To return to the text again, here it jumps back to the essential training (after this unthreaded healing section). Now perhaps, as I heard suggested, this jumping about was to confuse the Nazis or as a blind for those who wouldn’t understand it, although I think there is a type of logic to this structure also.
A large part of this training, of any occult/spiritual training is concentration, and then with this concentration, you learn to hold the spiritual senses steady, and once you can do that, the mental/astral bodies are strengthened and ready for your consciousness to inhabit, and there is your entry into higher worlds and so the next stage of your spiritual journey.
However, a large impediment to good concentration (and mindfulness) can be (and usually is) all the unhealed parts of your mind. Like the glowing embers of the fire that isn’t out, and keeps bursting into flames.
There’s a chicken and egg situation in a way. So you need to develop concentration to progress now on the spiritual journey but cannot due to the unhealed parts of the mind, which are an energetic imbalance in the energy of the inner body. But to heal them, you need a degree of concentration. The problem is not having what you need to be well, but if you had it then you wouldn’t have the problem! It’s like being too fat to exercise, but if you could exercise, then you’d be less fat and a positive cycle would kick in.
So what is the answer? The answer is to babystep from where you are now. If you’re too fat for jogging, all you can do is get your lard ass up out of the chair, then that’s where you start, stand up and sit down a few times. A little success there can mean a short walk every day, and it would be slow progress, but FORWARD IS FORWARD and that is that.
So the way it is structured here in this training, is to get a little bit of concentration, and develop the spiritual senses a little bit. And with a little progress in these two things, start to work on the healing, and with a little bit of progress here, the first two are in turn strengthened and so you can return to them and move on to the next step and FORWARD IS FORWARD.
So the training returns to concentration. The instruction now is to hold one idea in the mind for ten minutes. What does that mean exactly? This is how NOT to do it. You might have an idea, I love hot dogs. OK, now perhaps that is true. So for ten minutes you hold the idea of ‘loving hot dogs’. There is a series of events in consciousness along the theme of ‘loving hotdogs’. Perhaps mental images of hotdogs, brief flashes of the pigs that make them up, a ‘taste memory’ of the porky salty taste of the meat, memories of eating hotdogs on specific occasions, ‘audio-memories’ of carnival sounds where many-a-hotdog was consumed before.
This is NOT it. This is a ‘themed stream of consciousness meditation’ or a ‘contemplation’ or an ‘exploration’ or whatever. Now, there might be quite a few stray thoughts that come in that are wholly off topic, and there might be some aspects that arise that are related, like the taste-memory of the saltiness, but that leads to a mental picture of the ocean, then fishes, then your friend with an aquarium. So it’s not to say an exercise like this is without merit, but I’m pretty sure it’s not what Bardon was suggesting.
What is the essence of an idea? Like, the idea we all die one day. That’s an idea. It’s knowing something. It’s a fact. It’s an insight. So, there might be a series of mental pictures in the mind, of various scenarios, memories of other people dying, situations where you might die. These are not ideas, they are mental pictures. Maybe you feel an energetic sense in your stomach, like a weight, and you label it ‘dread’,… but it’s not ‘an idea’. Neither are the mental pictures ‘an idea’.
What is it? What is an idea? In my mind, in-between the mental pictures, there’s an understanding of something, a kind of knowing. If it feels like anything at all, it feels like a ‘space’ in my body, starting in my chest and spreading back to the back of my head. Of course, that is not ‘an idea’ in my mind. Technically, it is just a sensation I personally get when this ‘knowing/understanding’ arises. Now it might correspond to something that is occurring in the corresponding place in the energetic body, or possibly not. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Like if you put your hand under the tap and feel the running water. You can feel that water, but the feeling/sensation isn’t the water. The water is ‘out there’ being reported via the nervous system and recreated as a sensation.
This idea of an ‘idea’, I think is like a kind of dark matter (as another analogy). We know it’s there from it’s effects and what is created from it, but really when we try and observe it directly, it’s a ghostly ‘knowing’ in the awareness.
