7 Beginning Meditation The Old Color Basement Technique
This part of meditation can be done a million times, and will still never reach the point of “perfection”. There is always more to learn, new things that develop, more to integrate. In these integrations, there are always new blockages that can arise, as awareness attempts to grasp and comprehend. The sum total of all spiritual traditions that ever have been or will be amounts to refinement of the following procedure. First, put your focus on the bottoms of your feet. If you have shoes on, it can be helpful to remove them. If you can be outside in the grass, this is especially helpful, but if you cannot, contact with the floor in the environment you find yourself is sufficient.
Move your awareness to the bottom of your feet, specifically where the arch of the foot either is, or should be. Imagine a spiral on the bottom of both feet in this area. Imagine it extruding into three dimensions, and drilling down into the Earth like the roots of a tree. Feel this energy at the bottom of your feet for as long as it takes for you to begin to feel either cold on the bottom of your feet, hot on the bottom of your feet, or tingly. Perhaps some combination of all three may occur. The feeling that should be predominate in your mind, however, should be one of stability and heaviness–not so heavy that you feel like someone has squashed you with a boulder–but heaviness in the sense that you might have felt as a child when your shoes were off and you ran in the grass.
Once you establish this feeling, it is time to bring it up to the very base of your spine, or the first chakra. Many old texts will tell you to focus on the perineum, and there is value in keeping your focus here as it has a tendency to get hot or vibrate quicker than any other area. Let your mind settle here. Begin to take in information. What is here? Is it emotional? Do you have an early memory of your family? Is it happy or sad? Do you feel pain elsewhere when you focus here? Accept whatever you see or feel. Then, take note of the color present here. If it is any color other than rainbow or red, it likely needs to be drained. Imagine the connection that you established at your feet as a pipeline, and let this area drain down it into the Earth. Note the color. Pay attention to any memories or sensations you get in your body. Is anything different? Once you get this area red, your job is complete. However, it may be that you have to do this technique several times before this happens. If you have trouble seeing anything, or otherwise are not sure, do not feel discouraged but do the best you can and move on with the rest of the meditation. It may well be some other area is off– above this area–and by doing this meditation, you eventually reach a place where you can see with ease.
The next place you want to move the energy up in your body that you started moving at your feet will be the second chakra, located approximately two inches below the navel. Let your mind rest here. What do you see? Is it emotional in nature? Creative? Sexual? Something you vaguely remember, but cannot put your finger on? Relax, let whatever needs to come arrive. Be accepting of what this area would like to show you. Examine the color. Is it something other than rainbow colored or orange? Better drain it as you did before if so. Try to go for the color orange, but again, if it does not take immediately do not become frustrated but continue on with the process.
Bring the energy up again. By now, it should seem a little like Christmas tree bulbs in that the electrical wire is drawing from the feet but runs to each bulb. Bring your energy up to the third chakra–located about where the lungs Y where the diaphragm rests. Let your mind sit here. What do you see? Does it feel comfortable? Does it seem tight? Are you able to see yourself easily accomplishing those things you want to do here? Does it feel like a struggle? Is there pain anywhere else in your body? Take note. What color is here? If it is not yellow or rainbow, it is time to drain this area. As much as is possible, go for a bright yellow. Pay attention to the shape, as you should for the previous areas as well. Is it round? Is it dented up? Make it as round as you can, and if some other color occurs to you to put here to get it eventually to yellow, then do that. The next area to bring the energy to sits between the breasts at the sternum. This area is the heart chakra. Put your focus here. What emotions do you have here? Does it seem like you have plenty of self-love here, or are you feeling a quart low? Can you be compassionate here, or are you exhausted? Is there some past relationship issue here, or are you currently content? Examine the color. If it is not rainbow colored or green, allow it to drain. Go as much as you can for the color green. As with the other areas, examine the shape, and take note of any pain or out-of-place sensation.
Now we bring the energy to the throat, which sits at the little divot where the clavicle meets. If you are not sure where that is, think about all those medical shows on TV where you see them inserting a breathing tube. Put your focus on this spot. Breathe. Can you breathe easy? Is it constricted here? Does it feel tight here compared to your chest? Are you able to express yourself how you most need to? If there are colors here other than blue or rainbow, drain it. Try to go for as much blue as you can.
