Imre Vallyon - Why Meditate?: The True Purpose of Meditation

Table of Contents

WHY MEDITATE?

The True Purpose of Meditation

by Imre Vallyon

The Spiritual Path Series Vol 1

Edited transcript of a talk by Imre Vallyon (session 1756)

ISBN 978-0-909038-91-5

November 2012

Sounding-Light Publishing Ltd

PO Box 771, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand

www.soundinglight.com

Copyright 2012 Imre Vallyon. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission in writing from the author, application for which shall be made through the publisher.

WHY MEDITATE?

The True Purpose of Meditation

IMRE VALLYON

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you already. Nirvana is within you already. All you need to do is connect to It in a direct way. That is all.

WHY MEDITATE?

Nowadays, most people have wrong ideas about spirituality, even those following the Eastern path. Many people practise yoga techniques purely for relaxation. For the past twenty or thirty years it has been taught in the Western world that when you are very busy and have a lot of stress in your life you should do some yoga exercises, breathing exercises, or meditation to relieve the stress. So people started doing all these exercises and meditations to relieve stress in their lives, which of course has nothing to do with meditation at all. To improve your health or relieve stress are not objectives of meditation. This is a modern idea, and a very wrong idea.

So I will tell you why people meditated in ancient days, going back to the ancient Egyptians, the Babylonians, the old Jewish civilization, the early Greeks and Romans, and the early Christians and Sufis. Why did they meditate? It was not for the reasons that most people in the West meditate today.

To understand the idea of meditation, we need to look at how a human being is made up and how the Universe is made up. Otherwise you wont understand why people should meditate. You will need to accept it as a theory at first, but later on you will discover it in meditation yourself as a truth.

You are Both a Soul and a Personality

Each of us is a Living Soul, existing in a radically different reality to this one. You, as a Living Soul, live in a Soul world. You can call it the Causal Worldsvery refined, high frequency, semi-Light, semi-material worlds. You live as a Living Soul in these worlds.

But you also have a personality that exists down here on this level. On this level you have a physical body, you have a mind, and you have emotions. Each of thesethe physical body, the mind, and the emotionshave their own sphere of activity in and around you. You can see the physical aspect, but the mental and emotional vibrations you cannot see. If you become clairvoyant, of course, then you can see these things; but the average person is not clairvoyant, so the average person can only feel them. You can feel peoples thoughts, you can feel peoples emotions, and you can touch them physically, but all of this is only of the personality which lives in this world.

So you are both a Living Soul and a personality, and the problem arises because there is no conscious link between these two aspects of yourself. You dont remember yourself as a Living Soul; you know yourself only as a personality. In the education system, at home, and in church you are taught about your personalityabout your body, feelings, moods, desires and thoughtsbut you still cannot experience yourself as a Living Soul, as a spiritual entity apart from and beyond the personality. Therefore, you cannot experience the other Universe in which the Living Soul abidesa greater Universe, a radiant Light-Universe. (Refer to )

In the East they use a different language to describe the same idea. They call the Soul Atman , the Spirit or the Self. They say that you have Atman (Spirit), you have Manas (the mind), you have Kama (the desire-nature), and you have the physical body.

Whether you follow an Eastern or a Western idea, however, the basic problem is that there is a disconnection between yourself as an immortal spiritual entity and the perishable self that exists in this world. Therefore, the Ancients made an effort to connect the two, so that while living in this world they became consciously immortal. That connecting process is meditation.

So the true purpose of meditation is to link yourself up within yourself. This is why the Easterners use the word Yoga. In the Hebrew tradition it is Yichud. Yoga does not mean exercise, it means union . Yoga is the uniting of that spiritual entity within you with the material entity which you observe yourself to be.

A Good Meditation is Very Simple

From the very beginning it is important to understand why you meditate. If you have a wrong idea of meditation, or if you meditate for the wrong purpose, then you will not attain that result which is the true purpose of meditation. This is why it is important also to choose the right kind of meditation. During the past six thousand years, people have forgotten the true idea of meditation and have devised intellectual exercises that actually take you away from that idea of union. The Buddhists, the Tibetans, and the Jesuits of the Christian tradition, for instance, invented very long, complicated, stressful visualizations and thinking processes and called them meditation, and they thought that through those processes you could attain Higher Consciousness.

The problem, however, is that the more complicated the exercise, the less chance you have of succeeding. This is why we have to clarify what meditation actually is. A good meditation is very simple; it has to be simple, because a complex meditation will keep you tied to mental activity. The very complicated Buddhist and Christian forms of meditation keep the mind actively engaged in some visualization or thought-process, so you remain on that level. You (your consciousness) cannot move up or down and you cannot unite within, because you keep activating your mind. The whole idea of a good meditation is to quiet the mind, to make the mind completely still . And you have to understand very scientifically why that is so.

You have a physical body, you have an astral or emotional body and you have a mind body, and each has a different frequency of vibration. Your physical body vibrates very slowly, your emotional body vibrates faster, and the mind body vibrates faster still. And then there is your Soul, which has a very rapid and fine vibration, and you cannot perceive it unless you cultivate that vibration. So you cannot ever perceive the Soul by simply remaining on the physical brain level, because the brains rate of vibration is too slow. Nor can you perceive the Soul by feeling, because the emotional body is still too slow. Even by thinking, you cannot perceive the Soul, because your mind body is still too slow. Any meditation that continually over-stimulates your physical, emotional, or mental processes will develop only those levels of your personality; it will not connect you to the Soul level. So, to perceive yourself as a Living Soul, you have to go beyond physical, emotional, and mental processes.

The Soul Realizes that Something is Missing

Over thousands of years, people have invented two basic kinds of meditation process: one which connects you to yourself as a Living Soul, and the other which develops you horizontally (outwardly into the world), perhaps developing your emotional nature, or your mental faculty, or physical abilities, or psychic powers ( siddhis ). But then the results are vastly different. Many of the Tibetan and early Hatha Yoga forms of meditation, for instance, were invented to develop psychic powers, so that one could levitate, walk on water, go through fire, and so on. They thought that the purpose of meditation was to develop those powers. They had already forgotten the higher purpose of meditation, which is to unite yourself as a Living Soul.