The Lion Path cassettes, however well designed, can work only on the quality of consciousness and awareness brought to their use.

Meditation, for want of a better word, is a state of consciousness beyond the normal flux of streaming associations, memories, imaginings, and sensations that pervades everyday awareness and takes up most people's time and lives, day and night, except for deep and dreamless sleep. That state, beyond the to-and-fro tides of the ordinary flux of consciousness, needs to be cultivated in waking life. The point of such meditation is not to think of nothing -- for that is still a thought - but to think nothing, which is easier said than learned. But the simplest way to do it is to feel, to fill the consciousness to overflowing with an essentially benign feeling like utter harmony or utter peace. It is such pure feeling that enables us not to think.

One of the best ways to learn how to cultivate that state is to practise a simple but very effective form of ancient breath control and direction whose old Sanskrit name is pranayama. This exercise was in fact the foundation of what is called Raja Yoga - the royal way of joining or yoking to the higher self.

The practise is simple: A slow in-breath for a full eight seconds (one second passes as one says inwardly one thousand one), filling the lungs first in their bottom-most regions and enabling this by expanding the solar plexus area; then in the middle region, and finally in their very topmost portions - feeling during the eight second you are doing this the vivifying energy entering you.

Next comes the all-important eight seconds hold (Sanskrit kumbhaka, a term of yoga also traditionally related to eight), when you are neither inhaling nor exhaling. During this interval you can feel the energy coursing throughout your entire being … doing its sublime transmutational work of which you have no obligation (and probably as yet no capacity) to understand. Finally, you perform a slow, measured - that is, unaccelerated - eight seconds of exhalation with a short (about a second) pause at its end. Then re-begin the cycle of inhalation-hold-exhalation once more and repeat it for at least three times. But as you improve in the practice, gradually increase the number of cycles until you can do ten of them without special effort or feeling strain.

After some practice you may well find that your state of consciousness will alter and leap upward like a living flame after only a short time and even before the first cycle is finished


Pleromic Journey

All the beneficent and balanced traditions of inner growth and development have stressed love and the cultivation of an atmosphere of joy and high dedication. On the other hand, the old books on the method of yoga (literally a joining to a higher level of awareness) all warned of the dangers of imposing such a development too rapidly upon a consciousness still sunk in the miasma of strong destructive states such as irritability, anxiety or reckless and irresponsible experimentation: the three great pitfalls of anger, despondency and fruitless or harmful curiousity.

The besetting danger is that inner development tends to accelerate all your inner motivations. Hence such development will also increase the growth of any noxious weeds whose sprouts or seeds have been inadvertently left in your subconscious.

That danger was precisely the theme of a classic sci-fi film of the 1950s called Forbidden Planet . A great scientist, played by Walter Pidgeon, discovered the key to a lost and very advanced civilization whose members had found the key to an intense development of the mind. But they had forgotten those Monsters of the Id , the as yet undissolved even if unwanted germs of violent and self-destructive behaviour - germs that would be nurtured by quickened development of the beneficent powers and that would eventually inundate them with uncontrolled and hugely magnified imbalances. Thus an entire and mighty civilization went insane through their very ideals of evolution.

The remedy for this pitfall is steadily and beforehand to flood the unconscious mind with love energy from the superconscious until its unwanted dregs are dissolved, and before they can grow and invade the conscious mind or dream states. Only then, in this purified ground, can one safely cultivate one's higher potential.

A very important part of cultivating that purified ground of consciousness is to open yourself to the healing and sustaining powers of the Path by experiencing the sustaining cassette (The Pleromic Journey) about once a week. It embodies the ancient Chaldeo-Egyptian sacred theurgic Rite of Ascension and an acoustic Bathing in the Pleromic Essences, rediscovered by Musaios in 1996. This cassette program implements that discovery in terms of 20th century instrumentalities for vital spiritual therapy and renewal in a world already straying dangerously towards imbalance on all levels.

Each time you experience The Pleromic Journey you will be taken through levels of rising consciousness on The Ladder of Horus. Alchemically speaking, Horus rules the realm of the athanor or deep unconscious reservoir. The Ladder of Horus grants the aspirant access to that realm; the athanor is then sealed and the cleansing begins, after which your heroic self and its good habits can be energized without fear of other habits gaining and misusing that higher energy. (from The Lion Path: The Big Picture