Next, bring your focus either to between your eyebrows or the center of your forehead. This is the third eye area. When you focus here, what do you perceive? Is it clear, or hazy? Are you having concerns about bills and money, or is it relatively tranquil? Some of you may have interesting experiences at this area, as it is one of the areas that governs psychic sensitivity. If you see something here, do not pay much attention to it other than to take note it is here. What color is here? If it is not rainbow or indigo, it is time to drain it. Go for a deep purple/blue here as much as possible. If this area was weaker or black, and you could see nothing before, re-examine some of your previous chakras and see if your ability to perceive color is any better. Sometimes this area will be blocked and make perception harder until it is addressed.
Finally, bring your focus to the tip-top of your head at the very center. What do you see here? Is it black? Clear? Do you see angel-like things or past family members? Do you see nothing at all? Acknowledge everything. Bring in the colors purple and white here, and imagine them funneling through all the previous areas all the way down to your feet. Let go of anything and everything when you do this, as this is a purging energy. How do you feel? Put your focus at the top of your head once again. What do you see here? Spiritually advanced people may experience a traveling sensation, or a conversation with a guide. Often, people simply fall asleep, and this is fine too, although one should strive toward staying more awake during semi-lucid states. Hold your focus here, and see if anything occurs to you that seems out of the ordinary. Pay attention to it. Once you are done exploring the crown of your head, put your focus back down on your feet. Re-connect with that feeling of heaviness earlier. We certainly do not want you floating off or attempting to drive after such lofty heights as the crown chakra have been reached. You may need to stomp your feet on the floor, or let your toes dig into the soil if outdoors. Feel yourself return to your body in fullness. If you experience a lighter feeling, this is extremely positive. If you do not, but you feel slightly more energized, this is also good. If you feel neither of those, but you feel unsettled, this is also a good thing, but it means there is work to be done, and more things to be purged. You should take heart that you have opted to do something proactive on your journey instead of simply reacting.
This is the basic technique which uses color. There are other ways to meditate which I will discuss briefly further on.
7.1 You Made It!
You made it through the old color basement technique, and that is excellent. You will remember, however, that there is also a planetary technique. The advantage of the above color technique is that when it was written, this technique did not vary all that much. The rainbow had been “sitting” in the color arrangement it was in for over 2,000 years. At the point the Woman of Revelation showed up, however, it began a new kind of color coding which has not, as of this time, fully settled. So, in order for completeness to be met, we should now visit the planetary technique of meditation here in the basement.
8 Basement Planetary Meditation
The gateways to interaction with the chakras are many. One might use animals, sounds, or any number of things. At certain points, one may become advanced enough to meet a guide who helps or assists. A slightly more advanced version of meditation utilizes the following method: At the first chakra, imagine you can take the planet Saturn out of the sky and drop it at that first area. Why Saturn? Because of what it represents, which would take books to cover. For the purposes of this meditation, simply know the planets have certain meanings all of their own in the inner world. At the second chakra, imagine you can take the planet Jupiter out of the sky and drop it here. At the third, Mars. At the fourth, Venus. At the fifth, Mercury. At the sixth, combine the sun in the front at the forehead to the moon in the back of the head in some fashion. At the seventh, probably nothing, but sometimes Uranus or Neptune work here. Now, you might ask yourself why these particular planets at these areas. Since we are in the basement I will tell you when I finish explaining the technique.
Ideally, the meditation methods I have outlined here would be practiced for 21 days consecutively for 15 to 20 minutes a day. At the end of that period, it would be highly surprising to find that someone undertaking the exercise seriously and openly would feel no change inside themselves. After you get good at this, combine traditional breath work, and see where you go!
8.1 The Long Awaited Why Are These Planets Put Where they Are
The planets are placed in the order they are due to the construction of the Adam Kadmon or the perfect man. The solar system we inhabit is, in a roundabout way, a fractal of the Perfect human being in the sense that the planetary bodies in addition to being visual solid things we can see are actually kinds of resonators of sympathetic energy which happens to operate in their wavelength.
Traditionally, science called this sympathetic fluid a kind of aether, and went on to disprove that such a thing exists but also shows that such a thing does exist when it comes to magnetic fields and how they operate and the bending of spacetime due to the presence of planetary bodies. To be sure, the definitions we use in a modern sense in science no longer reflect or understand these things to be aether, but it seems to be a negligible point if you call the sheet that bends “spacetime” or “bendy aether” to anyone who might understand something about auras. Only scientists get angry when these terms are asserted, in part because it removes the material bias which has become endemic among the field. Aether then can be thought of either as the fluid in which lines of force move such as in magnetics, or as magnetics itself.
