Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Building the Antahkarana
To use disciplined aspiration and creative imagination to ‘build’ a bridge of light (the antahkarana) between the lower mind/personality and the Higher Mind/Soul, so the two are linked.
First purify and live rightly — the bridge is earned. From the aligned meditative state, aspire upward and visualise a steady rainbow bridge of light from your everyday mind to the Higher Self. Feel it as threefold — consciousness (head), life and love (heart), creative will (throat). Let devotion flow up, illumination flow down, then act on it. Build it daily; never force it.
What it is
Where Saraydarian’s seed-thought meditation is how you think, the antahkarana is what the thinking builds. He teaches that the aspirant himself constructs a bridge of light — the “rainbow bridge” — between the lower (personality) mind and the Higher Mind / Soul, using aspiration, the energy of the meditative work, and disciplined creative imagination.
The bridge is described as threefold: the consciousness thread anchored in the brain, the life thread anchored in the heart, and the creative thread anchored in the throat.
The practice operationalises imagination as creative (The Inner Creates the Outer), contact with a deeper Self (All Is One), focused attention (The Inner Creates the Outer), and the linking of higher and lower (The Inner Creates the Outer).
The Method
For Saraydarian, building the antahkarana is the culmination of meditation and self-purification — The Science of Becoming Oneself “culminates in giving techniques to build the Rainbow Bridge between the consciousness unit and the higher mind and beyond.” The practice, as taught:
- Earn the ground first. Purify the physical, emotional and mental natures (see the harmlessness/detachment technique). Saraydarian insists the bridge “is built by the aspirant himself” — by living rightly, not by a trick of visualisation.
- Align and lift. Begin from the aligned, stilled meditative state; raise the attention from the personality toward the Soul / Higher Mind as a felt aspiration.
- Visualise the bridge. With sustained creative imagination, picture a bridge or thread of radiant light spanning from your everyday mind up to the higher self — a “rainbow bridge.” Hold the image steadily; do not let it waver into daydream.
- Work the three threads. Sense the link as threefold — awareness rising through the head (consciousness), life and love steady in the heart (life thread), and the creative will at the throat — three strands of the one bridge.
- Send and receive across it. Let aspiration and devotion flow up the bridge; let illumination and the Soul’s quality flow down into the personality. Then carry that quality into action.
- Repeat daily. The bridge is built by repetition over time, not in one sitting; each meditation adds a strand. (Sourcing note: the threefold description — consciousness thread (brain), life thread (heart), creative thread (throat) — and the “built by the aspirant himself” framing are Saraydarian’s, consistent with the Bailey lineage he taught; the “Rainbow Bridge” and “culminates in… techniques to build” phrasings are from The Science of Becoming Oneself. Quoted briefly for fidelity.)
Source & Lineage
The antahkarana is a Vedantic term (the “inner instrument”) that Blavatsky and especially Alice Bailey reworked into the esoteric “rainbow bridge” between personality and Soul.
Saraydarian, trained in this lineage from childhood, taught it as the practical goal of meditation in both The Science of Meditation (where he lists “the ability to link the lower mind with the higher through the construction of the Antahkarana” as a fruit of practice) and The Science of Becoming Oneself.
Common refinements
Skipping the ethical groundwork. Saraydarian is firm that the bridge rests on purification and harmlessness; visualising it while unpurified breeds glamour.
- Letting the image drift into fantasy. Hold a clear, steady form — this is disciplined imagination, not reverie.
- Chasing phenomena. Lights, voices, psychic experiences are pitfalls, not progress.
- Expecting it fast. It is built by patient daily repetition; impatience and forcing distort it.