Lucille Cedarcrans regarding seed thoughts in meditation followed by some comments.

“The seed-thought is then dropped. The words are no longer spoken. This is the most difficult stage of the entire meditation for beginners and for many of their seniors. The tendency of the mind to repetition swings the student into the habit of affirmation, and this is the polar opposite of the condition required for Soul contact. Just so long as the mind is speaking, it is closed to communion with the Soul. It must become quiet, attentive, alert.

The seed-thought is dropped as words. The energy of the thought remains as a line of contact (a bridge in mental substance) and needs no repetition. The mind is still, attentive, receptive. When the moment of absolute silence has come, the Soul makes itself known.
I should here like to insert a few words of warning. Cast out all preconceived ideas you may have formulated as to what Soul contact is. You have probably heard stories of various phenomena experienced during meditation. Some of the common ones are: light, communication in the form of words, pictures, etc. This is all well and good and may be true of the persons concerned, but it is not a criterion.

Each individual experiences his contact in an individual manner. Some never see light, never see pictures, never hear or sense words. All of these phenomena are forms dictated by the personality, not the Soul. The purest form of Soul communication is instantaneous knowing. Anything else is a means, not the goal.” The Nature of The Soul, p. 46 Lucile Cedercrans/Master R

***********

There are a number of things to appreciate in the Cedarcrans quote.

“The seed-thought is then dropped. The words are no longer spoken. This is the most difficult stage of the entire meditation for beginners and for many of their seniors. The tendency of the mind to repetition swings the student into the habit of affirmation, and this is the polar opposite of the condition required for Soul contact. Just so long as the mind is speaking, it is closed to communion with the Soul. It must become quiet, attentive, alert.” 

Being able to work with a seed thought is its own contemplative training. To truly hold a seed, rather than ruminate upon it, is to establish the vibration of the seed and then suspend the thought process. This is invocative and is the training necessary for the next step which Cedarcrans offers: “The seed-thought must be dropped.” 

The difficulty in dropping a seed-thought is its next to impossibility. Give it a try! Nature abhors a vacuum and the mind is born of the dynamic Activity principle of Awareness. Both of these make “dropping” anything a challenge! As Cedarcrans states, there is a tendency of the mind for repetition. Unfortunately, what is repeated is not the emptiness of Awareness but instead that which constantly fills the naked state of Awareness-As-It-Is.

The cultivation of dropping a seed-thought is most effected by dropping various thoughts, beliefs, shoulds, desires, arisings, etc. through one’s normal day. To simply allow is one way of “dropping.” It is self-involvement that is being dropped, but that is also what is most difficult to reign in and erode during meditation.

When “The mind is still, attentive, receptive, (then) the moment of absolute silence has come, (and) the Soul makes itself known.” If the word essence is traded for Soul, then in the silence essence “makes itself known.” The challenge with this phraseology is its dualism. “Makes itself known” to who, how, in what way? These are dualistic questions that might naturally arise to a practitioner trying to engage the instructions. But here too is something to let go or drop. Instead of “makes itself known”, the experience is that essence is known. The energetic dynamic emerges from nowhere except from the Awareness held as acute presence. If it is the Soul in its regal nature that is known, then one is experiencing Wholeness as non-differentiated from oneself. The meditation is recognized as a mechanism and the Essence (Soul or Triad or whatever) is experienced as contiguous beyond meditation and not needed it. This is why bells and whistles are not criterion.

Meditation is life, as well as part of life. An infant learning to walk is meditating. A gardener delighting in his or her garden is meditating. A person sitting for a meditation session who has, like the other two examples, let go of meditation being “this” and not “that” is meditating. All other forms of practice and technique are like learning the alphabet so that one day one will read. From that day forward, then, the wealth of literacy will bear abundant gifts. The same is so of meditation.

Meditation teachers teach people how to recognize the letters of the alphabet of Awareness, so to speak. The letters are not the words, just as the techniques are not meditation. To say that meditation is the result of dropping, of letting go – and thus – is being, is so. This is the same as an infant having no pre-planned process for learning to walk. The baby is being, and in that moment, being is expressing in that way. But, the baby needs scaffolding; a person learning to re-member being does too.

As such, form is form. No problem. Duality is duality. No problem. Meditation has no problems with anything because being has no problems with anything. However, the vast majority of people the vast majority of a 24 hour day every day are not being, are interacting with existence through projections upon form rather than with the form simply as it is, like the baby. Duality is only an issue as long as anyone keeps it as one inside oneself: “self-divided in an apparent dual world,” to quote Naropa. It is not form that is transcended through meditation practice, but thoughts, projections, personalizations, and such about form that are dissolved from the mind. They were fabrications anyway. Poof!

The dropping mentioned above will be possible when supported by the understanding (and the daring) that that which is being dropped is a fabrication, a personalized self-created and self-reified something that does not exist as such other than in one’s mind. This is how the baby learning to walk has no thought about a table being a table or daddy’s shin and knee being a shin and knee. To the baby, they are simply that which will enable verticality. No thought about the things exist. Instead, a drive for verticality and the cleverness of Awareness itself ensure the outcome.

With the great ones, I have witnessed and experienced that readiness for doing anything is fruitless if proscribed by the mind or a mental personal assessment. Every mother knows that “when the baby is ready, he/she will walk.” But that readiness is not a check list analyzed by the infant. Similarly, the daring of Awareness is that it must be now, in one’s moments, with one’s emotions, and with the neurotic thought patterns of one’s mind. If not here in one’s here, within oneself, then where? In other words, there is no one else to be and no where to go.

My experience through much of my life (as a meditator and human being) was of above, below, within and without. Within that frame of reference of self and Being, yes, the “vacuum filled from above so to speak.” But, at some point, the span of realities and states and all of it being part of incarnated Presence-Awareness seeped to the foreground and became common-Is, normal. Then, just as “form is form”, normal is normal. The point is that the span of what had become normal meant that direction (above-below) was undone. Come to discover that normal included  the dynamic, full of energy quality of Awareness-Being; a quality experienced no matter who or what is experiencing awareness no matter the context or situation. In dropping whatever constraint that disallowed the experience, one discovers that which was already present, which is like being next to a stream on a hot day. The stream can’t cool one unless one steps in, but that means taking off one’s shoes. The stream is there and we are too. Awareness is here and we are too.

• The meditations offered online through Spirit Fire and myself are preparing the inner fields for refined instruction. They engage the practitioner through the sense of self and the senses as mechanisms whereby to train the mind to come inside. Each session is seeded, to be sure, but the seeding has the intention of integration, recognition (of anything subtle or real), shamatha. These three are the foundation of everything else regarding spiritual maturation, service, or Awareness-As-It-IS.

Graphics from DeviantART

• Seed by Yavuzelimturan
• The Stream: Gently Down by Brittnibear 2 1