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Video Description
Why do so many traditions fold the legs and sit on the ground to meditate? In this gentle lesson, Lyam Christopher suggests the answer goes back much further than the spiritual masters of the East. Sitting Indian style, or in the half lotus, reaches into an older human memory: the time before electric light, when people rose in the dark middle of the night to tend the fire, speak to the ancestors, and do magic. The posture, the candles, and the incense all touch the same ancient witching hour.
He ties this to the Middle Pillar work described in Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation. You may stand facing west, lie down with your head to the east, or sit on a cushion and picture the Tree of Life rising through you while your imaginary feet stay planted in Malkuth, the earth sphere. Good posture matters, not from fussiness, but because we spend our days hunched over phones and screens. Sitting upright wakes something older and steadier in the body, and letting your hands rest on your thighs keeps the whole pose simple and ready.
Then comes the charm: a simple system of finger magic. Each finger and thumb maps to a sphere on the Tree of Life, so holding Kether, Jupiter, Venus, or Mars becomes a tiny mudra that tells the body which power to welcome. One hand signifies the source, the other draws the energy down into earthly life. It is delightfully practical, and the invitation at the close is an experiment: sit in the dark with candles and incense, and see if an ancient, fire-lit state of mind quietly returns.
Full Video Transcript
Alright, let’s do a quick video on sitting in the half lotus position, or sitting Indian style, sitting down to meditate.
Alright, so what’s the big deal about sitting in this special position?
As you might be familiar, in the Kabbalah magic book, it’s recommended that when you do the middle pillar work, you stand up, and you have the east behind you, and you’re facing west.
that’s a good way to do the middle pillar work but you can also sit down in the middle of your
circle and perform the middle pillar that way and you can sit in something called the posture
of pure awareness which is sitting indian style on a meditation cushion perhaps and
sitting in this sort of this this position right here okay um this is not necessarily
a way to imitate the spiritual masters of the east okay this kind of position of sitting
harkens back much deeper into our ancestry okay so uh i think once again this is a great way to
do the middle pillar and also standing up is also a great way to do it but you can also sit down in
this style and when you visualize a tree of life over your body you can imagine that your legs are
sticking down through the floor when you’re sitting in this and your and your imaginary
feet are still down stuck in malkuth okay uh and that’s the way you picture the tree of life over
your body when you’re sitting indian style like this okay um this posture is more than just an
imitation of the spiritual masters of the east okay um our ancestors before civilization came
along used to sleep differently than we did today okay and even after civilization came along we
slept we slept differently then than we do today it’s only with the advent of
electric light that we began to sleep solidly all through the night okay
before electric light came along we would pretty much go to bed after the
Sun went down because we’d get sleepy and because the night is longer than
eight hours we would tend to wake up in the middle of the night and we would do
a few things. Putter around the home, have sex, pray, tend to the campfire, speak to the ancestors.
If it’s medieval times, you might even go down to the pub and have a drink and talk to your
neighbors and then go back home and go back to sleep for your second shift. If you were a monk,
you would get up in the middle of the night and sing praises to God along with all the other
monks. This was not a big deal for them to do because they would be tempted to get up in the
middle of the night anyway because because of the way that the light cycle
was proceeding around them it’s only with the advent of electric light that
we began to go to bed later and sleep all through the night okay the reason
for this is is that electric light has blue in it has some of the blue light of
the visible spectrum in it and the blue light of the visible spectrum signals
your brain to stop producing melatonin and to secrete a couple of stress hormones, which get
you ready to play and to work during the day. This is why looking into or staring into your
phone at night keeps you awake for a long period of time. And it’s also why insomnia is so rampant
nowadays. There’s nothing wrong with people. It’s just that we have evolved to not sleep when blue
light is present uh so in your house all of these electric lights you have around you have blue in
them okay chances are they do uh you can replace them you can get amber colored antique glow lights
even if they’re led that should be good enough so when once the sun goes down and the blue light
goes away you’ll get sleepy and lo and behold you will be sleeping in two shifts because you’ll go
to bed early and then you’ll wake up in the middle of the night probably one o’clock two o’clock
do a few things and then you’ll go back to sleep again for our ancient or primordial ancestors
caveman times um there was nothing to do uh at that time of night humans cannot see very well
in the dark humans can see very well during the day but not very well at all at night
there’s no such thing as a night person okay this is this has happened to us because of electric
light that many of us apparently prefer to stay up later because there’s still all this blue light
around us that’s telling us you’re awake you’re awake it’s daytime okay uh so to sit down in a
meditation posture like this is one way of triggering a very ancient image a very ancient
memory of a time when we used to wake up in the middle of the night during the witching hour
speak to the ancestors tend to the campfire do prayers do magic other things okay uh wasn’t much
else to do other than to sit and meditate and do magic so this became a magical time for us
and we still adopt this posture today not even sure why we necessarily do it it tends to trigger
a magical state of mind and lo and behold it becomes associated with all kinds of magic even
fantasy aspects of magic. And here we have the similarity of the meditation posture to the way
we used to sit around the campfire. And notice the Buddha’s figure there. Yeah, when you sit
in this Indian style or this half lotus position, there’s a tendency to want to do something with
your hands. You can just rest your hands on your thighs and that’s fine. But in hermetic magic or
magic of all kinds, there’s a tendency to try to utilize everything towards your goal, okay?
