Periods of retreat

Those seeking to be Agni Yogis should take periodic retreats away from all outside influences. These influences include television, friends, family and routine work. A retreat should be a time of seclusion so that an inner tension may be achieved.

The purpose of a retreat is to intensify the spiritual focus upon the personality. The Soul intensifies Its focus upon the personality so that the personality becomes flooded with the Soul's purpose, plan and intention.

One of the techniques of the dark forces is to prevent you from being alone with yourself. Many people are influenced by such attacks. They hurry from one place to another, from one person to another, keeping company with others or killing time with certain amusements. Such people are afraid of being alone. They feel lonely and depressed if by chance they find themselves alone. Some people even try to ignore their self in order to escape the judgment of the Self.

Those who want to be Agni Yogis must cultivate the spirit of loneliness. They must feel happy, joyful, and more creative during the times when they are alone because in lonely moments one has a greater chance to meet his Self, to utilize his time creatively, to contemplate his future and to see himself as he is. One can also meet himself in a great danger or in a great ecstasy; but why wait for such moments when one can easily and naturally meet his Self by exercising daily a period of total retreat?

At the beginning, it is not easy to use such a time creatively and immediately have contact with one's true Self. But by striving, during retreat one eventually rejects the daydreaming tendency of the mind, the pleasure-seeking imagination of the emotions and the laziness of the body. Each retreat must be used as a time of healthy introspection, creativity and planning for new changes. Loneliness conceives future heroes and great talents.

A time of retreat is required to create a channel between the Higher Self and the personality. Eventually, this channel carries the flow of future visions and creative spiritual forces to the life of the personality.

In order to build this channel between your higher visions and your personality, a regular period of retreat is required. This may be a half-hour daily, a half or whole day weekly, one weekend a month, one week a year, or any other amount of time which is possible to be set aside for reflective meditation. In this manner you build the channel through which you will flood the physical, emotional and mental nature with spiritual intention and energy. A focus of incoming energies will fuse, master, beautify and transform the personality into a blossoming of creative endeavor for the Hierarchy.

-Torkom Saraydarian

Talks on Agni vol.1, p.65