Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:49 pm That's great, Federica! It's interesting to note that the elements for the ancients were something much more in line of what you describe. From esoteric perspective, although we see fluids with our eyes, the average person of today doesn't really enter into what the ancients called 'water'. With the advent of materialism, we're passing through a period where we really live only in the mineral element, which is really the form of our cognition (a symptom of which is the purely abstract thinking - arrangements of mineral shards).
What you are doing is redeeming back the living experience of the elements. Maybe it is not in the focus of your exercises in exactly this moment but what you're really developing through them is to liberate your spiritual activity from the rigid forms and learn to will its movements in a continuous fluid way. So it's not that much what we imagine but the spiritual gestures that we perform to make that happen. The reason this is important is because gradually these kinds of spiritual gestures become at the same time means of perception. How come? For example, unless we develop the ability to read, letters would be simply visual shapes for us. When we work with letter patterns we learn to experience concepts in them. Our world is full of spiritual gestures which simply pass unregistered through us. When we gain some experience with moving our imagination in this fluid ways, we'll soon begin to notice that we spontaneously encounter similar motions - initially, primarily in our own body. This is really the germinal beginnings of the experience of the etheric body. So you see, seeing these higher members is not a question of simply superimposing additional visual layer on top of our regular sight. The etheric body is weaved not of sensory perception but of living processes and we can become conscious of them only when our spirit learns to move like them. Then through a kind of resonance we can flow with these processes.
Thank you for the help, Cleric! Within the recently evoked bike metaphor, this is like a gentle push in the back so one can gain some speed while still new at biking : ) I didn’t have any particular focus with this try, it was a simple wish of exploring the landscape in a way that doesn’t only add more data points of the same old flat type. I see how this could emancipate the gestures out of triangular and rectangular shapes, so that more can get impressed in the new slots, or even in a newly acquired continuous receptivity, after slots have been smoothed out.
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:49 pm You may find it interesting to make a similar exercise by flowing with your oxygenated blood from the heart towards the periphery and then back. It is especially powerful if you can spread your imagination in all directions and keep simultaneous focus, instead of following a single artery, which is easier.
Similar very effective exercise is following the sap of a plant up and down.
You might be overestimating my ability to easily move around with these exercises. For now, it’s mainly a clumsy attempt, where water nature in particular comes to help, because of the sympathy I feel for the element. But it’s not that I can flow ‘as water’ without interruptions, and if I am not careful I would quickly find myself paddling in a kayak, rather than being water, just to give you an idea : ) It came to mind that maybe a denser fluid, one that would be closer to solid, mineral nature would be an easier start with the exercise, and so I tried the same thing with lava. I had in mind those impressive, hypnotic views from last year, where some spectacular eruptions happened around the world, especially that one where strips of lava slowly reached the sea shore, falling off the cliffs and clashing with water in the sea. One would almost wish, inexplicably and shamefully, that the stream of lava would make it to the edge of the cliff, instead of cooling off and stopping a few meters away from the edge... But that was not a success, I found it agitating and quickly got back to water. I will try the ones you suggest! Thank you!
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:49 pm One important note: we should be fully conscious that we're moving our imagination. By no means we should succumb to phantasm and believe that in this way we're having objective perceptions of the etheric realm. We should be completely clear that we're only training our spiritual activity in this way. Learning to resonate with actual processes requires additional work and as strange as it may sound, this work is primarily in the moral sphere. I'll not go into details but it's useful to reflect on the question why we would like to perceive these processes? To satisfy our curiosity? Or to put that knowledge in use for the whole? It may be helpful to think that anything we perceive from the invisible is like a kind of credit that the higher worlds lend us and it is of great import what we do with it.
Why do I want to perceive them? I have to answer, for both the given motives. In a spirit of exploration (that of a 19th century explorer, so to speak) it is true that there’s a curiosity to satisfy (I could also say a thirst for knowledge) and there is the resolution to do the right thing with that knowledge, somewhat like voting, making a small personal contribution in the right direction for the common good. However, I also have a strong sense of not wanting to get anywhere ahead of time, or before I’m ready. Your recent words about approaching meditation with an attitude comparable to the fear of getting hit from above by falling objects, describes well that sense. But when you say that, gradually, the kinds of spiritual gestures one comes to train this way become at the same time means of perception, firstly applicable to our own body, I understand you suggest that these exercises alone actually can lead, after a while, to objective perceptions of the etheric realm, even before the additional moral work is done.
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:49 pm I hope this gives you a hint about what the nature of perceiving the higher members of the human being is. It all boils down to the fact that everything in the dreamscape is moved by some form of spiritual activity. In our materialistic-scientific consciousness we alias everything into mineral shards, we collapse the wavefunction, we might say. But the life and soul processes are not some mechanical collisions of billiard balls (the way we think of the atomic realm). There's actual spiritual will behind everything, which is of thought nature and is responsible for the dynamics of the World Content. To perceive this spiritual activity we need to learn to replicate it through our own forces, we need to integrate that activity into our whole being. This is a very gradual process.
Yes it does! It lets me move from the dry and clean idea that everything around us is moved by spiritual activity to the tridimensional navigation of some pieces of that ‘everything’. The feeling I would like to share here is that executing on this ‘impulse’ seems very accessible. The obstacle is probably having that impulse within oneself, rather than executing on it and starting the navigation.
Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 8:49 pm It's also not that important at our stage that we develop it to the stage where we really begin to perceive the processes and beings. It's much more important to at least understand these things and at least set them as our ideal, as our direction. If we develop understanding now, then in the next incarnation this understanding will metamorphose into perceptions.
This is a bit tough to take in, but I surely understand that it feels tough only for the one who has not yet become acquainted with continually sacrificing the dream character, and continually die for the lower self while still on Earth.
) Bernardo's work came up on thephilosophyforum.com about five years ago, although the reaction there was pretty dismissive. But then, most folks are presumptively materialist, even if they don't know it, whereas I was always one of the representative idealists on that forum.
