What is Meditation?

More Radiant than the Sun

What is Meditation?

Göteborg, lecture of 30 October 2022

I want to dedicate the first part of the lecture I gave recently in Sweden to all our dear friends and supporters through the world, for the Christmas Festival and holy nights of 2022-2023. Let us become intimately closer to each other and unite our creative, active and joyful forces with each other in our families and communities, to participate consciously in the great spiritual events of our time, lifting our hearts to receive their infinite grace and blessings.

First Part: Preparation for Meditation

 To attain its results our meditation must be a sacred event, and we should only begin to practice it after we filled our souls with the forces of devotion and reverence, gratitude and festive joy. The entry through the portal of meditation should be felt as entry into the holy of holies of the cosmic temple in which we live and weave, as deep as the devotion we feel when we meet each human being, and as profound as the experience of the sublime beauty of nature and the universe. We should meditate only when we feel that we do it in order to offer ourselves to the cosmic-divine forces and become one with them. If we start- and end-our meditation in this way, it will also lead us, in due course, to the spiritual worlds.

 After we filled our entire soul with the forces of devotion and reverence, we must  also take care of the ‘basement’ forces of our soul. We must go down the stairs that leads to the store house of our emotions and desires, drives and instincts, to make sure that they are ordered and pacified enough, to not disturb our meditation from below. As this is an important and offer neglected part of the preparations to meditation, let mee say few things about it.

 One way to do it, which I found fruitful, is to open the basement forces to the light of the meeting with the Christ. In the light of this meeting, we see clearly everything hidden there, even in the most hidden corners of the soul. The immediate benefit of this is that paradoxically to our intellectual mind, the light that illuminates our darkness is so loving, and the grace and mercy are so all encompassing, that our shame, guilt and fear, so staunchly bound to the basement, are gracefully liberated and join their soul sisters and brothers in the upper floors. When the light of love illuminates our lower self  and release the bound soul forces, something else happens. In so far that we can see it now, it appears as a veritable treasure trove of rich potentiates.

 This brings us to the portal of the temple of mediation in balanced soul mood, because  in this light, we realize that our strength comes from above and from below, and that in the middle of our being we can stand upright and posed, peaceful and calm. it. The light of the higher self, which Christ radiates, makes the lower self appear as an integral part of the higher self. As a rich soil is a necessary for the growth and development of the plant, our lower self is perceived as the soil and nourishment of our holistic human growth. We realize that in our weaknesses lie sprouting future strength, and our failures, instead of being judged and condemned by an authoritarian God, become the springing board of future developments, and our sins the most fruitful seeds of redemption. We feel now whole humans again, or for the first time, humble and worthy to enter His temple.

If we start our meditation with this preparatory exercise, it will bring order and peace to the basement forces and create in our souls a loving, self-accepting and world open mood. We can truly dedicate our mediation to the Christ if we become Pauline in our entire attitude to life. He used to say how blessed he feels thanks to the light of Christ that revealed to him his inborn weaknesses, acquired failures and perpetrated sins, because this kept him humble in the light of Christ, develop true self-knowledge, and transform the old Adam into the new Adam.

 When we speak about meditation in the proper way, we will never speak about it otherwise then as the most holistic, all human ritual and celebration, consecration and offering, leading to an active participation in the creative life of the divine forces of the cosmos. In the meditation, we lift up and offer all the fruits of spiritualized thinking, feeling and will, of spiritualized science, art and religion, to the gods, unite with them as they receive our offer, and experience how they reciprocate it with their downpouring grace and abundance of love and wisdom.

Few Indications concerning the Meditation, More Radiant than the Sun

After the above described preparation and purification of the soul forces, we immerse ourselves fully in the content of the meditation:

More radiant than the Sun,

Purer than the snow,

Finer than the ether

Is the Self

The spirit in my heart.

This Self am I, 

I am this Self. [1]

 Everything in meditation is individual, and each person will experience what we described here sooner or later. How long does it take until the meditation becomes real experience depends also on the individual karma and individual faculties. We are doing our best with our present forces, and develop the new forces, and we can be certain that we shall harvest the fruits of the seeds that we planted in due course. You are never in a hurry, aren’t’ you, when you mediate with feeling and mood described above. This must be remembered, as a golden rule, because ambition and vanity, are the worst adversaries of spiritual development.

