So I’ve settled back into practicing a form of meditation I learned a few years ago from Tony Mierzwicki’s book “Graeco-Egyptian Magick.” You sit and envisage the seven traditional planets about you, each in turn: the Moon before you, Mercury to the left, and so on. Jupiter is in the heart center and Saturn overhead. While you imagine each planet as an appropriately colored luminous sphere, you chant each of the Classical Greek vowels as long as you can sustain it, one vowel for each planet. I’ve found three cycles of this practice is the basic minimum, seven is about my limit.
For a year or two I practiced this, then went off it in order to try discursive meditation. That’s where I went off the rails. I couldn’t do it. As soon as I try to think discursively about some symbolically rich image - say, the Fool from the Rider Waite tarot - I lose interest. My mind is much more interested in images themselves, and how beautiful they are - their vibrant colors, how they are composed - rather than in what they symbolize or represent in some allegorical way. So my meditation practice went to hell.
While visualizing the aforementioned planetary spheres, I sometimes think of the attributes of the gods appearing within them, or - more rarely - their faces or figures. They seem to glow in my mind’s eye. But I don’t particularly look for meanings in them. If the gods feel disposed to send me some such realization, I’ll be paying attention.
I suppose this may mean that I won’t be recollecting past lives any time soon, or growing a mental body all that fast, nor ascending in a rush up the great chain of being. But then I never asked to become an enlightened being in this lifetime. All I ever wanted was to make nice pictures and find some gratification in doing so.
When I visualize the sphere of Venus, I imagine a sphere of rose quartz. At first I felt this a bit too pink-bubbly; but when I visualize her in green, the other obvious option, it makes me think of leaves of infested plants I’ve seen and I get images of giant insects. So I’m sticking with rose quartz.
Tony says to picture Saturn as black. But in terms of visualization a black sphere hanging in the blackness of space is a non-starter; so I picture Saturn as a deep indigo, rather like a black light in an old-time poster shop.
The location of Jupiter at the heart center reminds me of the hyper cube at the center of a tesseract. I fancy some kind of more-than-three-dimensional spatial matrix is being referenced here.
An Easy Simple Meditation
For a year or two I practiced this, then went off it in order to try discursive meditation. That’s where I went off the rails. I couldn’t do it. As soon as I try to think discursively about some symbolically rich image - say, the Fool from the Rider Waite tarot - I lose interest. My mind is much more interested in images themselves, and how beautiful they are - their vibrant colors, how they are composed - rather than in what they symbolize or represent in some allegorical way. So my meditation practice went to hell.
While visualizing the aforementioned planetary spheres, I sometimes think of the attributes of the gods appearing within them, or - more rarely - their faces or figures. They seem to glow in my mind’s eye. But I don’t particularly look for meanings in them. If the gods feel disposed to send me some such realization, I’ll be paying attention.
I suppose this may mean that I won’t be recollecting past lives any time soon, or growing a mental body all that fast, nor ascending in a rush up the great chain of being. But then I never asked to become an enlightened being in this lifetime. All I ever wanted was to make nice pictures and find some gratification in doing so.
When I visualize the sphere of Venus, I imagine a sphere of rose quartz. At first I felt this a bit too pink-bubbly; but when I visualize her in green, the other obvious option, it makes me think of leaves of infested plants I’ve seen and I get images of giant insects. So I’m sticking with rose quartz.
Tony says to picture Saturn as black. But in terms of visualization a black sphere hanging in the blackness of space is a non-starter; so I picture Saturn as a deep indigo, rather like a black light in an old-time poster shop.
The location of Jupiter at the heart center reminds me of the hyper cube at the center of a tesseract. I fancy some kind of more-than-three-dimensional spatial matrix is being referenced here.