Federica wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 10:46 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:42 pm One thing which I am sure you have experienced in meditation is the torrent of chaotic soul-life which emerges when we are trying to deepen concentration into a unitary thought-image. Our thoughts, passions, anxieties, concerns, etc. keep swirling around and it's like playing whack-a-mole, as soon as one mole is squashed by our concentrating efforts, another pops up to take it place. We may employ some technique and have success squashing the moles and then find we are now thinking about how we attained that success, thereby sucked right back into the torrents. Our lower nature will use even our successes to distract us from the high Ideal in that way.
Absolutely, I have experienced that. It’s like there is an inexhaustible default energy that keeps the thoughts swirling around, making us feel like we are being thought by those thoughts (or at least so it feels for me). Similar to the act of breathing, which is unconscious by default, but can be taken over by conscious intention, so thinking seems to fall in between the unconscious and conscious spectrums, except that, unlike breathing, in thinking the two regimes work one against the other. By default, there's a sort of gravity that presses thinking down into the soul-sensory loops. If we let it be, that’s where thoughts will be embarked. So we have to consciously lift it up to a regime switch. With breathing we got lucky that some higher ideation was doing the project management for us
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Dec 06, 2022 7:42 pm Lately what I find helpful to remember is that these chaotic torrents I experience in meditation are always happening during normal sensory consciousness as well, only drowned out by the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Thereby we fall under the spell of the Maya that our inner soul-life is relatively ordered, that our forces of willing-feeling-thinking are relatively harmonious and working towards unified goals in life. But really we are being tossed and turned on the waves of many conflicting soul-currents just as we experience when trying to deepen concentration. So just the conscious experience of and attention to those inner torrents is already an act of differentiating our intuitive depth activity from the intellectual body suit which formats the expression of its flow into horizontal concepts and perceptions, as in Cleric's last metaphor.
Yes, I have indeed lured myself into believing that I had made progress, and that my complex was becoming more under control. I see the illusion constructed by the intellect, an additional wave of activity that only covers up the chains of the soul and sensory loops, which are still active, only doubled by one extra unit of heaviness, that our willed spiritual activity will have to disentangle. I will now try to listen to the two wavelengths, and see if they can be perceived as operating one over the other. Thank you!
Federica,
Yes there is a strong connection between breathing and thinking. Our physical breathing has actually become linked tightly with our lower sensuous-intellectual nature, which is why ancient breathing techniques could serve to only reinforce that lower conditioning rather than liberating our thinking from it. You may want to experiment gently holding the breath when your concentration is deepening in meditation, just to experience some more differentiation between the bodily nature and the soul-spirit nature. But perhaps this meditation topic is better left for another thread.
We should see how the very act of becoming more self-conscious of the soul and sensory loops is indeed making progress and gaining more control over the inner depth activity. It is finding more degrees of freedom through which your inutitive activity can express itself through the 'joints and hinges' of your intellectual body suit. Your efforts here have clearly paid off, as is evident from your posts. When we find that we can employ more concepts and metaphors, etc. to express our intuitive understanding, that is a great sign of more liberated and flexible thinking. And it is that deepened inner understanding which will provide living feedback, although not necessarily evident at first (if we remember 'time' does not flow in the same linear way for the spiritual), which gradually purifies the even deeper layers of feeling and willing activity.