When you contemplate on the first sentience of the mantra, More radiant than the sun, you create an image of a sun. Each person creates a different image, of course.  You create an image according to your memories and inclinations, and it is your individual creation, and should not be compared with what other people do. What is the image that expresses for you this being that is more radiant than the sun? You will have one image today and maybe change it next year if you continue to meditate, because you have developed and your image of the being of the sun has also changed. This is why I don’t want to draw a specific image, to let each one be free to create your image for yourself. Also what I say about the experience of the mediation should be taken in this sense, they will be experienced differently by different people, but nevertheless, the stages will be the same stages of development for everybody.

 So, you start with a certain image that you form in you mid of the first sentence, More radiant than the sun.Then you forget all about the image and surrender fully to the feeling it arouses in your soul. As we learned from Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, meditation is all about the most intensive experience of the feeling aroused by the content of the mediation. From these feeling, everything else will grow.  Now if you succeed in fully immersing yourself in these feelings, to such an extent that you wholly forget yourself- this is after all the precondition for all true meditation- the first thing you may experience is how your etheric body expands. In this very moment, after you represented it to yourself, quietly in your thinking, and imagined the mental picture of this being, that is More radiant than the sun, you totally immerse yourself in the feeling of wonder, gratitude, blessedness, and beauty, that this image aroused in your soul. You have now become this sun being, you are living in this being, you feel as if you expand with a sun-aura that spreads all around you. You are not conscious of yourself as ordinary person now. This one is long forgotten! Then in the expanded, widespread aura of the sun you feel yourself as sun being, until, so to say- here its already becoming difficult to describe the experience in our ordinary language, wholly adapted to described material external things- you feel in the expanding circles of the radiant sun that the center of the sun, which is spread over its cosmic periphery, is also the peripheral center of your new heart. You become aware that now you live and weave in the infinitely vast center of the sun. More radiant than the sun thus encompasses me, and I merge with it, and paradoxically, I feel that out there, in the expanded spheres, I am in the center of my heart and at the same time I also stand in the center of the sun. This is the first stage of the experience, and as you can see, in time, the first sentence can take us thus far. Let us look again closer at the beginning of this experience.

As we said, the first thing you experience when you immerse yourself entirely in the sentence, More radiant than the sun, is how all the heart-forces, the etheric heart-forces, concentrate in the etheric heart in daily life, when the etheric body is closely connected with the physical body, are streaming out from the center of the heart and expand outwardly in spiraling circles. They are expanding to the periphery of the radiant sun, whatever the image you created, but you will experience this tremendous expansion of the etheric body, which can be followed by various experiences. We can naturally only briefly indicate few of them.  For example, this expansion can be followed by a strong feeling of warmth, of growing inner warmth, emerging also from the center of the heart and expands like warmth, like waves of warmth into the periphery.  This can also be accompanied with light-forces, the heart can be also experienced as the source of light. So the expansion of the etheric body come with the expansion of my whole being in warmth and in light towards this cosmic sun periphery, because at this moment, when you are in the experience of the expansion of the etheric body, you are not thinking any more in images, you are not thinking at all, but only feeling the intensity of the warmth, light, and expansion process.  You are not speaking to yourself anymore now,  you are the movement of warmth-and light filled, expansion. The you feel: my whole being expands, I become expansion itself; my ordinary self is wholly transformed in this process, and I cannot even really say that I am living in ‘my’ expanding etheric body, because this would imply that I possess an etheric body, as I possess an external object. But I am changing as the etheric body expands, I am part of it, not I have an etheric body, but it has me, it takes me with it. I don’t really experience that my etheric body expands, though of course, in ordinary discourse I will use ordinary language to make myself clear. I expand, I grow with all my being with the etheric body, because I am one with it. This is true meditation. This is how it is truly experienced in a real meditative experience. It is becoming by degrees true supersensible experience. It leads me to real supersensible situations and events…  

[1] Esoteric lesson from 24 October 1905 (GA 245). The mantra was the first meditation given to students of the Esoteric School of the Theosophical Society. The English translation from the Sanskrit was made by Annie Besant.