Astral Arc (youtube series)

[Federica]

So this morning I've tried the first two steps of the meditation on the higher self. As expected, I have first struggled to achieve restfulness of soul. But I had good motivation, and I felt I was moving back and forth toward restfulness. It's 'only' that I couldn't maintain the state of restfulness. As advised, after a while I moved to the second step, even if the first was not achieved. I thought about the mentioned verse, trying to vividly think and visualize the words, and to create an openness for an encounter, or humble discovery. Again, I couldn't achieve much, but I had a sense of movement, of something happening, of dynamism of the heart, although short-lived. And the most surprising thing, when I closed it, was the time elapsed: more than one hour. That was well beyond my subjective sense of time passed, and by far beyond any previous meditation attempt. I look forward to trying again tomorrow!

Federica,

What you say about the subjective sense of time passed is interesting. For me, it's usually the opposite effect - I feel that I have been meditating for an hour, but it was actually only 15 min. clock-time. It reminds me of something Cleric wrote about how it could depend if we are viewing feeling from the perspective of thinking or thinking from the perspective of feeling. Perhaps I incline towards the former and you towards the latter. What do you think? Has that remained pretty constant for you?

Hm.. I don't know. I don't understand well this feeling-thinking reciprocal relation. My sense is, they come from different origins, then they interact. There is an asymmetry, because thinking works at a higher level of freedom/awareness, and it's through thought-images that feelings are consciously experienced. So a feeling has to be viewed as a thought-form, but the opposite does not seem possible, I believe. How to view thinking from the perspective of feeling?

This morning was my fourth meditation, and yes, I have experienced again a dilation of clock-time in my meditative world, although it was less spectacular than on day 1. For me it looks like a rather good sign of involvement in my inner world, a sign of better flow, where I pack in the meditative now more than I do in standard experience, so the movement from an idea to the next is delated, or expanded, compared to what happens in my standard experience, when I have to quickly switch from thought to thought, unable to find enough richness to inhabit each idea for a long 'time'/grasp the extended idea.

My tentative intuition would be that it depends on how our cognitive process flows in meditation compared to how it flows in normal cognition. You have likely reached a level of general understanding and processing of idea-perceptions outside meditation that has expanded your now to an extent that, compared to your meditations', is larger? Parallel to that, you are probably able to travel fast enough in meditation to feel that a lot has happened?

Well, I guess my idea is pretty confusing as is I should think it through more in depth... but the main point is, I wonder if the perception of time passed does not depend on how we perceive time in general, which is of course impacted by our level of spiritual development.

In my case, as I said earlier, I have so far put almost all my efforts in reading, reflecting, and praying, not in meditation. So I have exercised my everyday thinking muscles to some extent, but not at all my meditative ones. And now I really feel the unbalance and weakness. At the same time, I'm motivated and happy to engage in this new effort, which probably helps me lose myself in the imaginative efforts, and that's where I also lose contact with the time grid.

Anyhow, I believe my step 1 has now gotten slightly better, I have found 'warm ice' as a good "word of power" for me. It evoques the "still waters", by the ice, but also the intentionality and dynamic potential of warmth. And it’s a wonder that nicely drives imaginative efforts to create and maintain. I am still weak on step 2, but I was ready for that. Hopefully, with persistence, my subjective-objective time relation will be inverted at some point as well.

[AshvinP]

So this morning I've tried the first two steps of the meditation on the higher self. As expected, I have first struggled to achieve restfulness of soul. But I had good motivation, and I felt I was moving back and forth toward restfulness. It's 'only' that I couldn't maintain the state of restfulness. As advised, after a while I moved to the second step, even if the first was not achieved. I thought about the mentioned verse, trying to vividly think and visualize the words, and to create an openness for an encounter, or humble discovery. Again, I couldn't achieve much, but I had a sense of movement, of something happening, of dynamism of the heart, although short-lived. And the most surprising thing, when I closed it, was the time elapsed: more than one hour. That was well beyond my subjective sense of time passed, and by far beyond any previous meditation attempt. I look forward to trying again tomorrow!

