THE OCCULT MEANING OF ABOVE IS WITHIN.
THE OCCULT MEANING OF BELOW IS WITHOUT.
Translated into here and now language, the axiom means that as we make changes in our exterior observable world, we simultaneously make changes in our interior mental world. And as we make interior changes in how we think, we simultaneously make exterior changes in how we behave. Transformation happens when we consciously work in the physical OR in the mental, because we are connected, mind and body. Can't have one without the other.
AS IT IS BELOW (in your physical world), SO IT IS ABOVE (in your mental - emotional world). Law of the Universe: For every Action there is an Equal and Opposite Reaction. And it works not only in the physical world of overt form, but in the non-physical world of force where the law shifts to: for every emotion or thought there is a corresponding emotion or thought.
Test out the "below" theory: Structure your daily physical life action to reflect those
ideals you wish to obtain within. Start with a personal altar and daily devotion for right now. If that's too much, clean out the closets and drawers, arrange the towels or junk drawer,
throw out old magazines - it's all action BELOW that makes clearing/cleaning changes ABOVE.
Nothing symbolic about it. You feel tired but really good in a clean, organized house.
THEN make yourself an altar.
Test out the "above" theory: Smile and send thoughts of loving kindness and compassion to
people you see. Watch them return the blessing.
AS IT IS ABOVE (in your mental/emotional world), SO IT IS BELOW (in your physical world). The Law of the Universe: Energy Follows Thought and Emotion. The more focused and concentrated the thought or emotion, the more energy it draws to it. Focus and concentration are voluntary efforts of human will, and Will is pure energy the human alone can summon and direct. By thinking and by desiring we draw superstrings to us. If we maintain the thought or desire and invest it with more thought and desire, we find ourselves drawing plans for a new house, or baking chocolate chip cookies.
This mandate gets a little tricky because we start working in mental matter. Beginners
need to know they must develop the discrimination to CHOOSE to invest thought and desire
into those things that cause transformation. So we bring creation down a step and clean up
our debts, pay bills on time, return the library books, write thank you notes, balance
the checkbook for real, obey the speed limit when no cops are around, stop telling lies
by remaining silent. Easy mental stuff until we understand thought-forms, sacred symbols,
and visualization.
FOR THE PERFORMANCE OF THE MIRACLES OF THE ONE THING (personality transformation).
The easiest way to change the way you think you are is to take physical action in the
world. Actions are the final precipitation and proof of internal intentions. If you want
to know what your intentions really are, look at your life circumstances. All of them. Tough look at reality.
WRITING A STATEMENT OF INTENTION
What is it that you want? What do you expect? Why are you embarking on this path? Any path? What do you intend to accomplish? Why are you reading this now?
The best way to get really clear in your mind about your intentions and your commitment is to write them down. Then you discover they need to be re-written and tweaked and scratched and nudged until you are finally satisfied with the words.
IT'S THE SAME THING WHEN YOU MAKE SUGGESTIONS TO YOUR SUB-CONSCIOUS. Meticulous care in the wording is necessary to avoid error in the outcome. The Sub-Conscious is literal, absolutely without humor, understanding, or mercy. If you say you want new toenails, you'll get a new set growing on top of the old toenails.
When you write down your intention, you are, in effect, taking a vow or oath to accomplish what you have written. You know exactly where you are going and will know when you arrive so that you can write a new statement/vow for the next step.
SAMPLE: I intend to expand my consciousness until I reach Union with the One. I will do whatever is necessary, at any time and any place. I will follow true guidance when I know it is true, and I will earnestly work to discover the Truth.
Now, that sentence "I will do whatever is necessary, at any time and any place" may need to be qualified. You may not be willing to quit your job, sell your house, and move to India. Be careful in your wording and think it over for a while before signing the thing. Then again, you may take weeks to get the document as you want it. Don't let the germination of an intention statement keep you from beginning the practices.
Once you have the document, light a candle, invoke your Higher Self and say the words aloud. Sign the paper, stash it under your altar cloth, say: Thy Will Be Done. Read the statement once a month.
THE IMPORTANCE OF AN ALTAR
The first action of conscious transformation is the single most necessary physical task: sit and meditate. The most observable physical manifestation of your intentions is a meditation altar. Understand that an altar is a sacred space. It is a room, a closet, or an hour a day of silence and solitude, a place where you can go and simply be. It's where you don't know the latest news or weather report, you don't know how much you owe or what favors you have to return; it is a place of peace, sacred and holy to the divine creative within you. And so must your exterior altar reflect the interior necessity.
