Liber Resh for everyone!
Grand Master Shiva X°
In the third part of this series I’ll turn to Liber Resh meditation. This is the third part of Resh, after invocation and adoration. In Book Four Part One, Crowley defines meditation as “the way of attainment of genius or godhead considered as a development of the human brain.” The Crowley corpus teaches multiple methods of meditation. And of course, there are many other systems of meditation beyond those taught in our System. So what should you do?
Remember that as with parts I and II, these blogs have been written as suggestive for newcomers or those interested in our System. They are not intended to replace the formal teachings and transmissions of Authority. It might be easiest to say that as you develop routine and establish the magical contact I’ve mentioned in parts I and II, you will cultivate your own practice of just how to “compose Thyself to holy meditation.” Compose in this case means “to calm or settle (oneself or one’s features or thoughts).” Suitably composed, holy meditation can be looked on as mindful concentration.
Mindful concentration is one of the goals of traditional yoga. Of the many different meanings of yoga, one better known in India than in the West is that any disciplined activity is considered yoga. It implies routine. In Barbara Stoler Miller’s translation of The Bhagavad Gita for example, the sanskrit “yoga” is translated as “discipline.” So what is this yoga of concentration we are doing to close off our Resh practice?
Paul Foster Case in his Esoteric Secrets of Magic and Meditation Vol 2 said of concentration “We shall always feel that we are learning how to direct a real force, and we shall think of that force as being one with whose effects we have been familiar all of our lives. What we are setting out to control is not a nebulous abstraction, neither is it some new, strange, uncanny power hidden away somewhere within us. It is sunshine, the radiant energy of the nucleus of this world system. On this account the basic tenet of alchemy, The Emerald Tablet, calls the Great Work the “Operation of the Sun.” For Case, this radiant energy is “The fundamental mode in which cosmic life-force becomes available for human use.” This accords with our own System.
Remember our definition of meditation – “the way of attainment of genius or godhead considered as a development of the human brain.” While we commonly understand yoga deriving from the root meaning ‘to bind’, as David Gordon White points out in Sinister Yogis, “its primary sense, as found in the Vedas, is best rendered by the French “attelage,” a term whose semantic fields cover both the act of yoking, hitching, or harnessing; the conveyance (chariot) so hitched; and the draft animals (horses). The English “rig” is the nearest approximation I can find to this. As such, the compound may be either read literally as “hitched to his rig” or “ready to hitch up” and understood in the metaphorical sense of being prepared to take the final journey, from life into a glorious afterlife beyond the disk of the sun, in the luminous realm of the immortals.” The solar connection to yoga is a little too deep to get into here, but for simplicity consider yoga as binding your chariot to the Sun. So we bind (connect) our mind to the Sun in Liber Resh. Invocation. Adoration. Meditation.
As I mentioned in part II, we use stated intention (invocation) and elevated emotion (adoration), or love under will, to achieve synthesis (meditation). The more heightened or elevated the intent and emotion, the deeper the meditation. All elements combined, you could look on the rite as projecting the mind out of the body and Entering into the sun, and then sinking the solar mind back into the abode of the body in Silence. In Silence you might “unite with Him in the adoration of That which is beyond Him”. “Thus shalt thou ever be mindful of the Great Work which thou hast undertaken to perform, and thus shalt thou be strengthened to pursue it unto the attainment of the Stone of the Wise, the Summum Bonum, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.”
In the temenos of the ritual practice of Liber Resh – that sacred enclosure or precinct without us and within us – we can leave our usual waking life outside and reside in this space beyond it. We move away from the travels (patterns) of our familiar past that create the orbit of your predictable future, to the ‘travels’ of the Sun in the solitary, solar, heavenly present. We achieve a state of wholeness from which we compose ourselves to meditation oriented to the spiritual sun within (rather than the earthly ego). In this state of mindfulness you will “ever be mindful of the Great Work which thou hast undertaken to perform.” Look on this as the ultimate reality check. It is to wake up. It is to live in the sunlight. With sunlight comes insights – you literally create your future in solar-mindfulness, connecting to your true nature. You may be thinking of the practice “I don’t have the time for all of this.” Neither do I. Step outside of time. Live in the Sunlight.
Crowley’s disciple Frater Achad, in his Stepping out of the Old Aeon into the New wrote:
“As all of you should know, we have entered a New Aeon. A Higher Truth has been given to the World. This truth is waiting in readiness for all those who will consciously accept it, but it has to be realized before it is understood, and day by day those who have accepted this Law, and are trying to live it, realize more and more of its Beauty and Perfection. The new teaching appears strange at first; and the mind is unable to grasp more than a fragment of what it really means. Only when we are living the Law can that fragment expand into the infinite conception of the whole…The Sun does not die, as the ancients thought; It is always shining, always radiating Light and Life. Stop for a moment and get a clear conception of this Sun, how He is shining in the early morning, shining at midday, shining in the evening, and shining in the night. Have you got this idea clearly in your minds? You have stepped out of the Old Aeon into the New. Now let us consider what has happened. In order to get this mental picture of the ever-shining Sun, what did you do? You identified yourself with the Sun. You stepped out of the consciousness of this planet; and for a moment you had to consider yourself as a Solar Being. Then why step back again? You may have done so involuntarily, because the Light was so great that it seemed as Darkness. But do it again, this time more fully, and let us consider what the changes in our concept of the Universe will be.”
So, why not practice Liber Resh, ‘shining in the early morning, shining at midday, shining in the evening, and shining in the night,’ and in holy meditation experience for yourself, directly, ‘what the changes in our concept of the Universe will be.’ “Make actual magical contact with the spiritual energy of the Sun and thus to draw actual force from him.” In this state, the present future and future present, the solar presence, free from your familiar past and predictable future, free from falsehood in the Light of Truth, “The new Aeon is the worship of the spiritual made one with the material, of Horus, of the Child, of the Future.”
Start living it.