Federica,

What you say about the subjective sense of time passed is interesting. For me, it's usually the opposite effect - I feel that I have been meditating for an hour, but it was actually only 15 min. clock-time. It reminds me of something Cleric wrote about how it could depend if we are viewing feeling from the perspective of thinking or thinking from the perspective of feeling. Perhaps I incline towards the former and you towards the latter. What do you think? Has that remained pretty constant for you?

Hm.. I don't know. I don't understand well this feeling-thinking reciprocal relation. My sense is, they come from different origins, then they interact. There is an asymmetry, because thinking works at a higher level of freedom/awareness, and it's through thought-images that feelings are consciously experienced. So a feeling has to be viewed as a thought-form, but the opposite does not seem possible, I believe. How to view thinking from the perspective of feeling?

This morning was my fourth meditation, and yes, I have experienced again a dilation of clock-time in my meditative world, although it was less spectacular than on day 1. For me it looks like a rather good sign of involvement in my inner world, a sign of better flow, where I pack in the meditative now more than I do in standard experience, so the movement from an idea to the next is delated, or expanded, compared to what happens in my standard experience, when I have to quickly switch from thought to thought, unable to find enough richness to inhabit each idea for a long 'time'/grasp the extended idea.

My tentative intuition would be that it depends on how our cognitive process flows in meditation compared to how it flows in normal cognition. You have likely reached a level of general understanding and processing of idea-perceptions outside meditation that has expanded your now to an extent that, compared to your meditations', is larger? Parallel to that, you are probably able to travel fast enough in meditation to feel that a lot has happened?

Well, I guess my idea is pretty confusing as is I should think it through more in depth... but the main point is, I wonder if the perception of time passed does not depend on how we perceive time in general, which is of course impacted by our level of spiritual development.

In my case, as I said earlier, I have so far put almost all my efforts in reading, reflecting, and praying, not in meditation. So I have exercised my everyday thinking muscles to some extent, but not at all my meditative ones. And now I really feel the unbalance and weakness. At the same time, I'm motivated and happy to engage in this new effort, which probably helps me lose myself in the imaginative efforts, and that's where I also lose contact with the time grid.

Anyhow, I believe my step 1 has now gotten slightly better, I have found 'warm ice' as a good "word of power" for me. It evoques the "still waters", by the ice, but also the intentionality and dynamic potential of warmth. And it’s a wonder that nicely drives imaginative efforts to create and maintain. I am still weak on step 2, but I was ready for that. Hopefully, with persistence, my subjective-objective time relation will be inverted at some point as well.

Federica,

I was going to write a more direct response to the above, but then I came across this passage from Tomberg which may be more indirectly relevant. At the least, it shows there are at least three distinct dispositions within our thinking soul activity, oriented towards thinking, feeling, and will. Tomberg discusses these in the context of meditation, which may also relate to the question of time-experience. Either way, I am sure people here can get a lot of value for their own meditative efforts in contemplating what follows. What you describe above seems to fit well with what he says is the 'central European' experience, which may be a 'fortunate' disposition due to its natural striving for balance. I'm glad you have found a renewed motivation for the meditative effort!

The above-characterized differences in attitudes of soul also hold sway in relation to meditation. Russians, for instance, could hardly have any enthusiasm for meditation if it were presented to them as a mere exercise. The soul-life is for them too holy, too sacred, for mere ‘exercises’ to be practiced there. They would feel it to be an importation of something foreign, even mechanical, into the life of soul. It could drown out the inner angel voice. The soul is a wonderland where wonders still take place. East Europeans never lose the feeling that something unexpected can happen in the soul: a great repentance, a great conversion, or perhaps a revelation. They believe in the miracle in the human being. So, therefore, many believe for instance that the future of Bolshevism does not lie in the form of a reaction to it, or in the realization of its aims, but rather in the form of a mighty transformation of soul attitude: a grandiose penitence.

The feeling that human beings can unexpectedly rise above themselves in insight and deed—this belief in the miraculous in the human being is actually an instinctive consciousness of the presence of the angel in the depths of human inner life—whence an intervention can always be counted upon. This consciousness is at the same time a hindrance for the working of the ‘I’ as the systematic educator of inner life, for it is feared that thereby something greater could be displaced by something lesser.

