The silence that can be kept at will

Meditation is the most-discussed subject in this community and among the least instructed by the material it studies. That needs saying plainly at the start, because a reader arriving from a tradition where the technique comes first will look for a technique here and not find one. The Ra Contact was recorded in ninety-minute sittings, and the questioner, when he raised meditation at all, raised it as a comparison: which of two ways of sitting produces more. He was asking for a ranking. What he got was a classification, and then an ordering by who each kind is for.

There are three places where the material says something substantive about the practice. Between them they give a criterion, a division and a prerequisite, and then no posture, no count of breaths, no duration and no teacher.

The criterion is a capacity, not an experience

The clearest statement is in the fifth session, inside the answer that begins the material’s training sequence. Ra is not asked about meditation there. He is asked what the first step in becoming a healer is, and the answer opens with a prerequisite for all mental work.

The prerequisite of mental work is the ability to retain silence of self at a steady state when required by the self. The mind must be opened like a door. The key is silence.

It is easy to read past how specific that is. The measure is not calm, and it is not depth, and it is not any state you might describe afterwards. It is whether silence can be kept at a steady state when required, on demand, by the intention of the one keeping it. A person may sit for an hour in pleasant stillness and fail that test entirely, because the stillness was something that happened to them rather than something they can summon.

The image that follows is worth as much as the criterion. A door opens from one side. The material is describing a faculty that is trained and then used, not a state that is earned and then enjoyed.

The community’s own conversations have circled this from the other direction without naming it as a criterion. The observation is that silence is difficult to retain under pressure, that the mind behaves as though it has its own agency and its own agenda, and that the difference between a practitioner and a person who meditates is often exactly whether they can become quiet when a situation demands it rather than when the schedule allows it. We think that observation is a restatement of the same test, arrived at independently, and it is the reason this essay treats meditation and the balancing review as one discipline rather than two.

The prerequisite, in the material’s own order

Ra does not stop at the criterion. The same answer lays out what the silence is for, and the order matters, because it is not the order most systems use.

To begin to master the concept of mental discipline it is necessary to examine the self. The polarity of your dimension must be internalized. Where you find patience within your mind you must consciously find the corresponding impatience and vice versa. Each thought that a being has, has in its turn an antithesis.

Against the common picture, that sequence is odd. In most accounts, sitting comes first and self-examination is what you do afterwards, or what a teacher does with you. In this one, the examining is the discipline and the silence is the condition that makes it possible. The sitting is not where the work happens; it is where the worker becomes able to work.

The second step of that sequence is a correction to something the sitting is often used for. Ra says it is not for a being of polarity in this density to sort its own contents into the acceptable and the unacceptable.

It is not for a being of polarity in the physical consciousness to pick and choose among attributes, thus building the roles that cause blockages and confusions in the already-distorted mind complex.

Meditation used as a way of getting away from the parts of yourself you have not settled is, on this account, not a neutral mistake. It is the mechanism by which the unsettled parts acquire more weight. Anyone who has used a practice to become more patient at an impatience already knows what that sentence means, and does not need it explained.

The third and fourth steps then repeat the whole movement with the gaze turned outward, toward other people and toward what the material calls the mass mind. We treat that as the reason the daily review on the practice page insists on extending the same attention to one other person. It is not a politeness added to a private exercise. It is the third step of the material’s own sequence.

Two kinds of sitting, ranked

The second substantial passage is the one where the questioner asks his comparison directly, and it is the most useful single answer in the material on this subject. Ra answers that there are two types and that they are useful for different reasons, and then describes the first.

Each of the two types of meditation is useful for a particular reason. The passive meditation involving the clearing of the mind, the emptying of the mental jumble which is characteristic of mind complex activity among your peoples, is efficacious for those whose goal is to achieve an inner silence as a base from which to listen to the Creator. This is an useful and helpful tool and is by far the most generally useful type of meditation as opposed to contemplation or prayer.

We draw attention to the phrase by far the most generally useful, because it is as close as the material comes to a recommendation, and it is a recommendation to clear rather than to concentrate. The goal named is not emptiness as an achievement. It is a base from which to listen.

The second type gets a different sentence, and a much narrower audience.

Visualization is the tool of the adept. Those who learn to hold visual images in mind are developing an inner concentrative power that can transcend boredom and discomfort. When this ability has become crystallized in an adept the adept may then do polarizing in consciousness without external action, which can affect the planetary consciousness. This is the reason for existence of the so-called White Magician.

