Tag: rāja yoga

Dreaming and Rāja Yoga

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

“The trick in setting up the dreaming does not lie in looking at things, but in sustaining sight of them when they are no longer in sight. Dreaming becomes real once you have succeeded in bringing into sharp focus anything you bring to mind, for then there is no difference between what you do when dreaming and what you do when you are not dreaming.”

I think it fair to say that I am artistically challenged, I am not good at sketching. In school when there was a class mural for assembly, I was allowed to do the pine trees. I can however visualize well, perhaps very well.

There are many different notions on dreaming but the Toltec aphorism above suggests a visualisation perhaps in a meditative state. Setting up the active dreaming starts with the visualisation of a yellow rose. This is the Western analogue of the Eastern lotus. I have done both approaches. The idea is to open up the heart centre and connect it vis throat to Ajna.

When I am meditating, I look like some geezer sat in a chair with his eyes closed.This is what is going on inside.

In January 2009 I had been meditating on the Caduceus slowly building the form over weeks.  Here is an attempt to sketch what went on in a half hour rāja yoga or active dreaming meditation. If you take you time the form stabilises and becomes reproducible.

–

–

There are many models and if you look closely, you can see a re-presentation of kabalistic Otz-Chiim or Yggdrasil of the runic shaman or Asvattha which preceded the Hermetic Caduceus according to Blavatsky.

–

–

–

–

Attitudes to non-concrete science have changed since the days of Prof. James Emerson Reynolds FRS.

James Emerson Reynolds (8 January 1844 – 18 February 1920) was an Irish chemist who was the first scientist to isolate thiourea and developed the “Reynolds’s test” for acetone.

Reynolds was a member of a number of institutions, including the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland, the Society of Chemical Industry, of which he was president from 1891-91, the Chemical Society and the Royal Society. In 1919 he had a serious accident, which was followed by a stroke. He died at his home 3 Inverness Gardens, Kensington on 18 February 1920. The chemistry department in TCD have his original specimen of thiourea on display.

The Dream of Sanat Kumara

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring.

Acts 17:28

Esoteric thought suggests that our entire planetary schema is the effect of the thought from or dream of the Sanat Kumara, the lord of the world. He holds this thought form for billions of years and it is this which currently sustains our beingness. It is in this manifest thought form where we have our existence. There is only The One Life though many consider themselves separate entities. We are each of us a part of a whole. His meditation evolves.

To imagine a being capable of sustaining such a complex and dynamic thought form is extremely difficult and certainly beyond my ken. I cannot envisage a consciousness or awareness so vast and comprehensive. We might call this created manifest thought form Gaia or earth. The interconnectedness is thorough and complete though our separative minds struggle to accept this. What happens in Kabul has an impact in Edinburgh. That awareness holds together quarks and gives rise to what we call the strong and the weak forces. It makes electrons and mountains. It is responsible for the properties of water and the miracle of new birth. It contains evil and good. And it makes flowers so beautiful for our upliftment.

A being capable of this is beyond our comprehension. He could envisage Atlantis so that it existed and then wipe it from his rāja yoga meditation so that no traces are found, there is no evidence of the capital city and not a single skeleton. We as humans map the evolution of thought form, trace evidence of plate tectonics floating on the fiery inner core. We imagine ourselves omniscient and “homo sapiens” when our intellect can in no way encompass even a tiny fraction of that of the Sanat Kumara.

If he chose to alter his held image, his meditation, a continent might sink.

The thought form materialises the dream onto the physical plane so that you can drink coffee and take a shower. Your consciousness is a tiny spark in a magnificent whole. It seeks its journey back to the source from whence it came. To be one again, all-one.

Anthropogenic change brought about by the karma, the cause and effect, inherent in the world and the sparks of free will in each being impacts on his meditation. His great experiment plays out and he observes and adjusts…

And yet we bomb and kill our brothers and sisters our fellow human beings…we demand and are very ungrateful. Like a plague of locusts, we deplete and render barren. We waste and despoil. And we feel oh so justified in our greed…and we imagine that we are entitled so to do, that we have “rights”.