For these reasons, the motivation of meditation as a mere exercise is not only insufficient for the East European, but also antipathetic. Still, they can rouse much energy and enthusiasm for meditative work when they are presented with another motivation for it.

Now the actual significance of fasting consists in the fact that, through abstinence and reduction to the level of necessity, forces are freed from lower members of the organism which can then be put at the disposal of the higher activity of upper members. This ‘making available’ of the lower forces to the higher activity is in Eastern Europe one of the most important aspects of spiritual life. And there can be found there—in contrast to the Catholic asceticism for merit or reward—the general, partly subconscious conviction that all of the ‘lower’ can be transformed into something ‘higher’. This transformation takes place through fasting during periods of spiritual effort.

Now thinking is not the highest faculty for which the human being has potential. It can be transformed into a still higher faculty—that of vision. For this it is necessary for thinking to be just as much internalized as speaking has become internalized into thinking. As we are silent while thinking, so must we silence our thinking for inner vision to take place. We must proceed from thinking to the thought (a formulation of Rudolf Steiner’s) and then proceed further to let go of the thought. This process is the spiritual equivalent to fasting; that is, transformation of thinking forces into higher forces of vision. And so, meditation understood as fasting is the sacrifice of lower forces for the benefit of higher, future faculties. This is the Eastern attitude toward meditation. And for the East European, meditation is not an exercise, it is a sacrifice, a continuous, repeated sacrifice called fasting.

If East Europeans have problems in the realm of motivations that they have to resolve before meditation, so Westerners have difficulties in the realm of results, of successes in meditation. They are focused on the achievement of results. Here the problem arises that at first these results are imagined to be other than they really are. For the fruits of meditative work are to be sought on another level than the one where the work has begun. The special quality of this work lies in the fact that through it something new arises. Now Westerners have the tendency to visualize this new thing in an old way, that is to say, it is actually visualized as being on the same level as where their ordinary consciousness exists. Results are expected which are visualized materialistically. Thereby arises a grave hindrance; there enters in a ‘haste’, a desire for success. Instead of remaining quietly steady and with loving devotion in the clarity of meditation, there enters a mechanical ‘let’s get on with it.’ Through the pursuit of a goal that has been projected down into a material plane, the meditation becomes mechanized.

This hindrance can be eliminated by taking up, before and alongside the meditative work, a comprehensive cognitive effort to penetrate the concepts communicated by spiritual science. Through this effort, thinking is released from its materialistic tendency. It is gradually trained to think of spiritual and intimate things in a spiritual and intimate manner. Thus it becomes capable of envisioning the results of meditation in advance in such a way that instead of arousing desire, it brings forth sacrifice and renunciation in the soul.

So we see that people of the East, through permeating their motives with morality, clear away the hindrances that block their way to meditation, while people of the West achieve the same through the labor of thought. Now morality is the most effective weapon against the Luciferic, while thinking is the best antidote to the Ahrimanic. Had Easterners not concerned themselves with motivating ideals before they went in for meditation, they would have fallen into a voluptuousness: a self-seeking enjoyment of the inner life. Had Westerners decided to save themselves the effort of the labor of thought and tried to achieve higher faculties only through meditation, their meditation would have degenerated into mechanical ‘gymnastic’ exercises. In other words, the Easterner would have succumbed to Lucifer, the Westerner to Ahriman.

People of the Center have the fortunate predisposition to foster the way as such. For them there is comparatively little difficulty in pursuing meditation for its own sake. They work with the feeling: Meditation is something by means of which I increase my value as a human being. Because of the presence of this predisposition, the stream of modern meditative life, the living Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, was able to—and had to—arise in the Center.

For the people of the Center, meditation is more an ‘aesthetic’ than a moral-religious or practically correct activity. They labor at the work-of-art, ‘Human Being’. They sculpt themselves and experience a deep satisfaction in the process of formation.

This fortunate predisposition must, however, be wrought with effort, for it appears only in the state of balance between the moral and the practical. This balance is not always present, nor is it easily established. The contrasting tendencies in the conceptions of meditation in East and West struggle here against each other in the souls of prospective meditators. They have to make their way through doubt.

