Teachings and art of Herman Rednick

Over the years Herman introduced various chants, breaths, and visualizations to be used in meditation, but a general form evolved that was used by the group and by students at home. The student begins with a chant as an invocation, followed by the cleansing breath, the rhythmic breath, and sending beams of love. Then he or she meditates on the lesson, by continuing the rhythmic breath, repeating the mantra given, and holding an image. The meditation session ends with healing mantras and visualizations for those who have asked for healing. The order of these elements need not be rigid–the intention is to invoke the spirit, to calm the mind and body, and to focus on the meditation work at hand. It is good to keep in mind that facility with visualization and control of the breath come with practice. Explanations of how to do the above techniques and an outline of a meditation session are detailed in the appendices of Earth Journey I and Earth Journey II books which are compilations of Herman Rednick Lessons.

Herman suggested choosing a quiet place for meditation and setting up a shrine or altar to aid as a focal point. Often the quietest room in the house is a bedroom and an altar can be set up there. If there is an extra room or quiet space not used for sleeping, that would be ideal. The altar can be a small table or even a shelf on which can be set one or several sacred images meaningful to the student: a statue of the Buddha, representations of the Christ or the Holy Mother, a photograph of the guru – as well as candles and incense. Many of Herman’s students hung one of his spiritual paintings as inspiration on the wall behind their altars.
We might consider for a moment the importance of place. The experience of walking the spiritual path happens not only in consciousness, but also in time and space. We can experience the spiritual path in the home where we live and in our place of work. If we want to intensify our work on the path, we will want to make use of every available aid so that we achieve the greatest transformation possible from our effort. Place is one of these supports. We set aside an area of our home especially for the purpose of our meditations, distinct from other functions of our living space. Though the spiritual work can be done and must be done wherever we find ourselves, in our own home we can choose and create a place dedicated to a spiritual focus. It becomes a refuge, a sanctuary, and a focal point for our concentrated mind and heart as well as for the helping forces we invoke. We sit in meditation before our altar and over time it becomes the magnetic center of our home, a reflection in the physical world of the magnetic center within our being.

Just as the place for meditation is significant so is the time. Here, the number of hours is not as important as consistency. Why is this so? The angels, we hear from Herman as well as from other sources, not only respond to need but they move in rhythm with the natural cycle of the day. If the student sits in meditation at the same hour every day (4AM was Herman’s suggested time) he or she makes use of this rhythm and the angelic forces join him daily at this time to help him in his meditation work. Also the earth is quiet at this early hour: the activity of people and their thoughts and emotions that fill the atmosphere during the day are relatively still. The student of meditation can then more easily calm his body, mind, and emotions. In addition, there is nothing like rising to meditate at 4:00 in the morning to strengthen the will, a necessary quality for walking the spiritual path.

As we create time in our lives for specific hours of meditation (perhaps 4AM and 8:30PM as Herman suggested) we may come to feel that we are taking refuge in an eternal hour or that we are participating in an eternal meditation. Herman wrote as lyrics to a song:

This hour is mine.
At evening I commune with my Lord. My heart becomes radiant
and my mind is full of peace.

This hour is mine.
This hour is thine
when all burdens fall away in the presence of my radiant Lord.

In addition to creating time to refocus after the day’s many activities, the evening meditation can carry us into sleep and dreams in a more peaceful and spiritually receptive state.

Although suggestions from Herman were solicited by his students on a vast array of topics to help them in meeting life’s problems, Herman himself only asked students to follow three disciplines to aid their progress on the spiritual path: meditate twice a day; follow a basically vegetarian diet; and do not use alcohol or consciousness altering drugs.*

Herman recommended a vegetarian diet because the elimination of meat makes the physical cells more translucent and the body more receptive to spiritual vibration. Eggs and dairy products were permitted, and Herman occasionally advised students to eat fish. He was not rigid about these disciplines and spoke to individual cases–chicken for some, more sleep for others.

Recreational drugs and meditation can work at cross purposes. Meditation calms the mind and emotions and increases awareness. Drugs and alcohol either dull this awareness or open it to psychic influences that can interfere with and even be destructive to the meditative goal of stable spiritual contact. While the openness induced by a mind-altering substance can certainly bring about an immediate transporting experience, the state is neither permanent nor integrated with the whole nature. It is not even dependably positive. A single experience is not the same as spiritual consciousness. Drug experiences can interfere with a seeker’s development and work against the goal of lasting spiritual realization. That goal is achieved through love, will, and discipline.

Similarly, with alcohol, even minimal use inhibits the strong mental focus required for spiritual work and can open the emotions to streams of negative energy.

*This refers to marijuana, hallucinogens, opioids , etc. Prescription drugs or herbal preparations for health purposes are permitted, and even tobacco is not prohibited.

What Herman described as “The Work,” the process of transforming the personality so that it can radiate the soul light, is not limited to the meditation hour or to attending a class once a week. The thrust of the work involves not only visible activities, but also the invisible attitude with which one meets each experience during the day. The work of transformation is to bring to each of our experiences the love and gratitude necessary to change the very depths of our beings. This encompasses all areas of life–work, sex, family relations, health–with nothing excluded. People may not consider holding a job or cleaning house a spiritual activity, yet the essence of this path is to make everything we do a spiritual practice.

How can we make everything we do a yoga? There are several tools Herman suggested: love, gratitude, mantra, visualization, and retrospective writing.

