An Authentic Meditation

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AN AUTHENTIC MEDITATION

Soon enough, this apparent assemblage of gases, liquids, and solids, and the likewise constituted environment of which it is a part, will dissolve and reconfigure. That is what will be apparent to those others of similar nature, viewing from the outside.

This body will, by ways, return to the land of which it has been, and is, just another moving piece. That is how it will look from without. And what about from within?

When the body is bound in sleep, and between the intervals of pure mergence with the ground of all things, the supra-conscious logos of the universe, what is to be found in the psuche (consciousness/soul) insofar as it will return to an apparently individual existence, represents itself (to itself) in and as dream.

The experiences, tendencies, all activities and affections of the waking body are there in dreams, in the forms with which the psuche clothes itself in order to perceive itself. If the waking body has been wrathful, hateful, lustful, so too in the soul will these forms be enclosed and lurk, ready to show themselves to the soul in their true -and terrifying – shapes, whenever the body is bound in sleep or dissolved in death. And likewise, with the virtues, though in opposite shapes.

If, when this composite hulk, the waking body and it’s environment, which are together the outermost manifestation of the soul, it’s hall-porch, dissolve and all the affections, and tendencies, and experiences, vices and virtues, withdraw into the hallway proper, there has been an overabundance of anger, intemperance, hatred, greed, then the hallway will take on the appearance of a hell. And likewise, with the virtues, though in an opposite aspect.

Now is the time to really look at what is going on, in both the outer and inner chambers of this particular extremity of the World-Soul, this polyp of the Cosmic God, this soul called ‘myself’.

LIR’S¹ CHILDREN

Tidal-trapped in turbid pools,

appearing from the ocean brine,

abide we kind that water rules,

Lir’s children, out the sea of time

***

As vapours through a world of dust,

we wander, bearing father’s soul,

to stir the soil, to iron rust,

to quicken breath and body whole

***

Until at last, through many shapes,

all empty, save the thought of Lir

himself, back to his sea escape,

from grief and grave, there reappear

1. Gaelic god of the sea, Lir is best known in the guise of the character of the king, father of the children condemned by a stepmother’s spell to spend centuries in the form of swans. Lir was taken by the national revival author and mystic, George Russell, as the Gaelic analogue of Vedic Brahman, the absolute reality and true Self.