The physical work of setting up the right place, selecting the resonating colors, altar cloth, and symbolic objects to place on your altar, engages the mind (within; above) in metaphorical activity that expands consciousness. You think about what color represents purity, or love, or charity. You dwell on the altar representing your Higher Self. You think about a Calvary cross representing the sacrifice of your ego, which separates you from conscious knowledge of immortality. You learn that the equal-armed cross represents your perfectly balanced personality. You contemplate the Wheel of Life representing the cycles your spirit has completed and will yet complete. You understand that crystals and pentagrams represent your physical body. You know that interlocking triangles represent the blending of spirit and matter. You see the Hindu AUM and hear the sound of God creating the universe.
Add a special mantle, scarf, cloak, or hood, or any piece of clothing that is especially fine and pure. Make the garment by hand and of pure silk or wool or 100% cotton, and when you drape it on your physical body to sit at your altar, you drape your mental and emotional bodies in the fine intention and purity of your work.
Select a special time to sit at your altar, a time when you can have silence and solitude. Make it the same time once a day. Add to your physical preparations a tad of hardship by perhaps setting your time of devotion at 3 A.M. Daily. Without fail. Set the alarm if you must, and soon your inner alarm will wake you at the appropriate time. Get up and sit at your altar and do the inner mental work. Make yourself. Discipline your body. Use your Will to master your physical body. You won't die of tiredness, and insisting on daily devotion will validate to your Higher Self that you are determined to transform, even if you doze4 off occasionally. Actually, the daily performance of devotion IS a conscious physical transformation that reaps benefits Above.
A daily tended altar where regular devotion/meditation happens will gather the mental and emotional energy and hold it in the sacred symbols you collected. Flowers offered to your Higher Self will last far longer than they normally would. Candles burn brighter and longer and often flare while you meditate, if your intention is pure and your concentration is focused. From these closely observed events, you will gain validation and knowledge that The Great Work is happening inside you, for your altar is an outer reflection of an inner condition. Soon all your bodies and consciousnesses will ready themselves for devotion as your special time with your Self grows near. You will feel the growing desire and the anticipation in your body.
Thus the physical work by the body begins to convince your mental and emotional bodies that you are serious about transforming your personality. The more you use your Will to construct your altar, the more convinced are your Mental and Emotional bodies of your sincere and persevering intentions. The certainty of your bodies translates into your various levels of consciousness…all the way up. And that is a knock on the door that brings down the Light.
ENTER WESTERN MEDITATION as a means to facilitate altering the way you think, feel, understand and behave. In other words, as the highway down which you must travel to expand your consciousness and prepare your soul for evolution and reincarnation.
THE MYSTERY OF WESTERN MEDITATION
Meditation is the only way you can intentionally expand your consciousness and spiritually transform your personality. It is the means to use in altering the way you think, feel, understand and behave in the world. And it is so because it works from the inside out. For instance, diets imposed from the outside by your will power let you lose weight, but when the diet stops, sooner or later you gain back the weight. On the other hand, plant persistent suggestions for weight loss in your sub-conscious and one day you have no appetite. Fattening food may suddenly taste bad and you don't want any of those nasty chips. A taste of fried chicken makes you retch. These internal and natural changes are permanent, so be careful how you make your requests. Best to have a teacher help in this area.
Making suggestions to the sub-conscious in meditation is peculiar to Western Meditation. Eastern meditation teaches to silence the mind and practice long enough so the mind reaches Samadi, Nirvana, Bliss. It takes lifetimes. Sitting in a cave in the mountains. Maybe suffering physical torture. It works. For centuries, Yogi's have proven it works.
But it's not for Western Civilization. Our culture isn't geared that way. We have lives to lead, families to support, good and creative works to perform. Basically, we really like being social creatures. It's our nature. So how do we also work on our personal transformation if it has to be done in meditation?
Re-define meditation, of course. Western Meditation is simply concentrated and focused thinking and imagining sacred symbols while withdrawn from the influence of the emotions, physical body, and ego. This type of meditation is actually a "vertical" expansion of consciousness without the baggage of the physical body. It slowly explores and presses farther into other planes of consciousness. By remaining conscious and aware in the next timeless-spaceless dimension, we can plant thought-form seeds that will mature in the personality, effecting what we call transformation. Sound pretty mystical? Not at all. It's scientific.
The May 7, 2001 issue of Newsweek ran a Science and Technology section about the findings of Neurotheology5. In one article, University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Andrew Newberg collected brain-imaging data from Tibetan Buddhists who were in deep meditation and Franciscan nuns deep in prayer. From the brain scans, he concluded that:
If you block sensory inputs to this region [superior parietal lobe of the brain], as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self and not-self,. . . . With no information from the senses arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but "to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone and everything," Newberg and d'Aquili write in "Why God Won't Go Away." The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that they have touched infinity6.
To sum up, science has found the physical mechanism in the brain that produces a mystical experience, and that mechanism can be triggered by a volitional act of Will to concentrate deeply enough to shut down the sensory connection areas in the brain (half the brain). Therefore, anyone with the Will and the Desire, with practice and perseverance, can have a mystical experience.
