Excerpts and pictures from Medhananda’s books

Psychology in pictures

from The Way of Horus, p. 27

We might ask ourselves, why are images necessary for the exploration of our inner world? But they are necessary even for the exploration of the outer world. We may repeat the word ‘entropy’ a thousand times, yet if we have no mental image connected with it, it will not help us to understand that basic concept of modern physics.

In the above picture we can recognize a symbolic message about self-awareness: the four big circles represent the superconscious and the subconscious in ‘beginners’. Those symbolic circles do not appear above and below the central figure of the ‘master’, because by becoming conscious of his whole scale of being he has integrated them into himself, he has become master of his multidimensional being. 
Of course the value and the beauty of a symbol lie in the fact that it cannot be defined or forever fixed in its meaning…

The Closed Scroll

from On the Threshold of a New Consciousness, p. 13

The capacity of an educated Egyptian to see all things, all beings, all phenomena, as a closed scroll has got lost in later times. And with that loss, a whole part of our brain fell asleep. Everything had two aspects: the superficial corpuscu1ar one, and the hidden vibratory origin containing its own energy and its own creative intent.
So each word of the hieroglyphic script possessed two meanings at the same time: a superficial, literal, phonetic one which could be read aloud for everyone to hear, and a secret one, a hidden exegesis used as an individual exercise of identification and intended to give illumination. 

For example, the basket meaning ‚all’ containing all’ , manifested a twofold universe. 
There were the basket with the vulture – the material universe – constantly eating its own children and giving them new birth, and the basket with the snake, the uraeus animating the vibratory universe. Both baskets, represented side by side, were part of one of the five names of every pharaoh. 

In order to remain in constant contact with his creative duality the pharaoh wore a tail, a reminder of his corpuscular evolution, while over his head cloth stood the rising snake, the living symbol of his fundamental vibratory nature. 
Some of his names united both these aspects, such as, conscious vibratory container of the two realities. 
This dual vision of the universe was constantly present to the Egyptian thinker. And the knowledge that each hieroglyph had a secret meaning lasted through the dark ages. But superstitious interpretations prevented their double-sided truth from emerging. The covering was lifted for the first time when quantum mechanics rediscovered the vibratory reality of everything – a finding which did not prevent our twentieth-century culture, our theology, philosophy, education and psychology from remaining rigidly corpuscular, reductionist and materialist.
Whatever the resistance opposed by ignorance, a scroll is made to be unrolled, and its evolutionary unfolding has started.

The Shen-Ring

from On the Threshold of a New Consciousness

The Egyptian Shen-Ring,
symbol of all symbols,
represents the coming together
of the linear ordinary way of being 
and the global plenary one
– in two words: time and eternity. 
The art of passing from the one to the other,
and linking them at will,
is the secret of all dynamism and freedom.

Paradise again

from On the Threshold of a New Consciousness, p. 140

“When man left paradise it was with all his gods, archetypes and totem animals.
When he wants to return, he has to transform them all,
to perceive them as own soul powers
and bind them all around his centre.
He has to take them all with him.
If he were to go alone,
it would not be paradise”.
                                                                  — Medhananda

Neteru, the eternal movements in us

from The Way of Horus, p. 43

To decipher the Egyptian pictorial messages, we have first to understand the neteru ntr (singular neter, plural neteru). This is possible only when we forget their unfortunate translation into ‘gods’—unfortunate because they are not supernatural suprapersons, but parts of ourselves, of every living being. Their symbol is a waving flag. The flag is ourselves.

And the eternal movements in us which wave the flag are the neteru. 
In fact they are all that moves us, on all levels of existence. They move and connect the electrons and the stars, the lion and the gazelle, deep sleep and awakening, in all the different spaces and times.
Creation is not done on a potter’s wheel. It starts as imagination, the formation of an image, the image of a photon before there was light, the image of a carbon ring before there was life, the image of a synapsing neurone before there was mind, an image which is pure vibration until it finds resonance in a world of matter.
The neteru, as the ancient Egyptians conceived them, are active, dynamic images projecting themselves into creation, translating a vibratory universe into a corpuscular one.
… We do not know the neteru, because we are under the illusion that we are moving by our own free will; we think that our opinions, our ideas, our likes and dislikes, our desires, our loves are ours, expressions of what we call our individuality. But in fact we are led and upheld and inspired, or blown, or ridden, or kicked around, or torn apart by the neteru in us, their playground and their battlefield.
Yet there are free people; they have fought hard for their freedom. They have conquered their kingdom, by meeting, recognizing, gathering in themselves and embracing all the neteru. And the truth has made them free – not just a truth, but the great common truth we all are.
In the meantime we are invited to become aware of the neteru in us, to make their acquaintance, to become their friend, their brother, their playmate. 
Then, as in the German nursery song, 

When I go to sleep at night
fourteen angels stand aside …

From the tomb of Ramses VI.