So there are things you can do with your hands, too, that will even further have magical
significance when you’re sitting in your meditation posture. When you sit down to do ritual,
very often, surprise, surprise, what do you do? You light fire, you light candles, and you burn
incense and these are also triggers for that ancient time of night when we used to get up
and tend the fire and speak to the ancestors and do magic okay so sitting down this way to meditate
lighting the incense uh lighting the candles all these things trigger that magical witching hour
all right now i have an article in the forbidden realms blog um i believe it’s called meditation’s
darkest secret uh it has this little image here if you want to look for it uh and it uh in that
article i disclose the posture of pure awareness and it’s a way of sitting upright in this posture
which takes the most advantage of it there’s when people sit in a meditation posture there’s a
tendency to overdo the perfection of it okay i think it’s important if you’re going to spend a
lot of time sitting to meditate in this way that your posture be good that is it is important okay
because you want to have that good posture um encouraged no matter where you are which is
ultimately healthy for you moving about your day okay does it have a lot of benefits for
i don’t know sitting there meditating accumulating energy sort of yes there’s a balance aspect to it
But don’t get so caught up in getting it perfect.
There is some trouble nowadays because we’re sitting at computers or we’re hunched over cell phones.
There is some problem with that.
And it would be worthwhile for you to consider what’s happening to your posture.
A lot of times I’m at the gym and I see guys who have really good physiques,
but they tend to have their shoulders hunched forward and they’re sort of stooping.
And you can tell this is the posture that they have adopted over their cell phones or over at their computers.
It’s that leaning forward, stooping sort of thing going on, right?
So it really is helpful during the day to do some kind of exercises that encourage good posture.
Not only can you do yoga stretches every day that can, you know, like chest expansion exercise,
but you can also learn how to sit in a meditation posture that is straight up and down okay but once
again to try to make it perfect um that’s beside the point all right and in regards to sitting down
uh in the indian style uh see what you can do is you can do your lesser banishing ritual the
pentagram and any other rituals and then you can sit down and do the middle pillar in this
meditation posture okay uh and that posture plus the uh the candles that you might light or the
and the incense that you’re burning, all these things tend to stimulate that ancient primordial
memory of waking up in the middle of the night during the witching hour, doing magic, talking
to the ancestors, praying, tending to the campfire, wondering what’s out there in the darkness of the
night. Okay. That being said, I like all of these different ways of doing the middle pillar,
standing up, facing west, or lying down with your head pointed toward the east and your feet
pointed toward the west or sitting on a meditation cushion uh cushion indian style okay uh with your
hands on your thighs uh doing the middle pillar that way okay the middle pillar exercise also
where you float in the light or you float in the aura which is very important um you might notice
a tendency in your practice when it comes to floating in the aura that you will tend to gloss
over that and not spend a good amount of time doing that that’s a mistake you should spend a
lot of time doing that spend up to 20 minutes floating in the aura okay and you can do that
sitting in this half lotus position and once again if you want to get a sort of perfected
version of sitting in a meditation posture you can go to that article meditation’s darkest secret
and it’s described in depth there but try not to be perfectionist about it from a book called the
numagus by donald tyson he presented very briefly in that book a system of finger magic and it
always um enticed me so much but he didn’t really go into it until later much later uh and i don’t
like the system he came up with so much he has another book called kinesic magic where he
presents different finger things you can do while you’re meditating or whatever um that indicate the
various powers of the tree of life okay um in the new magus he he simply gives the attributions of
the kabbalistic sphere oath the spheres on the tree of life he gives those um correspondences
of the sphere oath to the ten fingers of the human hands okay um and the reason i’m bringing
this up is because when if if you want to sit in a half lotus position for your middle pillar work
um you might also want to do something with your hands right you can just rest them on your thighs
or you can hold them in like like these these mudras okay and so i’ve developed a very simple
system of mudras that you can do uh while you are uh sitting in that half lotus position or
full lotus position okay um so in in his system donald tyson gives a um okay this is this
represents the left hand my left hand okay and let’s see let’s go to the other one let’s go to
the right hand so we’ll start at the top of the tree this is my right hand okay now um the right
hand uh is is facing outward because the right hand is normally considered active okay and uh
and you can see the way this goes the middle finger uh that is and of course that’s the back
of the hand so i’m going to turn this around okay so you can see how this works okay uh but
but when you look at your right hand it faces outward because that’s the active hand when you
look at your left hand it’s going to face inward okay and you can see that the middle finger then
um let’s go to the back this is the back of my right hand so the middle finger is kether and then
hakmah bina okay has said and gebura is the thumb okay and so if i am doing an invocation of um
jupiter which corresponds to has said i can do this and i will simply rest my hand um i’ll rest