The dream of the Sanat Kumara can sometimes be a nightmare…

The Shamballa Thought Form and Nomenclature

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

There are certain words bandied about by esotericists and new agers which will grate on the ears of someone trained in the physical sciences. Because therein their use is specific and defined. If you talk about a vibration to a physicist, chemist or engineer it has a very contained meaning. If you say the vibration of a new age it sounds like poppycock, yet people will accept informal “only good vibes, man”.

It is common parlance in esoteric circles to talk about the astral plane, the mental plane and the buddhic plane. Plane to a scientist refers most often to a two dimensional surface or cross section, there are planes of symmetry about which reflections can be made. The misuse of language appropriated by science is a real barrier to any acceptance of esoterica in the mainstream scientific mind, a real turn off, a deal breaker and a red line.

If you speak about someone being polarised emotionally that has no defined meaning. If, however, you describe someone as governed to a large part by their emotions and emotional reactions that is more acceptable. Soap operas are popular because many like the emotional drama as it reflects their lives and how they pan out.  In esoteric parlance the majority of humanity is “polarised” on the emotional/astral plane.

Others are preoccupied with body, form and fornication. They are governed by physical sensation, hormonal response, instinctual behaviours and sexual urge.

Those more detached and less dominated by emotion could be said to be governed by mental or thinking process, these can be straightforward or highly abstract.

We might then loosely talk of three moods or modes of consciousness, carnal meaty, emotional and mental. In esoteric speak the physical plane, the astral/emotional plane and the mental plane. There is no plane simply a state, a mood, a flavour of consciousness where the being’s consciousness mostly is. It is possible to move between flavours. A simple act experienced by a detached mental type could cause an upswelling of emotion.

If you are often angry then you are governed by emotions. There is a lot of anger in the middle East just now, a lot of hot angry heads.

In esoteric circles there are the so called buddhic and atmic “planes” which are more “rarefied” and “above” the three “lower” planes. The buddhic state of consciousness is governed by intuitional mind {and heart}.

The aim of rāja yoga is, in one sense, to try to rise above the mundane, emotional and the pettier aspects of mind. The being then “spends” more time free of wild emotional swings and the desire for physical and sexual gluttony. We might speak of individuals who are largely physically governed, largely emotionally governed, largely mentally governed and largely intuitionally governed. {The intuition here differs from mental guesswork.}

This last paragraph does not use nomenclature which belongs to science. Instead of “plane” we are framing a loose description of a state or type of consciousness. No dimensionality is implied. An ordering, perhaps evolutionary is. The consciousness is increasingly expansive and inclusive as effort is applied and mind opened and broadened. One is not dogged by the incessant unwelcome boners of the physically governed and can allow consciousness and awareness to elevate above the belt and emotional storms.

In the blue books opus By Alice Bailey and Djwhal Khul Shamballa is mentioned as a “place” where the so-called spiritual hierarchy hang-out and meet. Human beings who have watched too many Raiders of the Lost Ark and Tomb Raider will be prone to imagine that Shamballa is a place with perhaps secret entrances. They will look for the kingdom of Shambhala referenced in a special scroll of Kālacakra tantra. The insistence on verbatim and dead letter reading causes people to seek out the resting place of Noah’s Ark. Maybe people are unwilling to accept the prevalence of metaphor and allegory in parable. It seems to me Moses parting the sea is more metaphor than physical “plane” reality.

In the works of Kuhl he mentions that the so-called maters can be “found” high up on the mental plane, near the buddhic.

In other words, people who are large mentally and intuitionally governed might be able to “contact” the masters.

Perhaps Shamballa too is a state of awareness, a level of consciousness and a thought form in which these evolved beings congregate from time to time. When one has risen above and expanded consciousness one might be able to build the Shamballa thought form and “go” “there”.

