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Cosmic Consciousness by Ali Nomad

XV METHODS OF ATTAINMENT: THE WAY OF ILLUMINATION

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_Meditate upon this sutra._

"By perfectly concentrated meditation upon the heart, the interior being, comes the knowledge of consciousness."

The heart is the guide of the inner nature, as the head is of the outer. Love, the Most High God, is not born in the head, but in the heart. The heart travails in pain through sorrow and loss and compassion and pity and loneliness and aspiration and sensitiveness; and lo! there is born from this pain, the spiritual Self, which embraces the lesser consciousness, enfolding all your consciousness in the softness and bliss of pure, Seraphic Love--the heritage of your immortality.

_Meditate long and wisely upon this sutra._

"Through perfectly concentrated meditation on the light in the head, come the visions of the Masters who have attained; or through the divining power of intuition he knows all things."

There is a point in the head, anatomically named "the pineal gland"; this is frequently alluded to as the seat of the soul, but the soul is not confined within the body, therefore, it is in the nature of a key between the sense-conscious self and the spiritually conscious Self; it is like a central receiving station, and may be "called up," and aroused to consciousness by meditation. Realizing and focusing the light of the spiritual nature upon this part of the head, opens up those unexplored areas of consciousness in which the masters dwell, and the student knows by intuition, which is a higher aspect of reason, many things which were heretofore incomprehensible to the merely sense-conscious man.

The spiritual Self is not a being unlike and wholly foreign to our concept of the perfect mortal-man; all the powers of discernment which we find in mortal consciousness are accentuated, intensified, refined; all grossness, all imperfections and embarrassments removed; pleasure sensitized to ecstasy; love glorified to worship. "Shapeliness, beauty, force, the temper of the diamond; these are the endowments of that body."

The spiritual body is shapely, strong, beautiful, imperishable, as the diamond, with all its brilliancy. No vapory, uncertain, or _unreal being_, but the Real, with the husk of sense-consciousness dropped off, and only the kernels of truth buried in the chaff of Experience, retained from the experiences of the personal self.

"When the spiritual man is perfectly disentangled from the psychic body, he attains to mastery over all things and to a knowledge of all."

The spiritual Self, the cosmic conscious Self, must not be confounded with the psychic body, which is formed from the emotions--passions; fears; hatreds; ambitions; resentments; envy; regrets. Know thyself as a being superior to all baser emotions, and the mastery over them is complete. They are not destroyed, but converted into love--the everlasting Source of Life.

"There should be complete overcoming of allurement or pride in the invitations of the different regions of life, lest attachment to things evil arise once more."

It is said that the disciples, seeking the paths of Yoga, reach three degrees or stages of development; first, those who are just entering the path; second, those who are in the realm of allurements, subject to temptations; third, those who have won the victory over the senses and the external life--_maya_; fourth, those who are firmly entrenched behind the bulwark of certainty; the spiritual being realized: cosmic consciousness attained and retained.

"By absence of all self indulgence at this point, also, the seeds of bondage of sorrow are destroyed, and pure spiritual being is attained."

Self-abnegation and self-sacrifice have ever been the way of spiritual development; but we are prone to misunderstand and mistake the true interpretation of this admonition; men shut themselves in monasteries and women become nuns and recluses _as a penance_, in order to purchase, as it were, absolution (at-one-ness with The Absolute, which knows not sin); this is not the point intended here. Spiritual consciousness can not be bought; the desires of the personal self may be _sublimated_ into divine force and power, through recognizing the desires of the self as baubles which attract and fill the eye, until we fail to see the glories of that which awaits us.