Discursive Meditation: Phase 4

[ecosophia]

Another week has gone by, and it's time for another installment of instruction for those of my readers who are following this sequence of posts. Here's an ordinary ancient Egyptian woman, perhaps a minor priestess, reminding you of the correct posture; if you need more detailed reminders, you can find the first three phases of the practice here, here, and here. So far we've dealt with posture, relaxation, and breathing: the preliminaries to discursive meditation. Now it's time to go all the way and meditate. 

To make sense of what follows, it's important to remember that the word "meditation" literally means "thinking." As we discussed in the first post on this topic, when you say that a crime was premeditated, you don't mean that the perp did it in a blissed-out state with a mind empty of thought. You mean he thought deliberately, seriously, and intentionally about the crime before he did it. So that's what you're going to do -- no, not commit a crime, but think deliberately, seriously, and intentionally about something. (I suppose in some circles that counds as thoughtcrime, but we'll let that pass for now.) 

To do that, you need something to think about. The subject for a discursive meditation is known as the theme. You can use anything as a theme that you want to understand. It's standard practice to choose themes from whatever spiritual path you follow, and some paths have specific bodies of lore that are typically used for discursive meditation. 

If you're a Christian, for example, go open a copy of the Bible -- yes, right now. Turn to the beginning of the Gospel according to John. That's traditionally where you start Christian discursive meditation: start with the first verse and work your way through one verse at a time. (If you can't find something to ponder in the first verse of John, you may want to shine a flashlight in one ear and see if the beam comes out the other.) If you belong to a different faith that has a holy scripture, a sacred book, or a traditional volume of sacred lore, why, go ye and do likewise; I learned an enormous amount by meditating my way through the Mabinogion and the knowledge lectures of the Golden Dawn, and I'd guess that my Hellenic and Heathen readers could get at least as much out of Hesiod's Theogony and the Elder Edda respectively. 

Other options? Well, the classic alternative to written texts is sacred or magical imagery. Do you have a Tarot deck, and do you want to get much deeper into it than you've gotten so far? Deal out the Fool. That's going to be your first theme, and you're going to work on it for at least seven daily meditations. You know those weird and complicated diagrams that fill books on alchemy, and make next to no sense if you just look at them? Congratulations; you now know how to unlock them. They were designed and made to be explored and unpacked using discursive meditations. Brother Masons, you know the trestle boards of the three degrees? Guess what...

The key to choosing a theme for meditation is to take it in little bites. The bigger the theme, the less you'll get out of it. If you're doing the Christian meditation referenced above, don't take the entire first chapter of John as a theme. Take the first line of the first verse: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Better still, take the first clause: "In the beginning was the Word." What does that mean? If you're meditating on Tarot trump 0, The Fool, here again, don't do the whole thing at once. Start with the concept. What is a fool? Why is that concept suited to the beginning of the Major Arcana? 

Whatever your theme is, when you're ready to begin meditation, sit down in the position we've discussed and settle into it, neither tense nor relaxed but poised. Let go of excess tension, beginning from the top of your head and letting it drain down from there; spend about a minute at that. Then do five minutes of the Fourfold Breath, letting your mind focus solely on your breathing. Then you're ready to begin. 

Call the theme to mind. If it's verbal, repeat it silently to yourself several times. If it's an image, see it as clearly as possible in your mind's eye. In either case, hold it in your mind for a little while, and then begin thinking about it. 

Your thoughts will wander off the theme. Bring them back. They'll wander off again. Bring them back again. You'll have as much trouble keeping your mind on the theme as the practitioner of mind-emptying Asian styles of meditation has keeping thoughts at bay, and you'll develop the same skills of catching your mind wandering and bringing it back. In the intervals between these vagaries, on the other hand, you'll be learning something about the theme, and you'll also be working on the capacity for focused reflective thought, an essential human skill and one very poorly developed by most of us. 

Think about the theme for ten minutes. Then do a couple of final cycles of the Fourfold Breath, and finish. The next day, pick up another part of the theme -- "and the Word was with God" if you're doing the Christian meditation suggested above, some detail of the card if you're doing the Tarot meditation. Repeat the process. The next day, do it again, and again, and again. 

Next week we'll discuss some of the common problems and add in a few helpful tricks, but that's enough for now. Give it a try and see where it takes you.  

Comments

Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

I've been getting my themes from daily life, its frustrations, and building my character bit by bit, ans it's been slow going. I will start with the Prose Edda as soon as I find it among the books-shelved-at-random on moving day. Between bad lighting in the morning and bad knees, the search has not been productive so far, but if I kept the Mabinogian and the Kalavala, can the Eddas possibly possibly be missing?

Hesiod is in there somewhere, too, and a lot harder to find. Friends, do NOT move and let other people unpack your library!

Oops!

[(Anonymous)]

I meant, "The Poetic Edda."