Toward Ecosophy

Having completed a couple of fairly demanding research projects -- the results in question will be published over the next two years -- I've finally had the time to catch my breath a little and start reading some of the pile of books that have come my way this year. A fair number of those may be of interest to my readers, so a few notes here seem like a good idea.

Mouni Sadhu's been a name I've mentioned rather more than once in my blogging, and for good reason. His real name was Mieczyslaw Demetriusz Sudowski.  Born in Poland in 1897, he got involved in the thriving Polish occult scene after the First World War, and also studied in Paris with French occultists. After the Second World War he lived in Brazil for a while, then spent some time in India studying with the great Hindu teacher Sri Ramana Maharshi, before settling in Melbourne, Australia for the rest of his life. A lifelong Roman Catholic, he wrote a series of books on Christian occultism and mysticism that drew from Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as well as Hermeticism and Hindu traditions.  Most of these have been out of print for many years, but that's now changing.

The two volumes I want to talk about here are old favorites of mine, and are also  among the works of his that show the most influence of his time with Maharshi. Meditation: An Outline for Practical Study is one of the few guides to the Western tradition of meditation I know of; it's a good solid book on the subject, and worth reading. I learned quite a bit by studying it back in the day, when you could get it (if at all) only in highly overpriced secondhand editions or from a good library system. Samadhi: The Superconsciousness of the Future and Ways to its Achievement is less practically oriented but it sets out  the core ideas of Sadhu's Hindu-influenced Christian mysticism and provides the groundwork for most of his other books.

These are both valuable books, and I'm glad to have them in new editions, since my old copies long since fell apart through age and use. Both are now in print again from Aeon Books --

Meditation

Samadhi

-- and Aeon has also announced an even more welcome pair of Mouni Sadhu reprints in the works: Concentration, Sadhu's basic guide to mental training, and The Tarot, a hundred-lesson course in Hermetic occultism, building on the work of Eliphas Lévi and Papus. I wore out my copies of both books even before Meditation and Samadhi fell apart into stacks of loose pages, and it will be a very good thing to see them in print again.

The method of discursive meditation covered in last week's post on the subject is the framework for everything you do with this kind of meditation: settle your physical body, let go of unhelpful tensions, use rhythmic breathing to settle your subtle body, and then think, slowly, patiently, with as much mental focus as you can manage, about the theme of your choice. That's the method; know that much, and practice it daily, and you'll find your way step by step through the complexities of the process and achieve the states of increased clarity, perception, and wisdom that meditation brings. Yes, it really is that simple. 

Are there difficulties? Of course. I've already mentioned that meditation is the most boring activity you will ever experience, and I mean that quite literally. At some points it's maddeningly dull. That's true of every kind of meditation, by the way, and it's essential to its effectiveness. Boredom is always a sign that you're not paying enough attention. Meditation works by teaching you to notice what you don't usually notice, to pay attention to the things you usually slide right by. Thus there are two rules for dealing with boredom in meditation. The first is to keep going; the second is to slow down and pay more attention. That's not easy, but it'll get you through the boredom and help you notice what you've been missing. 

You'll almost certainly go through the stage at which your body itches, aches, and throws every other possible annoying and distracting physical sensation at you. All those are sensations that you've been having all along anyway, without noticing them. Now that you're quieting the constant babble of sensory and mental chatter, you're going to notice them. Remain motionless and keep on with the meditation; you can scratch or whatever once your meditation session is over. This is a passing phase and your body will quiet back down after a while. 

Many people also go through a stage when, as soon as they start meditation, they get really sleepy. That's another body issue; sometimes it's a way for your body to tell you that you aren't getting enough sleep, sometimes your body simply isn't used to being quiet except when you're going to sleep, and so it treats the meditation session as the lead-in to a nap. Fairly often this is just another passing phase. If it's not, you can add a bit of physical discomfort into the mix. I had a hard time with this early on in my practice, and solved it by meditating stark naked on a metal folding chair -- oh, and did I mention that it was winter? ;-) It was too cold for me to feel drowsy, and that broke my body out of the habit of treating meditation as naptime. 

