Primordial Meditation

Remedios Varo—Solar Music

Our language, all our fictional productions, are reflections of the universal images in the great vision of the creation. They are signs from the metaphysical time, from the enchanted time. 

In his book Seven Nights, Jorge Luis Borges writes:

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to the reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for we change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that man of yesterday not is the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of the book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus (page76).

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Bradley said that one of the effects of poetry is that it gives us the impression not of discovering something new but of remembering something we have forgotten. When we read a good poem we imagine that we too could have written it; that the poem already existed within us (page 81).

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We may remember Plotinus. They wanted to paint his portrait, and he refused, saying “I myself am a shadow, a shadow of the archetype that is in the sky. What is the point of making a shadow of that shadow?” What is art, thought Plotinus, but an apparition of the second degree? If man is frail, how can an image of a man be loved?  This is what Banchs felt. He felt the phantasmic quality of the mirror (page 88).

Reconstructed bust believed to represent Plotinus

In other words: he felt the reflection of one of the universal images of time.

There is a Persian metaphor which says that that the moon is the mirror of time. In that phrase, mirror of time, is the fragility of the moon and also its eternity. It is the contradiction of the moon and also its eternity.

In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says:

"Now, when you see your appearance, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, which do not die and do not show themselves, how will you be able to bear such greatness?"

Time is, as Plato said, the moving image of eternity. Anything fragile is moving images of eternity. Eternity is found in the universal images. But with the negation-power, and the outgoing movement of time, the universal images become split, and become progressively perishable, material. The world is manifested, and the disenchanted, psychological time has arised.

The universal images work in synchronism with the Now, and therefore with the Wholeness. They seek to put together, to synthesize, to join, to heal. In that way they constitute a common human consensus. We can all agree about them. They descent as different symbols in different cultures.

But in the consciousness´ identification with thinking and psychological time, the Ego is created. And the Ego uses the negation-power of time to make resistance. The resistance consists in problematizing life itself by comparing with earlier and hoping, desiring or fearing something else. And in this evaluation-process the Ego splits up the universal images. It identifies ifself with one pole in a pair of opposites, for which reason the polar partner is expelled. In this dividing process the collective and personal images arise, and herewith all the disagreements.

Consequently the universal language, and the movement of time, reflect themselves in your thinking, but because of the Ego´s evaluations, the images are divided in words and analysis; what you could call thinking in opposites (subject as divided from object, good as divided from evil, love as divided from hate, perfect as divided from fiasco) - words and sentences which work in sequences in past and future, extremes, or analyses.

In other words: the Ego, in its identification with opposites, tends to debate, to work against other people, and seeks to demonstrate their flaws.

However, primordial meditation is to move yourself backwards through the whole of this structure, which is created by the outgoing movement of time. Primordial meditation is therefore, as Plato made it clear, to remember the outgoing movement´s negation, namely the backmovement of time, the memory of the universal vision and the universal images, the memory of the metaphysical and enchanted time.

In accordance with Plotinus then The One (the Source), in its eternal and continual radiation, first of all manifests ifself as thought, which in it´s individualized form shows ifself in the soul, which again finds it´s way to the body, the lowest and the most random expression of being. The purpose of life for the individual therefore is to move the opposite way: from the low to the high, from the random body and all it´s lust to The One and all it´s light.

In primordial meditation this consists in practising neutral observation rather than evaluating; it is to be in the Now rather than in the past or the future; it is to think between the opposites, rather than to think in extremes; it is to use dialogue rather than debate; it is, together with other people, to work one´s way towards a mutual understanding; it is to use language from the universal images of time, rather than the personal or collective images of time.

And finally it is also to let go of the backmovement of time. In physical sense this means death. But within mysticism they also describe Unio Mystica as a kind of death. This death consists in dying from psychological time and it´s images, for hereby to step into the Now and be made transparent by the metaphysical time and its non-linguistic oneness, the ancient Source from where awareness and love always have flown, and in which we all have a mutual understanding of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Source book:

Meditation as an Art of Life – a Basic Reader (Free Ebook)

Related websites:

Philosophical Counseling in Rold Forest

The Philosophical Salon