A Rosicrucian Speaks

Joseph J. Weed

Creative Meditation

1958

In our Rosicrucian teachings we are urged to meditate and to set aside a certain time each day for meditation. Definite instructions are given and techniques taught but unfortunately only a very few students carry out the meditations as suggested. My purpose now is to attempt to awaken in you an interest in meditation and to give certain suggestions which may help you to meditate more creatively and with greater success.

In the very beginning of this world, we are told, God formed and informed the world by His thought and has held all together within His mind for the many, many eons of manifested existence. The ancient occult statement says "God thought, God visualized, God spoke and the world was made and is sustained". Between the Creator and humanity there is a graded Hierarchy of beings each endowed by the Creator with a fragment of himself and hence potentially capable of doing everything He has done or can do. The important word in that sentence is "potentially". Every living intelligent being, from the highest Master or Deva down to the lowest human is potentially able to create in the same manner as the Creator of all, but actually the individual's creative ability depends upon the degree of evolvement he has attained, his understanding of the techniques of the creative process and the control he can manifest.

Now before some of you say to yourself "Well, that eliminates me", let me hasten to add that all of us are creating all the time. Even the weakest and least able person in the world has created something and is probably in the process of creating something else right now. Men everywhere, if they only knew it, are always in a state of unconscious meditation, dreaming of better things, fighting for desired material benefits, longing for that which lies beyond their present possession and their present attainment. All these desires, longings, wishes, visions and dreams are the "basic ingredients" of focussed meditation. Thus, we all create continuously, whether we Intend to create or not. The problem we face is to create that which is good, which will help us and our fellow man and avoid creating thoughts, emotions, circumstances and things which are of lower order. In this connection the Master says "We must learn to love, not to hate; we must learn to serve and not exact due service; We must learn to heal, not to hurt".

The world we live in was originally designed by the Creator as a beautiful, pure, perfect thing. Today, our world has lost its pristine quality. The myriad creations of man, dating back to the dawn of time, have overlaid and obscured the original purity of God's creation, that to the inner eye it has seemingly become covered with murky clouds and a miasma of writhing obscenities. These are the creations of the thoughts and emotions and violent deeds of the lower strata of humanity that accumulating over thousands of years have resulted in the disease and pestilence, the hurricanes and earthquakes, the wars and other forms of violence and unpleasantness that have changed this planet from the garden it once was to the field of unfairness, difficulty and competitive tension which it is for most of us today.

Fortunately for humanity, the Soul works always in all of us and we are unconsciously stimulated to seek for higher and better things. The Master says "All that is, is created by meditation, by desire merging first into transient thought, then becoming clear thinking and eventually abstract and transcendent thought". Thus, in the way of all Masters Who condense great ideas into a few words, the Master here has compressed the development of a thousand incarnations into a single sentence. The law is that that which man has succeeded in creating (and all men under the Law of Karma create their own world) eventually no longer satisfies. His interest and meditation then shifts into the creation of higher things and eventually touches the world of spiritual values. It is to this process that Christ referred when He said "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he".

Human beings, people like ourselves, are capable of four different grades or types of individual meditation. Beings of higher development than the human employ different techniques of creative effort which are beyond both our ability and our comprehension. But the human techniques are employed, or may be employed, by all of us. They are as follows: --

Desire. Yes this is a form of creative meditation and it leads to the attainment, in the material world and sometimes in the world of the emotions, of what the lower man desires and wants. This includes the desires of every human from the very lowest through the intermediate types on up to the aspirations of the mystic.
Prayer. This is the second form of creation, or creative meditation, and is the first step above desire. This is a big step upward in that the man praying acknowledges a Power higher than the personal self and appeals to It for help. The personal desire is blended with an aspiration for Soul relation or Cosmic Contact. Through the proved efficacy of prayer, man begins to discover the subtler powers of his nature and his essential dualism. In other words he finds for the first time that he is himself both lower self and a higher self.
Mental Reflection or Concentrated Thinking. This is the next step upward and the man begins to use his mind for the first time. This type of creative activity leads to definite personality achievements and triumphs, and has produced all of the creative wonders of our modern civilization. Here is man dealing with his physical environment in a masterful way and its success leads inevitably to a reorientation of the personality and an effort to attain soul contact or cosmic contact.
Straight Meditation. This is the next stage above concentrated thought and is a natural outgrowth from it. It is the process recommended and described in our monographs in which we are directed to employ the focussed, concentrated mind and fixed reflection. To this I urge you, for its success produces a soul infused personality or a conscious control of life by the soul personality which results in an effort to cooperate consciously with the creative work of the Hierarchy.

All desires are creative and all thoughts are creative. Each desire, no matter how weak, and each thought, no matter how transient and feeble, creates some form of manifestation. This does not mean that you get everything you wish for. Not at all. Your desire may be too weak and may be opposed by much stronger desires on the part of others. Or your thought may not be at all clear and only distantly related to reality. The more closely your visualization approaches reality or what already exists, the easier it is for it to manifest on the material plane.