Does that take the mystery out of Mystic?
No, because:
[. . .] whatever light science is shedding on spirituality, spirituality is returning the favor: mystical experiences may tell us something about consciousness, arguably the greatest mystery in neuroscience. In mystical experiences, the content of the mind fades, sensory awareness drops out, so you are left with pure consciousness. This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and is not a mere by product of sensory action7.
There you go. Science has confirmed that Consciousness does not need a physical brain to exist. Lifting the veil of the five sensory flesh perceptions, which can only be registered by the brain-mind, allows one to be conscious of infinity and eternity, to blend with that which alone Is. God-Consciousness is inherent but latent in every human being. All we have to do, as Alice Bailey says, is "slay the lunar lords," the five lower senses, by concentration and focus in meditation.
In the early stages of the altered state of consciousness called meditation, we work with mental matter to clear, clean, purify, align and consecrate our lower nature personalities. You see, try as we might in this dimension of violence, intrigue, duplicity, war, terror and cynicism, we can't penetrate the personality's quagmire of accumulated negativity. Both inherited and experienced frustration, resentment, anger, depression, disappointment, and jealousy prevent us from rising above our short-term, body-conscious, perspective of the world where we "know" we will die.
Meditation takes us to the interior space, squeezed between the five senses and infinity, where we consciously inject well chosen thought-forms to affect personality transformation. It is just here in the tiny space just above the Sound of your heart and a little below the Light of your Soul, that thinking and attitude and incorrect opinion can be changed. Just there can the personality purified. Only then can we, in deep meditation, contact the dimension of infinity and eternity, where we experience ourselves as eternal beings at one with the universe.
As it is above, so it is Below teaches Ageless Wisdom.
As you think, so you are, teaches the Avatar.
Due to our DESIRE to transform our personality in order to live a satisfying life, we use our WILL to insert our CONSCIOUSNESS into the physical practice of meditation. In other words: JUST DO IT. Now, let's assume our intelligence and consciousness have been successfully programmed to go for transformation.
Like any other physical practice, meditation can do only what it does, and this is the way it works: In the beginning, the flesh body is held motionless in a comfortable position and in a constant temperature. Eyes are closed. Sounds are minimal or absent. The point here is to decrease sensory input as much as possible. With little sensory input to evaluate, the mind begins to think, either of past events or possible future events. The Will gently brings the mind back to the present in any number of ways: focusing on the in-and-out flow of breathing, repeating a word over and over, or symbol visualizations are the most common ways of keeping the mind focused until the body relaxes its grip on the mind. A meditation workshop and guidance from teachers will assist you to find your most appropriate form of meditation.
The beta waves in the brains of experienced meditators begin to slow after a few minutes of decreasing sensory input, which means that the cortex diminishes its processing of information:
1. The parietal lobe slows down because there is little sensory input to process.
2. The frontal lobe declines in activity so that reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness decrease.
3. The thalamus reduces the flow of incoming information.
4. The reticular formation lowers the threshold of stimuli arousal8.
This cessation of brain activity is the physical effect of meditation. At this point, the WILL aspect of consciousness can re-program the brain. Joel Stern reports: " 'For 30 years meditation research has told us that it works beautifully as an antidote to stress,' says Daniel Goleman, author of Destructive Emotions, a conversation among the Dalai Lama and a group of neuroscientists. 'But what's exciting about the new research is how meditation can train the mind and reshape the brain.' Tests using the most sophisticated imaging techniques suggest that it [meditation] can actually reset the brain9, . . ."
With practice and over time, regular physical exercise becomes more efficient, effective and successful. Same thing for repeated meditation practice so that we can train and "reset the brain" more easily. First comes the practice of stilling the body, thereby decreasing brain activity. This mechanical work, like regular exercise, has medical benefits: lowering the blood pressure, increasing immune system efficiency, sleeping better, managing pain, and reducing the anger flash threshold. If we never proceed any farther in The Great Work, our life-satisfaction level will improve.
However, we are concerned with evolving the personality, and as meditation continues over time (and your Qabalistic Journal fills up with great stuff), realization dawns. The personality is more and more clear. You aren't the same person you were a year ago. Higher senses have increasingly activated, for unexplained visions and events happen in meditation that are definitely not originating in the physical brain. When one of those suckers marches through your meditation and helplessly watch, man, look out. Great stuff. It's a teaching from "Above."