It’s incredibly important though. It’s ‘high’ up, if you see what I mean. Hmmmm. How can I explain myself? Ultimately, our consciousness, who we are, is self-concept, you think I AM this and I AM that. I am successful. I am stupid. Blah. Blah. In the mind, we do think about other things, abstract ideas and other people, but all this stream of consciousness all relates to self-concept in some way. So all the stream of consciousness is radiating from this ‘dark matter’ of ghostly knowings, and much of it is self concept.
So say you want to hold the idea that ‘you will die’. Now, that sounds morbid, but I just want to explain this with an example, I’ll switch it positive in a moment. It’s actually a valid meditation. Momento Mori, remember you will die (in the Western tradition) is equivalent to the Buddhist corpse meditations. Both have the same effect, to have a deep insight into ones own mortality, and the benefit of this is putting life in perspective, being non-attached and having a sense of ‘spiritual urgency’, i.e. leading the spiritual life towards awakening now rather than postponing it to hedonism. The Buddha often refers to a ‘giant wave’, i.e. a sudden event that can take us away from life (we can die at any time; so practice now).
So the Western practice of Momento Mori was to surround oneself with images of death, like skulls and stuff, to remind one of one’s mortality and obtain the benefit of life being in perspective. The Buddhist version has a more formal, structured approach, which is to meditate on a series of your own corpses. So, one is a corpse where you have just died. Then a corpse of you dead a month later (looking like a zombie), then a skeleton of you, then just some dust etc.
So it’s a visual meditation. You hold an unmoving image of your corpse. In-between this mental image, every now and again, the ‘idea’ an ‘insight’, a deep ‘ghostly sense of knowing’ I AM MORTAL arises. It’s there like a flash to begin with, but you focus on it, try and hold it, extend it, favour it over the mental picture which relates to it and is below it, and over time you can learn to hold that pure knowing for long periods of time.
OK, switch! Perhaps let’s start with something positive. Let’s choose financial abundance, that way you can be training and creating at the same time. Think what happens if you try and create financial abundance with a manifestation method, for example creative visualisation. So you make a series of scenarios which involve you having financial abundance. You visualise them. They become very vivid and real in your mind. Because you didn’t go too much over the top then the mental pictures are somewhat believable. Perhaps you are also slowly repeating an affirmation, ‘I AM a magnet to financial abundance; I AM drawing tremendous wealth towards myself. I AM vibrating at the frequency of financial abundance’. So in-between these repeated affirmations and created mental pictures, there is the idea, the knowing/insight I AM WEALTHY. Now what I just typed was a sentence, and we’re not talking about words, we’re talking about ghostly dark matter understanding of an idea in awareness. I don’t know how to explain it further than this. You need to practice and find it yourself.
But never forget how important this is. It underlies much. Think even of a big ritual, say an elaborate ritual to the planet Jupiter, to increase financial abundance. You’re walking around lighting candles, invoking elements, stating intention with incantations and chants and stuff, and the culmination is kneeling before the alter and bringing the ritual to an emotional climax, A GNOSIS, wisdom, the visuallising, chanting, praying, words stop, to a climatic silence, a pure knowing that I AM wealthy. And that huge knowing is then released, and never considered again, the energy is out there and the magician sits back and awaits for the riches to unfold in the world.
So the stimulus that sparks the knowing can be inner or outer. You can create mental pictures of an intention (wealth) or a ritual with symbols (Jupiter) or whatever, it leads to the same thing GNOSIS the holding of a knowing. Wisdom.
Holding an idea. This is the exercise you are being given.
I am also thinking of the (again) Buddhist practice of Nembutsu, which means ‘to recollect the Buddha’. An external picture of the Buddha is fixated on, and it represents an awake version of yourself (enlightened) and the name of the Buddha is chanted (an intention to be enlightened, and also the thinking mind is occupied with the chanting) and then ‘other-power’ manifests the intention (Nirvanah).
The instruction in the text is to hold an idea for ten minutes. My suggestion is to take a positive desire and initially make this like a creative visualisation exercise, but specifically looking for the ghostly-dark matter-knowing of you being abundant, extend the time it exists until you can hold it in a fairly pure form for the full ten minutes. It’s no mean feat, and incredibly powerful, so stick with it.