New Book Project Mysteries of the Kybalion -The Principle of Rhythm Part 1

The Principle of Rhythm Part 1 B

There’s a little bit of evil and there’s a little bit of good. Nothing is all bad or nothing is all good. Where is the demarcation point between one pole and another? Where is the exact point where light is and darkness is, or darkness ends and light begins? We talked about how everything is a degree of everything else. For conceptual purposes, human beings think that there is actually a black and white and yet there is no such thing as black and white. From the standpoint of rhythmic pattern degrees, there is no such thing because where does white begin and where does black begin? Where does white end and where does black begin? When you feel elated in the morning and something happens and you feel depressed in the afternoon where is the point where it actually changed? Then it comes back, where is the point where it changes back? It’s imperceptible and yet for conceptual purposes, for a better understanding of the lower mind, you are made to think that there is an actual demarcation point somewhere up to this hour I was feeling good, then I was feeling bad up to here and nothing is like that. It is all illusory. Everything is but a degree of everything else. All of this, the Kybalion explains, affects a human being at their conscious level of mind. These energies push a human being, impel and compel them, especially those who have not practiced gaining control over their lives through the yogic techniques, through the disciplines, the art that we’ve been discussing: the wisdom teaching; practice of the devotional rituals; the Maat philosophy and finally meditation. Remember we talked previously about the unconscious level of mind that leads a human being automatically in their lives. Remember I told you a few sessions ago that if you’re walking down the street and then you all of sudden start thinking, imagining or fantasizing and you get to the end of the block but you didn’t remember that you have walked that distance, that is the automatic mind that has operated the personality while you were away musing in the astral plane of mind. Your personality has been carried away by its thoughts, emotions and its inner-feelings. You have been swept away with the tide, in other words. People can actually have this happen and by the end of the day they’ve killed somebody and they don’t realize what they’ve done or they regret it later or they do this or that, the mood swings and so on and so forth. Therefore the teaching has enjoined that an aspirant should begin to start to feel as if they have gained all there is to have gained in the world and as if they have lost everything that they have gained. Imagine what that means. Are you going to be neither bothered one way or another internally? And in so doing being undisturbed, having your mind placid like a quite lake or like an ocean with waves whipped up by the stormy winds of desires, regrets and misplaced feelings? Are you going to be unduly disturbed whether you gain something or you lose something? If you reach this point we are talking about all the funny little things that happen in the world, that seem so important, so compelling, they are going to seem petty, but also like a glorious show, an expression of the Divine, stuff that happens, and nothing more; nothing to get overly concerned about, unnecessarily involved with; nothing to pine away over; nothing to be longing over.

“If you wish to be as a master you must love impersonally, caring for all equally; wants must yield to self control, live as though you have achieved and acquired everything you need and also as if you have lost everything; even the thing or person you might love most; for material things are transitory.”
-Ancient Egyptian Proverb

Therefore through this practice you are going to come into a balance, you are going to come to a particular point and this is what the Kybalion calls Neutralization of Rhythm. You cannot stop the rhythmic pattern of the world. However, you can neutralize it’s affects within your personality and this is what every aspirant must learn how to do. Since this rhythmic pattern has its beginnings, it is like, remember that rock I talked about and throwing it into the lake, and then the ripples come afterwards, the rock falls into the lake of your unconscious mind and that is the sprouting of the unconscious Ari, a subtle impression. That reverberates into your sub-conscious or it emerges as a feeling in the subconscious, and then it emerges as a conscious thought and desire in your conscious mind. You think, “Oh, this is mine, this is what I desired, this is me.” In reality it is not you; it is nothing but an established pattern from your present and or previous lifetime or your previous existence in this lifetime – that you have agreed with, accepted and hold onto. What happens next is that when you accept the emergent feelings, thoughts and then act on them you are creating and leaving new impressions in your unconscious mind that will be experienced in the future, that will emerge in the future when stimulated at some point. That leads you to another impression in your mind and more mental agitations and more future desires and experiences, keeping you in a cycle of experiences, impressions, mental vibrations and agitations in a seemingly endless rhythmic cycle of ignorant worldly experiences, death, reincarnation, more ignorant experiences, more mental agitations and gross vibrations, that are going to come out later and to push you in another direction, towards another desire and to keep on reincarnating again and again and again and so on. This can go on indefinitely, unless you break the cycle of the rhythmic pattern, the worldly rhythmic pattern.