The core of Herman’s path is love–the transformation and the reorientation of our entire life to love. The answer to every problem is to love more because love opens the door to the soul, our own true nature, to angelic help, to insight, to healing, and to the higher worlds. Love is the key to the ancient mysteries, the second birth within the heart, and our protection as we move into further regions of spiritual reality. The natural outcome of love is service, and also true service is love expressed.

To cultivate a loving attitude and to intensify our focus on love, Herman recommended the use of mantra, such as the mantra “With a beam of love I touch the heart of my brother” or “The love of the Christ flows through me to you.” The love can be visualized as a beam of light streaming from one’s own heart and enfolding any person one sees or thinks about. This practice is key to the transformation of the ego.

“Gratitude is the song of the heart,” Herman wrote, and it is a uniquely powerful tool for loosening the grip of the ego. Gratitude is used to replace negative emotions –-particularly resentment-–with positive ones. While resentment ties us to the object of our resentment, blocks out the light, and even, according to Herman, creates disease, the spirit of gratitude for every person, situation, and thing frees us. It transforms ourselves and our circumstances, lifts us out of the state of conflict, and can even offset negative karma. Negative karma is the result of negative action in the past and these situations repeat in our lives until the lesson prompted by them is learned. Gratitude for our difficulties transforms our perception of the conditions we find ourselves in and opens us to an understanding of our life’s lessons. It aids our recognition that every person and event in our lives is an opportunity –-and even a compassionate design–for our own learning, for increasing our love and transforming our nature. Repetition of a mantra can help engender gratitude: “I am grateful for every experience” or “Gratitude sings through me.”

Some mantras, such as the ones at the end of each lesson, are phrases repeated to impress the subconscious mind with a particular concept. Other mantras are the names of spiritual beings or refer to certain states of consciousness. The sounds of the mantra invoke these beings and states.

Herman suggested repeating the mantra from the lesson throughout the day while doing tasks that do not require great mental concentration. If the lesson included a long mantra for meditation, Herman sometimes suggested a shorter version for use during the day. These shorter mantras appear in the following lessons under the first mantra.

Herman also gave out other mantras or chants for regular repetition and invocation, such as the Shamballa chant used in class or before meditation and the well- known Tibetan mantra Om Mani Padme Hum. In addition he gave special mantras during individual consultations for particular problems or purposes, e.g., healing, pregnancy, fear, insecurity, etc.

A visualization is a bridge built by the imagination to connect us to a spiritual reality or to invoke a spiritual presence. The visualization Herman most often encouraged was that of the Christ–within the heart, in other people, or as a constant presence. Here it is helpful to know that for Herman, Christ included not only the man Jesus as Christ, but the Christ principle or Christ consciousness. The recommended images of Christ to be used for visualization portray a being of radiant color or prismatic light rather than the crucified Christ. Herman also suggested the visualization of walking with Christ or conversing with him all day. Other visualizations include, but are not limited to, the Holy Mother, angels of healing, and certain colors surrounding the body during meditation.Mandalas were also given as visualizations, and these are found throughout the volumes, with the mandala for the heart cave meditation, an essential one, repeated and developed through the three volumes. The appendix also includes the heart cave series.

In meditation, a visualization accompanies each portion of the session. These images may be of the Christ or a holy being, the healing angels, the guru, the beams of love sent, or particular images described in the lesson- -a blue light in the heart, or the soul, for instance. The visualization of a spiritual being in meditation brings the reality of that being through the image into the meditator’s consciousness as an experience rather than as just an idea.

As with mantra, visualization is not confined to the meditation hour, but can be done at any time. A person in need of healing, for example, can be visualized any time of the day or night with angels pouring upon him or her an emerald green light flecked with gold. Also beams of love can be sent to a person who is not physically present by means of our clear image of that person surrounded with the golden light of love. And the image of a holy being can accompany us no matter what our speech or activity may be in the outer world. In fact, by constantly visualizing the love of Christ flowing through us to another, we “pray without ceasing.”

Sending beams of love by using the mantra “With a beam of love I touch the heart of ___” is Herman’s quintessential instruction. We send love to everyone on a list composed of the names of the people in our life– family, relatives, friends, daily contacts. We extend the list to include all those whom we have known in the last ten years. We repeatedly send love to each one, using heartfelt mantra and visualization to enfold them. In sending love, we focus especially on people with whom we have difficulty- -our enemies.

Even if a person is no longer alive, there is no obstacle to connecting with him or her. “There is no space in spirit,” as Herman often said, and by seeing someone’s image clearly, the contact is made. Working on this list produces powerful results by freeing us from our fears and resentments. As Herman wrote, “The spiritual fire of love will dissolve the blocks in your conscious and unconscious mind.”

Retrospective writing is an ancient method and an important tool for transforming the ego.
First the student writes down a negative experience just the way it happened. Then he or she rewrites it, re- entering the experience, changing not the actual situation, but only his or her own words and actions–and only those– to bring a more loving response to the resented experience. The student contemplates the new, rewritten scenario, visualizing him or herself speaking and acting in the new, more loving way, until it becomes a reality.

Rewriting and identifying of oneself as the true self changes old patterns in the psyche by replacing negative thoughts and emotions with positive ones. The technique includes both the rewriting of daily events and the rewriting of events that have occurred many years in the past. We begin with troubling events in the present and work backward toward childhood. In the process, repeated situations often emerge as we reach back into deeper layers of our psyche. Some situations must be rewritten many times before the pattern is changed, the intense, negative emotional charge is dissipated, and we are able to meet present experiences with love.