Building the inner being

from The Way of Horus, p. 122

The pillar of course is me.
To understand its symbolism we must remember that Egypt was a country without trees or forests, though there was plenty of swamp grass and cane. For building houses, Egypt had to invent and rely on what we call today fibre technology: pillars, walls, and roofs were made by tying reeds and canes together. 
The hieroglyph for reed is also the word for ‘I’, ‘me’, the little ego. 
And now we come to the psychological meaning of the djed column.

Let us observe, as in the picture above, our self-awareness, like a reed in the wind of events: a weak feeling of ‘little me’, an awareness lasting a few seconds, then gone, replaced by another reed. This is how the Egyptians represented the ‘fate’ to which ‘little me’s’ are subjected, a little chick looking at a lake of flowering lotus’ and reeds as opposed to the sovereign self who uses the same winds to carry him to his destination.
By building its djed with its own reeds the ‘chick’ becomes an ‘eagle’ and ‘fate’ becomes ‘destiny’.
What we call a soul or a personality or an individual is not a single entity but a multitude of elements barely holding together, if not openly fighting one another, making our putative oneness a pure illusion. That such an agglomeration of contradictory elements could last in eternity is a childish superstition. But the Egyptian pictorial way shows us how our disparate psychological constituents can be taken as building blocks, carefully brought together, fitted into a harmonious whole, tied and made into a true individuality: a house in eternity.
This synthesis is to be realized on the four levels visible in the column — the physical, vital, mental, and overmind levels — for the djed to become a ladder to heaven and an everlasting perfection. 

Let us examine in more detail these four levels, 
starting with our physical being: 
Does it obey us, is it well exercised? 

And our vital immune system: 
does it work as a single force field, vigilant, self-aware? 

Our mental being with all its ideas:
does it function around a centre like an orchestra of harmony and creation? 
And the overmind, seat of our deepest aspirations and highest ideals:
does it maintain a continuous awareness of the timeless programme of our soul? 

And are all these levels of being the expression of a single fundamental vibration, a single call, a single song: ourselves?

It is time for us to tie and erect our djed.

Neter with a Lasso Head

from The Way of Horus, p. 52

The role of the neteru, as shown in the picture above and in the hieroglyphs below is to lasso and then to bind all the vibrations in us, to help us control them, domesticate them and make them work together for building and creating our­selves in individual resonance with the cosmic harmony.

How could our ancestors in the Golden Age of the past see the neteru so clearly as to be able to make pictures of them, while we see nothing?

When a modern scientist claims to have ‘seen’ a particle that jumped into existence for a mere nanosecond as a squiggle on the oscilloscope, or a quasar twelve billion light years away at the very brink of space and time, these sightings are conclusions drawn from very complex computations. It was under equally rigorous conditions and self-imposed discipline that our ancestors exposed, expectantly, their ultrasensitive monocular self-awareness to the presence of the eternal movements in themselves, until they could perceive them, relate to them and make pictures of them.

Self-awareness became self-seeing.

The Many and the One

from Immortal Wisdom, p. 17

Lunar and Solar Intelligence

from The Royal Cubit, p. 81

If the sun is the symbol for solar daylight knowledge, 
a knowledge triumphant in its certitudes, 
the certitudes of the lunar knowledge 
are of a different kind. 
Solar knowledge remains bound 
to the material, corpuscular aspect of the world; 
while lunar wisdom shines in the depths of our being, 
and it is millions of years older. 
The first animals in the Cambrian 
which adventured out of the water, 
did not do it under the scorching sun, 
but waited for the moonlight to guide them. 
Stone-Age wisdom was predominantly lunar, 
the prerogative of women, and attuned 
to the mysteries of birth and death. 
In archaic Greece, the moon was still called 
the ancient mother palaiomator,  
the mother before the mothers promator.
Today daylight knowledge is considered 
the only valuable one. 
According to it, every living being dies. 
And nobody will seriously contradict that statement; 
because bodies die. 
But hidden behind this appearance, there is a doubt. 
And that is where lunar intelligence steps in… 

What is a Symbol?

from The Royal Cubit, p. 53

The value and the beauty of a symbol lie in the fact that it cannot be defined or forever fixed in its meaning….
To look at a teaching image until we recognize ourselves in it is a preliminary step towards self-knowledge.
Flowers are teaching flowering, birds flying, and stars shining – provided we admit to every symbol we meet: yes, this I am.

Insects, metamorphosing from larva to pupa to flying adults, are teachers for those ready for transforming themselves.

There is nothing in our universe, from the electron to the mega galaxy, which is not a symbol trying to teach us how to be man.
On the way to this self-discovery all symbols are helpers, friends, and guides, each one a faithful aspect of ourselves…

Symbols can be understood on as many levels as there are human levels of self-awareness.
If anyone has a reading which makes him and the symbols deeper, higher, and vaster, more united with himself and the wholeness of the universe, then by all means he should adopt it and remain faithful to it till his next step on the ladder of evaluating himself and the symbols around him. 
There is always a possible next step. Symbols have a life of their own…

In ancient Egypt—and it remains true today—knowledge was identification.
And identification is oneness and illumination.

‘Knowledge’ of the ‘vibrating’ reality behind the ‘veil’