The way through doubt—until the emergence of the inner faculty—is described in an excellent manner in the book Meetings with Rudolf Steiner by Friedrich Rittelmeyer.† This book, highly instructive from several other points of view also, contains a description of the intimate experiences in meditation of a Central European. It is only necessary to read a few things between the lines.

In order to summarize the above, and to answer the question which doubtless many a reader has come to—How may the characterized trinity in meditative life be brought into unison?—we need no more pregnant a formulation than that given in St John’s Gospel: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

In these words the solution suited to meditative consciousness for the problem ‘East, Center, West’ may be found, right into its most intimate consequences within the sphere of meditative life. The true ‘I’, the ‘I am’, is that which unites the tendencies to morality, reality, and method into a higher unity.

[Federica]

Federica,

I was going to write a more direct response to the above, but then I came across this passage from Tomberg which may be more indirectly relevant. At the least, it shows there are at least three distinct dispositions within our thinking soul activity, oriented towards thinking, feeling, and will. Tomberg discusses these in the context of meditation, which may also relate to the question of time-experience. Either way, I am sure people here can get a lot of value for their own meditative efforts in contemplating what follows. What you describe above seems to fit well with what he says is the 'central European' experience, which may be a 'fortunate' disposition due to its natural striving for balance. I'm glad you have found a renewed motivation for the meditative effort!

(...)

Thank you, Ashvin!

What an inspiring passage from Tomberg, it’s very relevant and illuminating! This part:

Now thinking is not the highest faculty for which the human being has potential. It can be transformed into a still higher faculty—that of vision. For this it is necessary for thinking to be just as much internalized as speaking has become internalized into thinking. As we are silent while thinking, so must we silence our thinking for inner vision to take place. We must proceed from thinking to the thought (a formulation of Rudolf Steiner’s) and then proceed further to let go of the thought.

could interest Güney who was "irritated" by meditative steps 3 and 4 as proposed by Romero. Maybe the above explanation will be less irritating.

The description of the Eastern European approach to meditation, in terms of transformation of something lower into something higher, reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago for the Meditation thread, but didn't dare to post then. Now I feel kind of compelled to, because it surprisingly matches what you say, that I might be approaching meditation in the middle ground between the ideas of sacrifice/transformation (Eastern European) and exercise/production (Western) in search for a balance between the two impulses. The difference is that I was unaware of that when I wrote it:

"I hope nobody will take it badly, but in connection with my own misunderstandings of what concentration is, and thinking back about the entire set of discussions and metaphors there have been about it during this (almost) year since I have known this forum, it looks like concentration could be likened to a kind of spiritualized equivalent of physical sexual activity. And maybe, all in all, and strangely enough, this idea could provide better cues on how to approach it, in contrast to the ideas of 'exercise', 'homework', 'straining activity'. I do also realize that as soon as one says that, a risk of misunderstanding appears, and maybe that's why such a 'parallel' has not been highlighted here (as far as I know)."


Also brilliant is the description of how the two opposite approaches to meditation can be balanced out. The Eastern meditator, who risks to identify the I with the lower personality/ego, focusing all efforts on ascension through sacrifice, can be brought back down to earth by a moral impulse, that brings back responsibility and practicality into the activity of meditation. And the Westerner can develop a humble and living understanding of thinking as spiritual activity, to overcome all horizontal expectations of progression. Finally, for those who are already trying, knowingly or unknowingly, to balance out the two polar opposites in their approach, they should simply try again and again if it doesn’t work

One can wonder if nowadays these approaches have less of a geographical component to them, and more of an individual soul component (although something tells me, Ashvin, you won’t agree with that). Anyhow, interestingly, all three approaches seem to be represented on this forum.

