Meditative practice

The key to the whole method is the use of the projected castle. This ensures that the concentration of mental energies is focused on the etheric body, which has been built up by the involved visualization. This projected etheric vehicle, when withdrawn back into the physical at the end of the meditation practice, continues to work in a perfectly safe and self-regulated manner. 

To Franz alchemy was a meditative practice. Fie would sit for hours in his study reading his books, and sometimes he would just sit and contemplate one of the illustrations. On several occasions it was an illustration that seemed to open an inner door in his mind and allowed him to travel to a spiritual dimension. Once there, he was able to hold conversations with ancient alchemists and philosophers and sometimes even with angels. 

The relative rarity of self-awareness is a major contributor to neurotic qualities of behavior and to the classification of ordinary consciousness as illusion or waking dreaming by many spiritual systems, an idea explored in Chapter 19. The higher end of the continuum of self-awareness comes to us even more rarely, although it may be sought deliberately in certain kinds of meditative practices, such as the Buddhist vipassana meditation discussed in chapter 7. 

A state is an altered state if it is discretely different from some baseline state we want to compare things to. Since we usually take ordinary waking consciousness as our standard of comparison, a state such as nocturnal dreaming is thus an altered state. Other well-known examples of altered states are the hypnotic state, states induced by psychoactive drugs such as alcohol, states centered on strong emotions such as rage, panic, depression, and elation, and states induced by meditative practices. ... 

Deliberate meditation practices, done at times specially designated as meditation time rather than ordinary life, can also lead to a temporary lessening of the identification process. If you spend fifteen calm minutes just observing your breathing while sitting still, for example, you have fifteen minutes in which your mind has been filled with the simple, emotionally neutral experience of breathing, rather than the typical mental/emotional activities that reinforce false personality and its multitudinous identifications. In his lectures Sogyal Rinpoche emphasized... 

Although Bhogar s work deals specifically with using the breath and various meditation practices to initiate a transformation in consciousness, he seems to have made the assumption that his readers have achieved a certain level of proficiency in the more fundamental of yogic disciplines. This is perhaps a bit of an understatement, in that he does have a tendency to present his system concealed within the language of an adept and, at times, he makes no accommodations for even the practitioners from other schools of Yoga. 

My patient Martin had the opposite reaction. A man with a great respect for science, Martin found profound relief in understanding the role that physical factors played in his depression. But he didn t understand why I suggested that he meditate, practice conscious breathing, and engage in heart-opening exercises. 

As shown by the passage quoted above, all those involved in the compounding of the elixir should first perform the preliminary purification practices (zhai). The consecrated place is built on a mountain slope near an eastflowing stream, and is designated as a pure chamber jingshe), a term that also denotes the room where a Daoist adept performs meditation practices. When one compounds the Nine Elixirs, the purification practices are per-... 

Some of the other methods mentioned by Ge Hong—especially those to eliminate one s shadow and hide one s form and those to guard one s form and appear lifeless —are related to the second type of meditation practices, collectively known as guarding the Mysterious One. According... 

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