i’ll rest the back of my hand on my thigh so it’ll be facing upward like this okay so my right hand
will do this okay and that is because uh i am invoking jupiter which corresponds to his set
okay uh let me see now the other hand let’s say if i were invoking let’s say if i were invoking
venus okay you can see it says uh left hand palm is my left hand palm okay and so this is tifareth
and then you as you can see the ring finger is number seven that’s for netsok and that’s venus
so if i’m invoking venus i would simply indicate this just like this okay and this this i would
rest on my thigh upward like that okay uh if i am invoking let’s go back to this one on the right
hand if i’m invoking gebura you can see gebura is represented by number five this is the back of the
of the hand okay um and you can see that uh that that’s represented by the thumb how do i point my
thumb at my thumb i can’t do that so in order to indicate gabur i simply point all the fingers at
the thumb so if i’m doing kabura it looks like this okay all right so if i’m doing um kether
it’s like this i’m doing okay if i’m doing hawk ma it’s like this if i’m doing bina it’s like this
which is saturn and if i’m doing has said which is jupiter i’m doing this and the palm is then
resting upwards on my thigh okay it’s just an extra signal that i can get my body habituated
into so whenever i’m working with the powers of has said it’s i’m signaling my body to get used
to it okay by holding my fingers in a particular position so not only am i sitting there indian
style to provoke that ancient memory of sitting up in the middle of the night doing magic during
the witching hour, right? I’m also incorporating a system of finger magic into that. And eventually
your body or your psyche enjoys that. Oh, it notices you’re putting your fingers in a particular
position that says, oh, I guess I need to gear up and invoke Gurbura energies or something like
that. Like if I’m doing this, this would be Gurbura energies. Okay. Now, when you’re sitting
in a meditation posture, let me see if I can clear the screen a little better. You’ll do something
with both hands okay so you can um let’s say if i wanted to uh invoke well let’s say i want to
invoke gabura or mars okay so with the right hand um that is the thumb okay and so to indicate
gabura i need to point all my fingers at my thumb so that indicates gabura and of course with the
with the left hand um all i’m going to do with that hand is indicate um that i’m going to draw
down the powers of Guborah into Malkuth. So anytime you’re invoking a planetary energy with
the right hand, the left hand is simply going to be in the indication of Malkuth, like this.
Okay, so if I’m invoking Saturn with my right hand, I would do this, and with my left hand,
I would do that. Okay, now if I’m invoking something with the left hand, like if I’m
invoking Venus in my left hand I would do this and with my right hand I’m just
indicating that the right hand is just going to be on Kether in other words I’m
going to invoke something so the right hand is indicating Kether and the left
hand is indicating Venus okay and the system is it’s a pretty cool system of
correspondence is very simple just gives your hands something to do that gives
you an extra trigger to program your psyche to get in a particular mode okay
so once again if I’m invoking anything with the left hand because the left hand
is this is to far earth this is Venus this is the Sun this is Venus this is
mercury this is the moon and this is Malkuth or the earth okay so if I’m
invoking something with this hand, I would just use, like I’ve been invoking the sun, I would do
this. And with the right hand, then I would just put, have my, this little mudra, it would indicate
Kether. Okay, so whenever I’m invoking something with the left hand, the right hand just sits in
the Kether position. Okay, whenever I’m invoking something with the right hand, let’s say if I do
Jupiter, then the left hand simply goes in the Malkuth position, to indicate that I’m
drawing that energy down into makuth okay so if i’m there we go so if i’m invoking if i’m invoking
jupiter this is my right hand and then this is my left hand and they just rest on the top of my
thighs pointing upward okay so uh whatever works for you but i do suggest you try it uh and of
course when you become aware of this idea of um you know sitting indian style that it tends to
trigger a very ancient primordial memory um you might want to go all out with that and do ritual
in the dark with candles and incense and sit in your in your meditation posture for the middle
pillar work all right uh and see if that uh gets you more quickly into a state of mind
um uh for deep meditation and reflection talking to the ancestors um doing magic essentially
all right um now if you if you have the type of body that cannot sit in the half lotus or full
lotus positions um it doesn’t mean you you can’t get there you could condition it to get there
uh i’m amazed at how at the lack of flexibility that some people have and it’s very obvious to
me that they could get that flexibility back if they were to do some yoga or things like that
but if you don’t want to bother it’s not a big deal you can still just lie down for your middle
pillar work or stand up facing west all right not a big deal you can also sit in a chair just grab
a chair stick it in the middle of your circle and sit up right on your chair not a big deal
all right or even sit in that um sit on your with your knees facing forward do their hands on your
eyes the way they do in japan i believe it is um which is probably another good trigger for
um that magic hour or that witching hour nighttime uh for nighttime magic all right so i’ll be
interested to see what you guys think if you guys if like if you sit down in a meditation posture
in the dark with candles lit and incense burning does it sort of get your mind into some kind of
primordial, I don’t know, caveman-ish memory to get you in a particular mode of basically ready
to do magic. I wonder what you guys think about that. All right, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher