Discursive Meditation: Phase 1

[ecosophia]

I mentioned here a little while back -- I think it was in the process of winding up the discussion on the Sphere of Protection -- that sometime shortly I'd be doing a comparable series of posts on the second core practice of traditional occultism. Yes, that would be discursive meditation, and I plan on spending the next several weeks going over the technique and talking about how to use it. 

Let's start, though, with a couple of details that tend to be forgotten. First of all, there's nothing particularly exotic or, ahem, Asian about meditation -- though of course most Asian spiritual traditions teach it as a matter of course. So did most Christian churches until not much more than a century ago. For a change, this isn't something that got dumped at the time of the Scientific Revolution, when so much of the Western world's spiritual heritage hit the dumpster in a hurry; this got dropped in the late 19th and very early 20th century, when most denominations discarded their remaining methods of personal spiritual practice and embraced notions of spirituality that focused on collective salvation, either by sheer faith and nothing else (the fundamentalist approach) or by charitable works (the social gospel approach). 

So we're dealing with something that used to be practiced by people all over the western world. (The word "meditation," remember, didn't have to be imported from some exotic language; it's from Latin, the normal language of educated people in the West until 1850 or so.) That's the first thing to keep in mind. The second is that what we're talking about is different in a crucial way from the kinds of meditation that were imported from Asia in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Nearly all of those latter methods focus on silencing the thinking mind; classic Western meditation doesn't. Instead, it focuses and directs the thinking mind. That's implicit in the word itself. When we say a crime was premeditated, for example, that doesn't mean that the perp chanted a mantra or practiced mindfulness meditation before doing it; it means that the perp thought it through, planned it, and deliberately decided to do it. 

Western meditation -- to give it its proper name, discursive meditation -- is focused, deliberate, reflective thought. A subject for thinking -- a theme, in the standard jargon -- serves the same role in discursive meditation as a mantra or what have you in other kinds of meditation. You focus your attention on it just as intently as on any other kind of meditation -- but that means you think about it, keep your mind and your thoughts on it, explore it, and understand it. In later posts in this series we'll talk about how that works and why it's so important.  For now, let's start with the first step, which is posture. 

Let's start with posture. No, you don't have to tie your legs into an overhand knot to practice meditation, and in fact for the kind of meditation we're doing, you don't want to do that. The posture to use is the one shown above in those fine Egyptian statues of Sekhmet the lion-goddess. Sit on a relatively hard chair; if it has a back, slide forward, so you don't touch it at all, and your spine is free. Your feet rest flat on the floor, your knees and hips are at right angles, your hands rest palm down on your thighs, your head is straight. Look forward and down, as though at something on the floor a few yards ahead of you. Breathe slowly and easily. 

(If you're already practicing the Sphere of Protection, do this in the space you've just cleared with that ritual. Set the chair in the space before you begin, and get used to doing the ritual around it. More on this later.)

Got it? Now don't move for five minutes. Don't fidget, shift, wiggle, scratch an itch or anything else. Leave your body completely still for five minutes by the clock. Do this once a day. That's your assignment for the next week. 

Unless you've already done this, or practiced certain other exercises that have the same effect, this is going to be much harder than you think. Our bodies are actually full of tensions and discomforts we never notice, and part of the constant shifting and wiggling and fidgeting that most people do most of the time is a matter of trying not to notice just how uncomfortable we are. Confront it head on. Stay still for those five minutes, no matter what. You'll still probably be having some trouble at the end of the week, but at that point we can go on and add something that will make it even worse. ;-)

That's one of the secrets of meditation. It is literally the most boring, grueling, frustrating thing you will ever do -- and once you get the hang of how to do it and why it's important, you'll do it every day, because the payoffs are worth so much more than the boredom et al. 

Five minutes a day sitting in the posture shown above. Got it?  Go for it. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I've been practicing discursive meditation since 2013, when I started working through the Celtic Golden Dawn. I thought I was reasonably good at it. Lately, though, I've realized that in all this time I've been mostly just skimming the surface of this practice and where it can take you.

I'm currently unable to practice magic, due to a pregnant wife. I spent a month or two trying out various spiritual practices to fill the void. Recently I've come back to using discursive meditation exclusively, first thing in the morning, with the Celtic Golden Dawn material providing themes.

The experience has been as profound as my first experiences with magic were. I find that the themes I've been selecting have been opening themselves to me, and to my understanding-- using the word in the old sense, not just my thinking mind-- as never before. I realized that, for years, I made magic THE THING, the main focus of my ritual work. I poured all my energy into the pentagram, the central ray, and later the OIW rite... and saved very little for the meditation practice. It wasn't that I didn't meditate-- I did, and some of my meditations were very fruitful. But I didn't always go very deep with it, and if it ever happened that I was short on time, it was the thing I was most likely to cut. It wasn't fun, after all-- it's no light show, like the rituals are-- and if you wrote in the CGD book that it was the most important element of the whole practice, well... Well, I'm not really sure what response I had to that. I suppose I ignored it. Or maybe I thought I knew better. After all, the first course in magic that I practiced (Donald Kraig's book) didn't teach discursive meditation, and hadn't I completed it, and changed my life in the process?

So I guess the point of this post is-- You were right all along. Discursive meditation is the key, and the well is much deeper than I had any idea.

I haven't tried the step by step method you're outlining here, going from five minutes of stillness to (I guess) adding in themes later. I think I will give it a try after the current sequence of themes I'm working through. Today, though, I did add in one new thing. You've always written that the legs should be parallel during meditation, the way that the lion lady's legs in the picture are. I can sit with my legs relatively parallel, but it's uncomfortable, so I've always just let my knees hang open a bit, so that my legs go outward from my body. Today for a few minutes at the end of the meditation I tried bringing my legs closer together. And... it was uncomfortable, requiring a light activation of the adductor muscles. But also, it took a certain pressure off of my lower back that I hadn't known I was carrying. I guess when you say "Follow the instructions as given," you have a reason....

[ecosophia]

This is actually very common among people who get into occultism. It certainly was true of me! My primary focus when I first got into Golden Dawn occultism was the ritual magic, and it changed my life just as dramatically as Kraig's book will have changed yours. It was only later on, when I started getting a sense of the deeper possibilities of the system, that meditation became more central to my practice -- and it just keeps on geting deeper.

And yes, there's usually a good reason for the instructions, as your lower back will be informing you! ;-)