Another thing that has come to mind, reading this passage, is that Tomberg, who was Russian, referred in detail to the typical Russian spiritual approach in perfectly impersonal terms. He didn't include himself in that cultural stream. Besides the fact that such an expression could be the most appropriate one to the sort of illustrative overview of cultural-spiritual diversity he was drawing there, the following has occurred to me. If we get into the habit of thinking of past philosophers and thinkers not as isolate individual 'bubbles' in the history of thought, but as epiphenomena (in the etymological sense of surface manifestation) of a much deeper I-consciousness, then it makes sense to not focus attention on one specific incarnational personality who was, in this case, Russian. Who knows where and how the I we have now the chance to know as author Valentin Tomberg will emerge in the future? What likeness will that I take, what nationality and soul features will it assume, in case it will reappear on this side of the threshold at some point. Then we could also start to think about ourselves in similar terms, getting used to consider and feel our ordinary I as a relatively ephemeral leave, belonging to a much more consistent tree-being (metaphorical), or as an incarnational appearance of a much more dimensional, and deep I-being. Because we often speak of reincarnation, incarnational rhythms, and our various lives, but there is always a risk that, as soon as we quit that explicit thought, we go back to a self image that snaps back to the ordinary I who has a given name, gender, nationality, and personal traits and history. We do know that everyday-us is not who we are. But it's very easy to know that fact as a book-fact, as an information, or as an interesting perspective, but not as an actual core awareness, or heart knowledge, from which to enliven our constant becoming.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I was going to write a more direct response to the above, but then I came across this passage from Tomberg which may be more indirectly relevant. At the least, it shows there are at least three distinct dispositions within our thinking soul activity, oriented towards thinking, feeling, and will. Tomberg discusses these in the context of meditation, which may also relate to the question of time-experience. Either way, I am sure people here can get a lot of value for their own meditative efforts in contemplating what follows. What you describe above seems to fit well with what he says is the 'central European' experience, which may be a 'fortunate' disposition due to its natural striving for balance. I'm glad you have found a renewed motivation for the meditative effort!

(...)

Thank you, Ashvin!

What an inspiring passage from Tomberg, it’s very relevant and illuminating! This part:

Now thinking is not the highest faculty for which the human being has potential. It can be transformed into a still higher faculty—that of vision. For this it is necessary for thinking to be just as much internalized as speaking has become internalized into thinking. As we are silent while thinking, so must we silence our thinking for inner vision to take place. We must proceed from thinking to the thought (a formulation of Rudolf Steiner’s) and then proceed further to let go of the thought.

could interest Güney who was "irritated" by meditative steps 3 and 4 as proposed by Romero. Maybe the above explanation will be less irritating.

The description of the Eastern European approach to meditation, in terms of transformation of something lower into something higher, reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago for the Meditation thread, but didn't dare to post then. Now I feel kind of compelled to, because it surprisingly matches what you say, that I might be approaching meditation in the middle ground between the ideas of sacrifice/transformation (Eastern European) and exercise/production (Western) in search for a balance between the two impulses. The difference is that I was unaware of that when I wrote it:

"I hope nobody will take it badly, but in connection with my own misunderstandings of what concentration is, and thinking back about the entire set of discussions and metaphors there have been about it during this (almost) year since I have known this forum, it looks like concentration could be likened to a kind of spiritualized equivalent of physical sexual activity. And maybe, all in all, and strangely enough, this idea could provide better cues on how to approach it, in contrast to the ideas of 'exercise', 'homework', 'straining activity'. I do also realize that as soon as one says that, a risk of misunderstanding appears, and maybe that's why such a 'parallel' has not been highlighted here (as far as I know)."


Also brilliant is the description of how the two opposite approaches to meditation can be balanced out. The Eastern meditator, who risks to identify the I with the lower personality/ego, focusing all efforts on ascension through sacrifice, can be brought back down to earth by a moral impulse, that brings back responsibility and practicality into the activity of meditation. And the Westerner can develop a humble and living understanding of thinking as spiritual activity, to overcome all horizontal expectations of progression. Finally, for those who are already trying, knowingly or unknowingly, to balance out the two polar opposites in their approach, they should simply try again and again if it doesn’t work

One can wonder if nowadays these approaches have less of a geographical component to them, and more of an individual soul component (although something tells me, Ashvin, you won’t agree with that). Anyhow, interestingly, all three approaches seem to be represented on this forum.