Unprecedented Dreaming

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

For me it has been a useful exercise to group these dreams thematically and see the scope and variety of subject matter. Many people are interested in dreams and things like lucid dreaming. There is an attempt to gain scientific credibility for dream studies using instrumentation and the statistical methods of psychology. Taken as a whole the opus of dreams published here and those not yet published may be unprecedented, and unique. Who else dreams of vajras, patents, lamas and hydrogen bonded water clusters?   

Am I simply an anomaly or is there something more significant at work?

In general people seek to promote their own ideas and profile. The not invented here syndrome can be found on all sides. Group mind is very anti anyone or any idea which does not originate in the group. Outsiders are not very welcome especially if they challenge the status quo or question current operational dogma.

I did, religiously, a Toltec dreaming practice daily at least once a day for eight years. I did it on the Victoria line of a morning. If you can do dreaming practice on a crowded rush hour tube you can do it anywhere. The control has to be good. The intent behind this practice is to connect with the dreamer {Soul or reincarnating Jiva} and then to hand over the steering wheel of the earthly vehicle to her. To live life according to the advice given in dreams, to surrender control.

Subsequent to this I did a meditation called the master in the heart which has a similar purpose, of connection. It builds the Antahkarana, a rāja yoga. One could say that Toltec dreaming draws inspiration down and the yoga builds upwards. They are rose and lotus visualisations. Union or at-one-ment are the goals or aim if you like. It does not require wearing tight leggings or looking fit / hot. It does mean that some measure of letting go of imagined control is needed.

Because I am good at visualisation, I have extended the rāja yoga to “places” beyond any written account. In Toltec terms a steady pictorial visualisation is an active dream in which you imagine and hold fast an image. These dream thought forms tend to stabilize when they are “accurate” and reproducible.  For example, the Sahasrāra chakra or crown chakra is one such visualisation. Opening this chakra and going beyond it is a death practice in which one opens the exit door. In order to do this one needs to stretch the sūtrātman anchoring the life inside the body. It is a risky thing to do, control must be impeccable. I first did this in a detached house in the middle of a wood on a country estate a distance from interruption and people. During the day I was quite alone in a “cabin” in a wood.

–

–

Because I am a scientist by training and I used to train smart young things in science at a top university and at high school sixth form levels. I even had postdoctoral workers. I have kept lab books or dream journals. The rāja yoga or active dream meditations were extensive with some of the thought forms taking weeks and months to build.  What one experiences in passing to a “higher” more “rarefied” state of consciousness is a kind of “membrane” which has to be transcended / popped. Each new state is difficult to hold or stabilize. Yet with practice it can be done. Here is one page from my dream journal.

–

–

In these meditations slight residual corporeal awareness remains but all sense of earth-time vanishes. There is a distant awareness of the room. One continues breathing but unconsciously so. I did record electroencephalograms {EEG} and video for a few of these. The EEG is, aside from very low frequency and amplitude theta, essentially flat despite the visualisation.

These meditations have a sensation of extensive travel to non-mundane “levels” “states” or “places”.

There is no way that I could adequately convey the experience to others. Unless you have “gone” there yourself you cannot know. Of particular assistance was the mantra associated with the Heart Sutra which one can chant in order to change between states when working upwards.

Gate gate, para gate, para sum gate bodhi svaha

Gone gone, gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond, hail the awakening

I was in conscious control doing this during daylight and without drugs or booze.

One needs to take great care to come back “down” and into body consciousness. At first the “path” downwards is as slow as the “upward”. In time one knows the way “home” and this can be done more quickly.

I guess these meditations are a form of white tantra. They are situated at anja and above and have nothing to do with basal tantra. In some later meditations three centres are active, heart, anja and sahasrāra.

In my book active visualisation and 3d {sometimes +} thought form building is active dreaming.

Of course I could be kidding myself, but I somehow doubt that.

This is what I mean by dreamyoga…