It requires an almost God like power to effect an immediate and drastic physical change but a gradual change can be brought about over a period of time in almost any set of conditions and circumstances. We in the present day have inherited from previous civilizations and cultures much of value and much which is disastrous in nature; but we in our turn have built upon the the old and have created the present civilization. Possibly the culminating triumph of the present civilization is that humanity has been brought to a point where it is faced with and must recognize the possibility of failure, the possibility of self extinction and consequent failure as a race of men. In evaluating that possibility, men are being forced to a reorientation toward the higher world and away from all which is strictly material.

In addition to the individual meditation techniques there are three stages of group meditation. These roughly parallel the three higher individual techniques and are as follows: --

Worship. This is basically prayer in a group. It is the united recognition and the subsequent reflection of humanity upon the fact of the divine Transcendence and divine Immanence. Worship as taught and encouraged by the world religions has created and maintained a path of return to the Divine Source for the average man for many thousands of years.
Invocation and Evocation. This parallels "mental reflection and creation" on the part of the individual. It is the new science of group creation and power and it is available to all dedicated groups. This is the technique which we employ in our convocations, the science of group invocation, but unfortunately it is not too well understood and the energy created is usually misdirected or dissipated. But as the individual Lodge and Chapter members become more skilled and the officers more understanding our convocation work can become a great power for universal good. Think on this.
Ashramic Meditation. For the present this is beyond us but when any one group can become dedicated and coherent and skilled as a group, it will attract the attention of a Master Who may then induct the entire group into his ashram in order to employ it for some specific Hierarchical purpose. It is at this point that Ashramic Meditation begins. The group consciousness is lifted up and opened up to impressions from the Master. In this way He guides and instructs the group and its individual members. For most of us and for most newly forming groups this is still pretty much in the future but we are told that in general the work of these Ashramic groups will be to:

Bring order out of chaos.
Help enlighten the average man and stimulate his awareness of and interest in higher things.

As we think on the foregoing facts our concept of meditation and creative meditation is bound to undergo something of a change. The average student thinks he lives in a world where things happen to him continuously, things over which he has no control. Upon occasion he tries to change this flow of events for the better. He may at this time resort to meditation and attempt to create a better environment for himself. These efforts may last 15 to 20 minutes at a time and occur once or twice a week. Little does he realize that he is creating all the time. Every waking thought and wish has some effect upon himself and his environment and in many cases he spends several hours a day creating by fears and worry (for example) the very circumstances he tries to change with his short meditation periods two or three times a week.

When once we have realized the full implications of this the proper procedure for creative meditation should begin to dawn on us. When we have, after careful and mature deliberation decided upon what we really want, we should then proceed to live that thought or idea twenty four hours a day. A quiet meditative period of creative visualization for 15 minutes each day is a great help in focussing the thought accurately. But the rest of the waking hours should be spent in a confident attitude of expectancy, of sureness in the rightness and ultimate materialization of the event, quality of manifestation desired. No counteracting doubts or fears should be permitted to creep in, no wavering and indecision should shake our confidence or the creation will be weakened or destroyed.

Another thing of importance in creative meditation is reasonableness. The laws are the same physical laws where the equation has always been ExT=W or Energy applied over a period of Time results in a specific amount of Work done. We are all familiar with these early problems in physics. For example :-- If one man can build a wall of brick three feet high and ten feet long in a day, two men can build it in ½ a day, or can build a larger wall three feet high and twenty feet long in a full day. And if you had ten men your wall would go up at 100 feet a day. This same law applies to creative meditation. The amount of energy employed and the duration of time it is applied determines the amount of work that will be accomplished. This simple fact is often overlooked by budding esotericists who expect great results in a short time and usually from very little effort. Bear in mind the physical universe was not created by you or by any man but by a Being so great that we cannot really conceive of what He is like. And the changes that have overlaid the original purity of this world were created by millions, nay billions of people over thousands of years. So basic changes in our physical world are pretty difficult for any one to achieve in one lifetime. But the event pattern can be changed and one's immediate environment can be changed and here is where we can be of the greatest effectiveness and do the most good.

We are instructed in the convocation ritual to "radiate thoughts of love and peace to our brothers and sisters throughout the world". This is creative and it fulfills the first injunction of the Ashramic group meditation which is "To bring order out of chaos". Thus, we have a concrete suggestion for creative meditation. To be effective and successful we should implement our effort here by maintaining an attitude of benevolence throughout our day. We should try to absorb the petty irritations with which we are confronted and not pass them on to others, we should endeavor to meet anger with calmness, hate with love, and as the Master tells us we should "seek to serve and not exact due service, we should seek to heal not to hurt".

Joseph J. Weed

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A Rosicrucian Speaks
Joseph J. Weed