Hermetic/alchemical meditation

7. Sol and Luna

In this series of elementary meditative exercises, no special postures are required but that in which one is most comfortable, nor are any special breathing rhythms used. Meditation should be undertaken when one is not too tired, and the best situation is probably lying down in a quiet, nearly dark, room, and it is essential to have privacy and no possibility of being disturbed.
All these exercises begin with the Philosophic Egg or retort meditation, described in the first issue, which leads one into an inner meditative space. Within that space, we shall perform short exercises, and then close the meditation with the retort exercise reversed, that is leading one out of the inner space back to normal consciousness.
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Sol and Luna

For this meditation we shall be doing an exercise which although simple touches upon archetypal realms. True success with this meditation will only be found if the form of the exercise is used on various levels of one's being - physical, etheric, astral, spiritual.

The basic meditative forms we use are the archetypes of the Sun and Moon. One must try to inwardly experience these archetypes, to find in one's own being the Solar and Lunar forces in their various manifestations.

One can initially picture the Sun archetype as an expansive, warm, outpouring, a radiation from centre to periphery, a dissolving of matter into energy, of formal pattern into dynamic forces. At the beginning of the exercise one can relate this to the physical level of ones being, through the outbreath or the outward pulsing of the blood from the heart out to the periphery of one's body.

The Lunar archetype can be experienced as a contractive, cold, inflowing, a movement towards the centre, a fixing or hardening of energies into form. One relates this initially to the retentive inbreathing, and the formed organs in the periphery of ones being, the brain or the limb system, receiving the energies of the blood stream, fixing them, and giving form to one's being.

One can then experience how one's physical being arises as a point of balance between the outflowing Solar forces that would dissolve one into the cosmos and the hardening Lunar forces that give one form and solidity. Try to carry this into the realm of the soul, to experience in the flow of the emotions, a solar element that presses outwards, that provides the energy behind the emotion, but also try to experience how this is met inwardly by a lunar element in the emotions, that acts as a kind of dark boundary within an emotion and gives it shape. (In most people there is only a consciousness of the solar element, the energetics, in emotions; the lunar element is more unconscious and obscure, but it must be brought into consciousness in order to achieve a more balanced being). Try through extending this exercise into the soul to inwardly feel the balance of lunar and solar forces that work in the emotions.

This exercise can also be used to work with the etheric forces of one's being, experiencing their receptive and active aspects which relate to sun and moon within, and it can also be used on the more spiritual plane, to work through to an awareness of the more cosmic dimension of these forces.