Personally, I tend to think of it more like a rarefied version of a vat of Mercury—the kind which seem to have been made by Aztecs under certain pyramids for reasons that do not have practical scientific explanations. They do, however, provide very specific “aether” explanations. Therefore, since the body is composed of light vibrating at different rates of speed and timing which correlates to the location of certain vital organs, one will then note that the planets do much the same in the sense that they are reported, by those in deeper states of meditation, to sound rather like a ringing of a bell. This sound is probably the harmonic state of the planet being picked up on by the consciousness of the experiencer and so it is that certain planets vibrate at lower and higher pitches relative to the octave at which their existence “rings” within the aether. Since the body has correlating parts to these frequencies, then the color associated with the area changes in relation to the spiritual movement of the magnetics of the body. Each planet then has a certain mathematical kind of musical description, and as the orbit varies in the heavens the concert and ringing is either closer or more distant and the Earth as well as the inhabitants on it experience these shifts. The body experiences these shifts as well, and health is the ability to be able to endure these changes while a homeostasis is kept within the body such that no specific part begins to go “too far out of range” compared to what the whole can withstand.
It follows then that all the planets are congruent with frequencies in the Human body in one way or another, and so the Solar system vibrates in ways consistent with that fundamental truth and one can then, with a little know-how, understand the Adam Kadmon to be applicable to this specific little section of the universe.
To quote another famous phrase, I can now say “Promises made, promises kept” as in previous editions I said that one day in a more complete work I would begin to explore the mechanisms behind this planetary assignment to chakras. To understand the implication of this overview, however, could take a lifetime in only understanding a single chakra.
9 Sri Yukteswar Bio
In order then to understand the above techniques, it helps us to understand something about Sri Yukteswar who was the writer of the book “The Holy Science” where I first found the rudiments of this technique:
Sri Yukteswar was born to a wealthy business man and his wife on May 10, 1855, in Serampore, India. He was given the name Priya Nath Karar. Upon leaving college, he married and had a daughter, and in 1884 he became a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. After the death of his wife, Priya Nath Karar became a Swami and received the name Sri Yukteswar Giri.
He met Babaji, the guru of Lahiri Mahasaya, in 1894. Babaji told him that one day he would send Sri Yukteswar a disciple who would share the teachings of yoga in the West. This disciple turned out to be Paramhansa Yogananda, who is best known for his book, Autobiography of a Yogi. Babaji also asked Sri Yukteswar to write a book on the essential unity of the Bible and Bhagavad Gita, the most well-known scripture in India. Sri Yukteswar titled this book The Holy Science.
Sri Yukteswar founded two hermitages, one of which was his family home given to him by his father as his inheritance. In the last year of his life, Sri Yukteswar turned over all his properties to Paramhansa Yogananda, asking him to find someone to maintain them. Sri Yukteswar left his body on March 9, 1936. Soon after, he appeared to Yogananda and described to him the nature of the afterlife. 1
Thus reads the description of Yukteswar’s life.
9.1 Sri Yukteswar’s Work The Holy Science
Sri Yukteswar’s work, The Holy Science, is brilliant and it is also deeply flawed. It is best experienced on its own merits and so, should you wish to understand more about the method, one ought to purchase the book and read it in their leisure. Yukteswar wrote in such a way that he hoped to be able to reconcile all the world’s religions. I, personally, have found that this is impossible. If, on the other hand, one wishes to say that all the world’s religions have wisdom, then I would agree with that assertion. So, I would say Yukteswar did manage to achieve his end, although perhaps not the way he imagined, with this specific kind of meditation that he was instrumental in discovering in the sense that any faith can employ this technique. Where Yukteswar was mistaken, in my experience, is that not all roads lead to the same experiential horizons of oneness as not all Gods are one with other Gods in terms of their thought-forms and spiritual domains. There is only one God I know which asserts that His existence is One and emphasizes it. Brahma is a similar understanding, but does not assert such Oneness in the same manner. Indeed, sometimes it seems Brahma is more like an “impersonal force” as opposed to an essence.
My aim with this book is more to point at a direction. Perhaps you will have a different experience and arrive at a differing conclusion. As long as you take responsibility for whatever road it is you wish to travel and do it with a spirit of Truth, I doubt we will arrive in any serious disagreement. However, in order to try to do what Yukteswar was trying to do we are going to need another piece. Time to visit the Messianic section of the basement…
https://www.sriyukteswar.com/↩︎