-Keep a list of topics-
I want to come back to two ideas we were talking about yesterday. The first is the need to vary the subject of one’s meditation in order to avoid mental staleness or indigestion. If you want to get the most out of the methods I give you, I advise you to take notes and make yourself a list that you can consult, like a cook who has a list of possible menus.

Each day you can look at your list, ‘Now, let’s see, that doesn’t tempt me; how about this? Yes, that’s exactly what I need, today.’ And then you will enjoy yourself because your meditation will be a success.

Stay above the horizon
Sometimes you try to concentrate on a topic and your brain wants nothing more to do with it for the moment. Some would perhaps think; ‘well I’ve been chaste and sober for so long, I’ll give myself a change by eating and drinking or finding someone to seduce,’ and they go on a spree.

No, as I said yesterday, you must not go any lower than the diaphragm and all that it symbolizes. There is an infinite variety of paths to choose from, but you must not go below the ‘horizon’, the dividing line of the diaphragm where you could run into trouble. Surely the vast space above the horizon – a range of 180 degrees – gives you plenty of scope? In this teaching one learns what direction to take when one needs a change.

What Hermes Trismegistus meant
The second point was about towns, palaces, mountains and rivers in the sun. Science tells us that the sun is an incandescent ball of fire, a world in a state of fusion in which life is impossible; so what I told you is totally unscientific.

But as Hermes Trismegistus says in the Emerald Tablet; ‘That which is below is like to that which is above.’ In other words, the things that we see in this world (rivers, mountains, lakes, rocks, trees and animals, and so on) could not exist if the models on which they were based did not already exist on a higher plane. Hermes Trismegistus was saying that there was a world above which was the model for our world, and in that higher world there were mountains, rivers, animals and men, made of another matter and with other forms.

Hermes Trismegistus did not say that that which was below was identical to that which was above, but that it was like it. The things we see here, on earth, are no more than a reflection, a repetition, an imitation of another world, just as the shadow of a tree resembles the tree, but is not the tree itself; or as a person’s reflection in a mirror resembles them, but is not them. The initiates have always spoken of the world as a shadow, the reflected image of a higher, divine world; as a reflection which points the way to that higher reality which, indeed, it resembles but which is infinitely more glorious.

The sun has inhabitants with houses… and lives just as we have…
The sun is the world above, and the earth is the world below. The sun represents heaven (or rather, the heavens) and it is teeming with life. Its inhabitants have houses just as we do, and they eat and drink, are born, love and make love, but divinely. And there are towns, too, in the sun: towns, mountains, rivers and a tremendous variety of plants, but the matter of which all these things are made is quite different from that which exists on earth.

Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov

Complete Works Volume 10, The Splendour of Tiphareth
Chapter 3, Our Higher Self Dwells in the Sun