How do you break the negative cycle and change to a rhythmic movement that leads to enlightenment instead of more lower worldly entanglements? The key to this change is focusing on Amun. Amun means Witnessing Self. If you were to practice awareness, concentrating on the Witnessing Self, your mind cannot be swayed with the tides of emotion. If you practice the discipline of the Witnessing Self meditation, which means concentrating on that part of your personality, which is the Witnessing Consciousness, you would discover that you can look at your mind and become separate from your thoughts. As soon as you become separate from your thoughts you are detached from them. You are free from them, you do not have to act on them and they do not have a hold on you. Additionally, you will be less susceptible to the automatic mind that takes over when you fly off into a fancy of imaginations or desires. Of course this is when you perfect the practice.

Recall that there are three aspects of experience, Amun, Ra and Ptah, the Triad, the Trinity of human experience. Amun is the Witnessing Self, Ra is the perceiving instrument and Ptah is the object. So subject, object and interaction between the two. If one of the these three components of perception is missing you cannot have experience, so in your meditation practice, when you go beyond your mind and senses then you lose sight of the physical world, the Ptah component. You would still have your mind to perceive with and you would still have your concept of self that is doing the perceiving, but there is nothing to perceive so therefore you cannot have a triad experience and you would more easily be aware of what is there when the triad is not. The triad or tripod of experience, it is like having a table with three legs, but without any one of the legs the table falls down. If you have the physical objects and you have the Witnessing Self and you don’t have any perceiving instruments to perceive them with then the table (of perception) breaks down also. If you place your attention on the Witness Self aspect within yourself, and reflect “I Am”, I Exist and there are objects out there and I use my mind to perceive them”, and if you study the wisdom teaching you come to understand that the world is an illusion because it does not exist unless it is being perceived in and through the mind so then you can take the world out of the equation. You become aware of yourself as independent of objects (the world).

If you practice a meditation technique that uses concentrating on a particular object, that means that you are taking your mind and concentrating on it, and also you are taking your perceiving instrument away from the world (everything else). You can’t perceive the world anymore so the tripod breaks down. If you were to be able to stop your thoughts, the result is the same as if you concentrate on one object, the tripod breaks down. All of these are different methods and ways but the primary goal of all is breaking down the triad of perception, being mindful and taking oneself out of time and space by breaking down the triad of perception. The Witnessing Self Meditation also allows this process to occur. It is practiced in the following way:

THE WITNESSING CONSIOSNESS MEDITATION TECHNIQUE AS A WAY TO CHANGE THE RHYTHM OF CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION

There are several stages that have been enjoined. The first stage of the practice is to slow down the movements of the body. Remember we are talking about rhythm as being an ebbing and flowing, a rhythmic movement. If you allow yourself to live in the world at the regular pace of the world, you are more easily apt to be caught up in the world. If you change up on the world you are going to easily fall out of the pattern of the world. So therefore practice slowing down the movements of the body. That means if takes you half a second to move your arm up, then you take ten seconds. You gradually move up, up, and up and you become aware of your action, it is not an automatic action anymore. Being aware of your action, that is happening very slowly, that takes you out of the world of time and space and brings you into awareness of yourself as actor. When you are aware of self as actor instead of being caught up in the play, or the movie of the world then you are becoming more aware of yourself as the Witnessing Consciousness. This exercise is to be practiced until your movements are almost imperceptible and then you actually stop your physical movements and then you work on your mental movements. Your physical body is allowed to rest completely without any movement at all so then you work on your mental movements. Become aware of your mental movements as passing clouds and you are separate and aware of the passing clouds. As soon as you start moving in this direction, the less hold these movements have on you. Actually, you are polarizing your personality, yourself towards the higher vibration as we spoke about last time, a few times ago. You are polarizing yourself to a particular point in the rhythm. Here working with breath is important. If you become aware of your breath, your breath is the ultimate representation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic aspect of the human being. These are rhythms that allow a human being to exist. When your body is in a sympathetic state your breath is very shallow and you are tense and stressed out and you are ready for a fight. When your parasympathetic system kicks in which is the pendulum flow back the other way, you relax, you can breathe freely. It is like the breath coming in and out.

Where does the breath stop coming in and where does the breath start going out? Again, you become aware of that. As soon as you become aware realize that the key is that as soon as you become aware of something you are free from it. From this yogic standpoint, aware of yourself as being separate from that thing. If you are aware of your breath and you are watching your breath, you are free from that breath. If you start becoming aware of your emotions, feelings and thoughts coming into your mind, impression sprouting in your mind, you are free from them, you don’t have to act on them. You are aware of the mob coming down the street because they are angry and upset, you don’t have to become part of it, you don’t have to get caught up in it. But you are not aware of all this if you are an ignorant human being and you are caught up. Somebody will come knocking on your door, an old friend who was with you and jail and they’ll say, “Hey I got a good gig going on here, we’re going to break into this place,” you are right down there with them. Or they come down with some drugs and you fall in with them using the drugs, and the pattern must be broken. Otherwise it can continue indefinitely as we say.

