Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Ralph Lewis on Meditation

On youtube you can find recordings of Ralph Lewis discussing a number of AMORC-related subjects, including meditation. While much of what he said has broad, general value, there were a couple of points that struck me as odd. (Of course, a short introductory lecture doesn't reveal everything contained in the Lewis monographs, but I can only react to his commentaries.)

Firstly, I think the practice he described sells people short. Sitting in a comfortable chair and meditating for five minutes is just not rigorous enough. It's not going to train your mind and body to work together in totality the way zazen or yoga would do.

Secondly, the meditation he described sounds like a very vague New Age kind of thing. There's nothing particularly Rosicrucian about it.

I think meditating on Rosicrucian symbolism, specifically, can help you unlock an inner mythology as experienced through the prism of the tradition. For example, my visualization once drifted spontaneously to the image of a sun disk moving slowly across the sky, with Aten-like beams radiating from it. I then saw white and red rose petals fluttering down through the air, and landing in a sort of Egyptian shallow reed lake. A girl wading through the water picked up some of the floating red petals and remade them into a rose blossom, offering it as a gift to the sun god. This was the origin of the golden cross + red rose.

If, as the original manifestos suggest, the book of nature is inscribed within all living things, then you only have let it come to the surface and show itself to you in symbolic ways. But this requires more, I think, than just a short daily routine that you could pick up from any New Age website.

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