Some other points may be worth mentioning. Most people find that it helps to practice meditation at the same time every day, so that it becomes a habit. Most people find that it's a good idea to wait at least an hour after eating a meal or having sex before practicing meditation -- in both cases, your body has most of its energies directed somewhere other than the thinking centers in the head, and needs time to redirect those. Traditional lore has it that it's a bad idea to meditate while drunk or under the influence of drugs, though a mild dose of caffeine seems to be exempt from that -- Zen monks in Japan drink plenty of tea before meditating, and so do I, with good results. 

Finally, there's a habit you may want to try introducing into your practice once you've gotten some experience with discursive meditation. When you're meditating and realize that your mind has gone rabbiting off away after something other than the theme of your meditation, don't just pop it right back onto the theme. Instead, notice what it's thinking about, and then work your way back through the chain of associations that got it to where it was. If you suddenly notice that you're thinking about your grandmother, let's say, stop there and go back. Why were you thinking about your grandmother? Because you were remembering a Thanksgiving dinner at her house when you were a child. Why did that memory come to mind? Because you were thinking about nuts, and she always had bowls of mixed nuts out on Thanksgiving day. Why were you thinking about nuts? Because you thought about squirrels, and the association came to mind. Why were you thinking about squirrels? Because one ran across the roof of your house, and the skittering noise broke into your train of thought and distracted you from your theme. 

Do this repeatedly and you'll find that it trains your mind to run back to the theme just as readily as it ran away from it. You'll also become more aware of your habitual thought patterns, which is a serious plus, as this will teach you over time to work with them consciously rather than having them control you unconsciously. Give it a try and see where it takes you. 

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 Pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the second biggest pyramid in Egypt, reminding you of the correct posture -- well, except that you don't have a scepter to hold and so should relax that right hand and rest it palm down on your thigh like the other. If you need more detailed reminders, you can find the first two phases of the practice here and here. So far we've dealt with posture and relaxation. Now it's time to integrate a third factor, which is breathing. 

How you breathe has powerful effects on your state of consciousness, and there are intricate systems of breathwork that take advantage of this for various reasons. If you don't have a teacher to supervise you and watch for signs of trouble, though, those can be risky. Breathwork stimulates the vagus nerve, which has a range of effects on the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine glands; if you do it clumsily, you can mess up your health. (I learned that the hard way, and it took about five years for me to get things back to normal. You don't want to go there.)

Fortunately there are methods of breathwork that are both safe and effective, and one of them is very commonly used in discursive meditation practice. It's called the Fourfold Breath. It's quite simple. You breathe in through your nose, slowly and deeply, to the count of four. You hold the breath in to the count of four. You breathe out through your nose, slowly and fully, to the count of four. You hold the breath out to the count of four. Repeat to the same steady rhythm. 

How do you know how slow or fast to make the rhythm? Simple -- make it reasonably slow without gasping or running out of air. Keep it steady, gentle, and flowing. No two people will have exactly the same rhythm, nor will you have the same rhythm every time you practice. Don't use a metronome or any other mechanical aid; just let yourself find a pace that works for you. 

One detail worth noting is that you don't hold your breath by closing your throat; you hold it by keeping the muscles of your chest and abdomen in their positions, either expanded or relaxed. If you're used to closing your throat to hold your breath, this can take some practice. How do you tell if you're closing your throat? Draw in a deep breath, hold it for a little while, and then breathe out. If you hear or feel a little "pop" inside your throat, you've closed it. To keep from doing that, keep trying to breathe in a trickle of air while you hold your breath in, and keep trying to breathe out a trickle of air when you're holding your breath out. You'll get the hang of it quickly. 

For the next week, five minutes of the Fourfold Breath will be your practice. Take the position, hold yourself still, and let the tension drain away from the crown of your head to the soles of your feet, just as you did last week; take a minute or two to do this. Then begin the Fourfold Breath. Keep doing it for five minutes. What you're doing this week is the sequence you'll use to begin the process of meditation for real next week.  Keep at it, and see where it take you!

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.