The next instruction is to ‘hold vacancy of mind for ten minutes’. That sounds impossible. When you try it and look, then you will realise that there will still be impressions in the mind, things coming in from the senses, hearing, feeling the pressure of what you are sitting on, temperature changes on your skin etc. but not actual ‘thought’ meaning no inner-conversation, no mental pictures. When I say no mental pictures, I don’t mean just created ones where you choose to imagine something, I’m talking also about the spontaneous ones that just come up by themselves. Again, not an easy feat, and again, not an insignificant one. A large part of magick, practical philosophy, positive thinking and just…. loads of good stuff 😛 is based on mental discipline. Mental discipline is a two edged sword. There are things you choose to populate the mind with, and conversely (and just as importantly) things you prohibit.
Many people worry about ‘thought-control’ in any form, perhaps because of Freud’s ideas. He taught that thoughts are like energies and they need to flow and if you block them it will cause neurosis, and I think that there is something to this. But he was talking about completely forgetting about traumatic events, which then fester in the mind. There is a big difference between an unhealed and an undisciplined mind.
Obviously, the practical application of this skill isn’t to walk around with a ‘vacancy of mind’, i.e. not ever thinking anything. The end result, if you can manage this for ten minutes, is to have the skill of mindfully watching for ‘thought pressure’ or a thought, something that is trying to rise in consciousness, and not fueling that thought to fruition.
In practical effect, it would mean, for example. You do your Jupiter ritual for abundance, or pray for a week or whatever it is. You make positive affirmations about being wealthy, but at some point, you are going to have to say, I will NEVER allow the thought or self-concept to arise in my mind that I am anything less than a total, money magnet. Again, no mean feat, but these mental muscles are … mental muscles, trainable, skills like concentration (thinking one thing) not thinking something (letting go) ‘audio-recalling’, visualising, they’re all ‘spiritual muscles’, you practice them daily. There is a threshold. If you get to the point that you can ‘not fuel’ or allow any thought for a full ten minutes, then your mind will become largely disciplined, most of the thoughts, ideas and most importantly: self-concepts, will be the ones that you WANT to have. THINK WHAT YOU WANT.
This skill, of holding an idea, and these other skills, are not just for the purpose of magick and manifestation, i.e. changing reality to conform with will (creating the life you want). Yes, this is manifestation, but magick is also a path. Opening the spiritual senses gives access to unseen worlds, and this can affect reality in the physical plane, and also open a path of spiritual attainment.
One thing that comes to mind, to return to Buddhism, is the Zen idea of a koan, i.e. to meditate on an unanswerable question (unanswerable to the logical mind) to break through the ego into non-dual thinking and enlightenment.
How exactly would you work with a koan? I’m not saying go and work with a koan (unless you want to); I’m illustrating the broad spiritual uses of the skills taught in this book. So, to take a well known koan, the sound of one hand clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping? Ultimately, there is no logical answer. Not unless you’re a smartass, like I used to be. I first read this koan when I was a teenager, and of course, I thought I knew everything. As soon as I read it, what is the sound of one hand clapping, I thought: wind. One hand clapping is basically waving, and if it has a sound, it would be wind — which is ridiculous. This isn’t the answer. If I had have been sitting in the Zen temple and said this to the master, no doubt they would have smacked me across the head with a stick.
Yet as a fifteen year old, I thought I’d instantly solved the koan all these spiritual monks spend a lifetime contemplating in vain. Luckily, it didn’t last for long. I did have the logical thought, ‘If that was enlightenment, why am I still suffering?’, and so it was back to the path.
I did actually take the precepts in a Zen temple, where I lived for a time, but it was Soto, and so we didn’t actually do koans; it’s not something I was personally trained in. But if that was something you wanted to do, how would you go about it? There is a question with no answer, so you think and think and think, logically, and you know that all the thoughts and ideas are wrong because the real answer will bring peace, it will bring an ultimate comprehension of reality. A smartass answer like ‘wind’ doesn’t cut it, not for longer than two minutes to someone older than twenty.
What do you do when you’re thinking about something and there is no answer. There is an analogy to misplacing something. When you have some possession and you know it isn’t lost, it’s just misplaced, and you ‘rack your brain’ trying to think where it might be. What specifically happens in consciousness? Well you’d create a series of mental pictures, partly of the past, where you last were with the possession, what you were doing when you last had it, possible scenarios of someone tidying it up and where they might have put it away, and you keep thinking and searching. So you are, as a ghostly-dark-matter-idea holding the intention to find the missing possession, and this is creating a series of mental pictures, but none of them are the answer, and so eventually, all your willed creating of these mental pictures come to nothing, they are not the answer and you give up and think, ‘It will come back to me’.
Then, a few hours later, when you are doing some unrelated thing, it pops into your mind — and there it is. And so in some sects of Buddhism, as I said, there is the concept of self-power and other-power. This is usually referred to in terms of awakening, i.e. obtaining Nirvanah, the ultimate reality. The teaching is that there is only so much you can do by yourself, like living ethically, staying pure in thought (disciplining the mind), But ultimately, you hold the image of perfection, of the Buddha, of your own awakening — and you wait. The answer cannot come from self-power. It comes from other-power. So in a way, to my understanding, awakening is akin to remembering something you have forgotten rather than obtaining something you don’t have.
How does it work? I think the answer is ‘in the light’. I see the imagination as ‘astral light’, as an all pervading energy. I have access to it and it creates mental pictures due to my will, but the things you see in your mind are made of the same ‘universal stuff’ that we all have access to. It’s like everyone swimming in the same ocean, and there is an awareness behind it all of infinite intelligence, other-power, which is actually self-power ultimately, beyond duality.
We can impress our own will and desires ‘into the light’ and it conforms, though it is also a repository and an intelligence.
So, to get back to the koan, how would it be solved? The answer is ‘in the light’ and the only way to comprehend it is to let go and dissolve into it. You would need to hold the ‘pure idea’ as a ghostly-dark-matter request, hold it exclusively, continually, as a daily meditation, with an underlying idea of awakening, of desiring to be free — and let go. There is an answer and there is a call.
It’s so strange sitting here writing this. I remember the day I took the precepts in the Zen temple. It was actually an amazing day. It was cold and snowing, and when I woke up, there were deer outside; never saw them before and never saw them since, and of course, the Buddha gave the first sermon in a deer park. Well I just remembered that the master gave this last talk about ‘a call and an answer’. Funny, as I was doing my work and entered the meditation hall a minute too late and so couldn’t get in; I listened sitting on the steps outside, but I didn’t really get what it was about. And they didn’t teach koans. And I haven’t thought about it until today, sitting here, writing this.
So, to continue with the book. There is the instruction to hold one idea for ten minutes, such as the idea of abundance. Then (once ten minutes is (largely) possible, practice ten minutes of NO thinking (no thoughts at all, neither willed nor spontaneous).