carrying in your soul the vision granted by the 7th and bringing it onto the fifth. There you may find that a new resolve enters you, a resolve that can carry into your life the sort of love that knows how to sacrifice in joy that good may become.(2)
This passage of resolve is the journey of Love, the incarnating I AM into the world. From the 7th to the 5th is the movement from being in the Cosmic Self to resolving the I to work in the world. Not self resolve, Creator resolve, His sending of I AM, into a new me at brith and at any moment, such as NOW.
The next interval is from the key note two strings up, the minor third following the 7th and the 5th the minor third can allow you to feel right into this point in life. The whole pain of being incarnate is existential, there is in any moment the uncertainty and pain of how to BE in this hard world. This sequence of intervals, 7th, 5th, minor 3rd can allow one a fairly whole vision of this feeling. The Cosmic I, the universe’s identification with us, is in this moment experienced. Are we able, willing to give up the little self, the identification with what we like to believe we are and experience such power, such Love. (3) Here, if you can find it is another moment of Creation. You, the meditant are in this moment/process creating a substance, a space through which the Cosmic I, that which gave us freedom, is invited to participate in Human life. The split is healing, two becomes one.
The final step in this meditation is the Major third: key note to fourth string up in the tuning advised above. Now there is joy. What was sacrifice or the willingness to experience pain now flowers into joy and the choice of giving or receiving this joy is also there. I suspect that I do not need to tell you much about this moment at all, if you have got this far you will find for yourself how the Cosmic I expands now into the body. I AM is able to stand up, having made the journey from its cosmic expression to its personal expression. A journey that reflects Christ’s descent into the body of Jesus, a journey we are all making to bring the True Self of all humankind into expression, here and now, bit by bit. A journey made again for us each time as the sacrifice of God in Loving us, His Creation. This needs to happen without cease, in every second, every dawn, every decision, (and ultimately in every human body) if any one of us is to become a true servant of the Love that made us.
The Human Being, a work in progress, the Earth’s outreach, striving to make herself sensitive to consciousness. Also the inreach of the stars seeking to light up in a new way – or – the hunger of the darkness to experience light, the sacrifice of the light to become strong. The Being of Christ in manifold expression:
Man, a work in progress and I, able to be a creator part of that.
Love
Notes.
(1). Such meditations as this one stir up the soul like a rush of new water into a pond raises the silt. Life’s every day challenges can become more stark. There are specific methods not mentioned here by which these challenges can be met.
(2). Please note that I am not offering you something to pass on here, something to discuss with friends. Here I am offering you a way of experience that may change you, that may store up in you forces that will change you so that what you carry for mankind can be more powerfully radiated, more deeply given.
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
T S Elliot, four quartets: Little Gidding I
(3) Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
T S Elliot, Little Gidding IV
Other commentators:
If you want what the visible world can give you, you are an employee
If you seek the invisible you are not being true to yourself.
Both wishes are foolish
But you will be forgiven for forgetting
that what you really want is Love’s confusing joy.
Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
To arrive where you are,
to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
T S Elliot, East Coker lll
- Truth is paradoxically both an objective discovery and yet: “…a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality.” (Rudolf Steiner)
This is one way of describing what one is creating in a meditation like this.