The 3rd eye opens and you intuit more about people you thought you knew better than you wanted to in the first place. Your Chakra System shifts into high gear. Higher vibrational energy enlivens your body. Miracles seem to happen, but they are simply new applications of universal law we never knew existed until we reached the higher dimensions of reality and developed the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
MEDITATION IS THE PRIMARY METHOD BY WHICH WE TRANSFORM OUR PERSONALITIES
IF YOU DON'T MEDITATE, BABY, IT AIN'T HAPPENING
TO CONTACT THE STILLNESS OF INFINITY AND ETERNITY, WHERE
THE TRANSFORMATIONAL WORK TAKES PLACE, YOU GOTTA CREATE A LITTLE STILLNESS ON THE DENSE SIDE OF THE VEIL OF FLESH.
THE SONG OF THE UNIVERSE ISN'T BOOMING ON THE CAR RADIO,
A VISION OF SPLENDOR CAN'T BE RENTED AT BLOCKBUSTER.
AS IT IS ABOVE, SO IT IS BELOW.
AS IT IS WITHOUT, SO IT IS WITHIN.
IF THE TV BLARES WITHOUT,
THE MIND BLARES WITHIN.
IF THE MOVIE PLAYS ON THE SILVER SCREEN,,
THE MIND PLAYS RE-RUNS.
THREE FIRST STEPS
BECAUSE everything is connected to everything else, and evolution can not happen in isolation, there are THREE FIRST STEPS necessary to begin re-weaving and expanding the lace of personality, to begin developing the ability to perceive beyond the flesh, to jump-start conscious transformation.
1) MEDITATING to begin stilling the monkey mind so we can effectively use our Volition to choose what our mind thinks about. Meditation is much misunderstood in the physically active do-or-die West because it looks like nothing is happening when the universe is actually opening up within our consciousness. Brain chemistry alters and latent abilities develop when we meditate regularly over a period of time.
TOOLS: Self-Consciousness; The Mental Body; the Physical Body;
and Willful Volition to keep the physical body motionless, the Emotional Body calm, and the self-conscious mind focused.
Start with 5 minutes of body immobility and watch the aches and pains, the itches and bugs crawl over you. Your body is built for active movement and will make you actually hurt to move. Resist the tyranny of the body for 5 minutes. There are no bugs and you don't have poison ivy. Your hip isn't broken and if you don't pay attention to the ache in your elbow it will go away. After a week, increase the time to 10 minutes. Keep ajournal. Later this will be a really funny and amazing time of mastery and transformation.
2) LEARNING SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE (Also called Angelic Language) so we can use our Intelligence to willfully manipulate our primary tools of body and mind.
TOOLS: The Self-Conscious Mind; the Physical Body; the Mental Body;
the Emotional Body of Desire; and Willful Volition to study and commit the symbols to brain conscious memory.
Start with Holy Tarot universal symbolism and The Tree of Life glyph. They were designed by the Masters of Compassion to facilitate communication between self-consciousness and the Higher Self, and to teach mastery in traveling through the planes of consciousness beyond our own.
3) CLEARING THE PERSONALITY of accumulated erroneous thought, assumptions, negativity, expectations, wishes, lies and dreams, by using our Will Power10 to align our Memory11 with reality, which frees up our Creative Imagination12 to restore Order and Reason13 to our lives so we can Hear with Intuition14 and Discriminate15 between what is real and what is not, enabling us to realize that our bodies are but Vehicles16 for the One eternal Self. In other words, get all our levels of consciousness operating on the same page.
TOOLS: Self-Conscious; Mental Body; Emotional Body of Desire;
Conscious Volition, Memory, Visualizing, and Imagination employing Symbolic Language.
The Holy Tarot is the best, but you need a live teacher to transmit the vibrations as you learn the symbols. No teacher? Well, use the axiom: THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS and see what kind of knots that concept ties your personality into. Then your job is to untie the knot to find the good in the event. File back through your memory to all the terrible events of your life and find at least one GOOD result from that event. Start today to monitor your emotional knee-jerk reactions and instant angers. What sets you off? What good can you learn from that lesson which is no accident. Repeat the mantra: ALL CIRCUMSTANCES IN MY LIFE ARE SOUL LESSONS FROM THE UNIVERSAL WILL-TO-GOOD.
Personality clearing continues almost as long as we are in a flesh body. The flesh is vulnerable, and pain causes emotional reflex action. Those reflexes can be mastered into calm reasoned response. Some advanced humans can eliminate the experience of pain entirely. Some have mastered the flesh so they can walk on hot coals, nails, or glass with no damage done to the skin. Highly evolved Masters, Adepts, and Yogis17 can dissolve their bodies and re-assemble them in another place, or preserve them for future use, while they guide humanity from the spirit side. How's that for selfless service?
FIRST THREE STEPS:
1) MEDITATE DAILY
2) LEARN THE SYMBOLIC LANGUAGE OF HOLY TAROT
3) CLEAR THE PERSONALITY - KNOW THYSELF
TIME TO START WALKING THE PATH
BLESSED BE ALL PATHWALKERS
"Life, so-called, is a short episode between two great mysteries, which yet are one."
Carl Jung 1875-1961
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