But going back to the meditation. This is a meditation practice that begins in a very conscious state; a very awake state and you remain so. Going into deeper levels of self-awareness until you are just the Eye, the Witnessing Eye. The next step beyond this is Neberdjer, once you’ve perfected Amun, which is understanding yourself as a witnessing transcendental being, which is beyond even the concept of Eye. The concept of existence and non-existence these are little concepts to the Self, these are just for mental understanding. Whatever God is, it is beyond even these concepts. These concepts cannot even apply, cannot even be used or explained. So the key is to watching the breath, allowing that stressed out pattern of life, this is problem with people. They get a stressed out pattern and their rhythm compensates in another form of stress. The sympathetic pattern is when people are cheated by life, you are in the sympathetic state, you are running away, your blood vessels are constricted; your digestive system is shut down because you are running. People are so stressed out that they are acting this way constantly. “Oh I have to get into work. Oh, I have to pick up my kids at school. Oh, I have to pay the bills. Oh, I have to go here, I have to do this I have to do that. Oh, I have to get some rest, Oh, I have to go on vacation, I have to come back from vacation and go back to work.” The compensation is more stress. They never go back to a compensation in their rhythm that truly compliments. That means you are out of kilter, you are out of harmony. So aspirants must bring their life to a certain harmony. Breathing is a perfect way to do that.

Practice watching the breath that allows the body to come back to a parasympathetic state, a relaxed state. That opens the door to discovering the Witnessing Self. So being aware that you are breathing. Breathing is as they say the only, the one aspect of the human constitution that human beings can be fully aware of or can be happening automatically without your awareness. As soon as you become aware of your breathing it starts to take you out of the ordinary world and its pattern of time and space and the worldly rhythms of egoistic desiring and experiencing and brings you closer to the present and the present is a doorway to eternity, the realm beyond time and space. If you must realize that if you are involved in the world you can’t be fully thinking about breathing. So your body takes that over autonomically. The same thing happens with your automatic consciousness as well as your ego consciousness. Your ego takes over its patterns. If your ego takes over your life, you have no control. If you take control then your ego cannot take control, you see. At the beginning, in the middle of your practice, sometimes the ego is in control, sometimes you are in control, sometimes you break down and you give in to the ego. You ought to try to curtail that. You do that by practicing the disciplines of the teaching. Your morning worship; your listening to the lectures; your study of the teachings; your devotion of the exercises and also your practice of the Maat righteousness teachings, your experience of the world will also lead you to see how defunct the world is and you still keep on believing in it. Even though you may listen to the most wonderful lectures, you go out into the world and you still may eat a little meat, you still may use some pesticides, you still desire to see professional sports instead of meditating, you still may do some things that you know the teaching doesn’t enjoin. Then the teaching eventually will show you the error of your ways. So not to worry, it is all good right? So practice discovering the Witnessing Self. This allows you to stop the movements of the unconscious mind and when that happens the ripple effect that occurs in the sub-conscious and unconscious mind will not affect it. This is the way to master the principle of rhythm. You polarize yourself to the Witnessing Self, to the Witnessing Consciousness, the Eye and allow a spiritual rhythmic movement to emerge and follow that more and more each day. If this is done you have achieved mastery of Self and you are not affected by the world. You have transcended time and space. This is the wonder and beauty of the Mindfulness Meditation, anybody can practice it. Just slow down the movements of your body. If it takes you ten seconds to walk across the room, take ten minutes, real slowly. Be aware of your movements, be aware of yourself breathing; be aware of yourself then be aware of yourself controlling the movements of your body and directing it. Your body is not a robot, it is not an automaton. You should realize that there is actually a level of existence; there is a level of happening that you are not previously aware of. Even now you are not aware of this level of your own being. You are still swimming in the ocean. You are to be aware of that Witnessing Self. The more you practice it the more awareness stays with you and in your ordinary life that means real awareness when you are moving at the speed of life. You know you can move at the ordinary speed of life but then you can become aware of yourself even within that movement. You can be like anybody else, appear to be dynamic and being very active and still being internally motionless, internally mindful.

We have a separate little book on the Mindfulness, the Slowness Meditation, the Mindfulness technique, also as talked about in some other meditation books the Path of Enlightenment. The Witnessing Self Consciousness, this is what the Buddhists call “Sat Chin Buddhi” This was in Kemet thousands and thousands of years. That is what the Eye, the top of the Pyramid represents. The point, the Ben Ben at the top of the Pyramid, what the Hindus call “Bindu”. The four legs, the four sides of the Pyramid, four aspects of the physical world, four aspects of the personality and so on so forth. This is mastery, this is transcendence. You want to achieve that by mindfulness. Hetep.