That is a strong claim, and what it says has to be separated from what it does not. It does not say visualisation is unavailable to a beginner, and it does not say the results are immediate. It says the capacity being built is concentration that can outlast boredom and discomfort, which are the two things that end most sittings, and that the destination of that capacity is action in consciousness that does not move through the body, which the material places in the same family as its white magic. The essay on that discipline takes the caution attached to it seriously; this one takes only the ordering.

So the material’s division is not between calm people and visual people. It is between a practice whose purpose is to listen and a practice whose purpose is to act, and it appoints the second one to a stage that the first one has to reach first.

The same answer names two further modes in a single sentence, and the community’s conversations have been living in that sentence without noticing that the material names prayer as a practice of its own. We treat prayer, contemplation, mantra and the recitation traditions at length in the essay on the arts, because the material gives prayer a mechanism and a condition there, and both matter more than the technique.

The two families, in the vocabulary the community already has

Readers here arrive holding a distinction the material does not use, and it maps onto the material’s division more neatly than one would expect.

One family works on what Indian philosophy calls the causal aspect: the non-dual contemplations, the Advaita line, the question of what is aware before any content arrives. The other works on the subtle aspect: the energy body, the inner image, the opening of the intuitive and creative channels, which the community’s own vocabulary calls working with the indigo ray, the magical workings, the gateway toward intelligent infinity.

The first family is the material’s passive meditation and its contemplation. The second is its visualisation. The two are not interchangeable, they do not substitute for one another, and the consistent counsel of our own study is that a person who is drawn to the second is well served by spending time in the first. The material’s own ordering says the same thing in fewer words.

Our own study adds one caution that the material leaves implicit, and it is the sharpest practical note in the whole subject. Conventional kundalini practice, as it is usually taught, works on the energy body and can be pursued without any development of the mind and spirit disciplines at all. That is not a claim that the practice is dangerous. It is the narrower and more useful observation that energy work answers to its own momentum, and a person can become quite accomplished in the subtle domain while the patterns that run their ordinary life are untouched. The three domains essay takes that apart; here it is enough to say that the ordering in Ra’s answer is not arbitrary and is not ours.

What the material leaves out

There is no instruction in the Ra Contact on how long to sit, at what hour, in what position, or with what object. There is no breath practice, no mantra given to the questioner, and no schedule. We have searched the archive for each of these rather than trusting an impression: mantra returns nothing at all, posture returns one passage and it is about the instrument’s comfort during trance, and every occurrence of breath is Ra directing the group to expel breath over the instrument, which is support for the contact rather than a technique for a reader. A person who wants a regimen will have to take it from somewhere else, and should know that they are doing so.

We think that the absence is consistent with the rest of the material rather than an oversight. Ra declines in the same sequence to hand over a rule about which attributes of a mind are acceptable, and it declines elsewhere to name a group because the listener would simply adopt the answer. In both cases the refusal protects the same thing: the faculty that can only be developed by the person developing it. A technique handed over whole would do exactly what the material refuses to do, which is to move the discretion from the sitter to the instructor.

That is also the honest reason this page will not give you a method. What we can offer is what we do: a daily review, a room for group practice, the register of what people here actually use, and an insistence that a reader who takes up one of the subtle-body programmes knows the ordering the material gives.

One more thing belongs here, because it connects two subjects that are usually kept apart. The material treats the recall of a dream as a trainable faculty, developed by recording immediately on waking. That is the same description as the one above, a capacity built by use whose test is availability rather than intensity, applied to a different state. Sitting and dreaming are, in this account, two settings of one instrument. The dream essay takes the other setting.

The caution that applies to all of them

Practices that work in the subtle domain have a documented pattern, in every tradition that has kept records: vivid and occasionally overwhelming inner experience can arrive well before the psychological capacity to integrate it. The experience does not come with a warning attached. This is why the material puts knowing yourself first and why we keep saying so, and it is why we treat any of these practices as one domain among three rather than as a route to the others.

This essay is not a treatment and meditation is not offered here as medical or psychological care. It does not promise calm, insight, health, or any other outcome, and a reader who is carrying something heavy should know that the room they need has a professional in it, which this community is not. The community page states that boundary in full.

What is left is a small, unglamorous discipline with no examination at the end of it. Sit until silence can be kept on request rather than on schedule. Spend the silence on the balance you did not want to look at. Keep the ordering, and let the second kind of sitting wait until the first one has done its work. And hold none of it as an identity, because the material’s own first instruction to the sitter is to decline to be one thing rather than another.