Federica,

The connection you draw here is important. What flows through our thinking I-consciousness should become an expression of Love, which raises physical and soul-love into the pure realm of the Spirit. Cleric has also referred to higher cognition as the process of allowing our normal intellect to be impregnated by the Spirit. And of course, the scripture speaks of 'knowledge' or 'knowing' in this way as well. It is really the process of awakening to how our thinking embeds the very same life force which allows for our physical capacity to create new beings (or more accurately, to participate in creating new physical sheaths for incoming souls to occupy). In primordial times, this life force was split and one stream went downwards into the physical creative force, the other upwards into the spiritual creative force. Now we are at the stage where they can be gradually spiraled together again, and our spiritual activity becomes creative as it is with the Gods. 

That quote was written back in 1931, so certainly the geographical boundaries are less important now than they were before. However, the soul-spiritual curvature of these archetypal regions is more lasting in its importance than the physical boundaries or the ability to cut across them. In other words, the former shifts more gradually than the latter. Steiner has also lectured on these differences - generally, the currents of the sentient soul are more prominent in southern Europe, the intellectual soul in central Europe, the consciousness soul in England/America, and the germinal Spirit Self in Eastern Europe/Russia. So these distinctions maintain lasting importance for incarnating souls. We could say that our decision to incarnate between death and rebirth is made in light of higher knowledge, provided through the higher hierarchies, of how these regions will interface with the tasks of our destiny as individuals and collectives. But you are correct that the importance is generally trending in the direction of individual soul dispositions which become increasingly free from the sphere of past cultural and natural conditioning and therefore can integrate the component soul-members into harmonious functioning, regardless of region. 

Another thing that has come to mind, reading this passage, is that Tomberg, who was Russian, referred in detail to the typical Russian spiritual approach in perfectly impersonal terms. He didn't include himself in that cultural stream. Besides the fact that such an expression could be the most appropriate one to the sort of illustrative overview of cultural-spiritual diversity he was drawing there, the following has occurred to me. If we get into the habit of thinking of past philosophers and thinkers not as isolate individual 'bubbles' in the history of thought, but as epiphenomena (in the etymological sense of surface manifestation) of a much deeper I-consciousness, then it makes sense to not focus attention on one specific incarnational personality who was, in this case, Russian. Who knows where and how the I we have now the chance to know as author Valentin Tomberg will emerge in the future? What likeness will that I take, what nationality and soul features will it assume, in case it will reappear on this side of the threshold at some point. Then we could also start to think about ourselves in similar terms, getting used to consider and feel our ordinary I as a relatively ephemeral leave, belonging to a much more consistent tree-being (metaphorical), or as an incarnational appearance of a much more dimensional, and deep I-being. Because we often speak of reincarnation, incarnational rhythms, and our various lives, but there is always a risk that, as soon as we quit that explicit thought, we go back to a self image that snaps back to the ordinary I who has a given name, gender, nationality, and personal traits and history. We do know that everyday-us is not who we are. But it's very easy to know that fact as a book-fact, as an information, or as an interesting perspective, but not as an actual core awareness, or heart knowledge, from which to enliven our constant becoming.

That's another excellent point, and well expressed. Of course, we shouldn't lose sight of the 'personality prism' altogether, through which the higher individuality expresses itself, but always with a view to gaining a greater understanding of the latter, just as we study isolated physical perceptions with a view to a greater understanding of the archetypal processes underlying them. With more spiritually developed individualities, as surely Tomberg was, we can even start to sense how the personality and individuality are spiraling together - the former becomes a closer and closer image of the latter. Ultimately that is our archetypal ideal, perfectly manifested through Christ Jesus.

[Cleric K]

I would like to begin by saying that what I’ll write shouldn’t be taken as something authoritative. I’ve mentioned before that my own path has gone quite chaotically and it is only in retrospect that I try to conceive of a more gradual approach. This has always been my desire – to refine the steps of the path into more palpable gulps. Part of the motivation is because I myself am an intellectually curious person and I know how dissatisfying it is to hear something like “You can’t understand this now, you’ll have to wait”. I am also fully aware how slippery such an endeavor can be because whether we like it or not there indeed are certain steps which can’t be simply thought out. For example, when we learn to ride a bicycle or swim, there’s always the magical ‘aha’ moment where we step into a completely novel experience. So we should be clear these steps into the novel inner experiences can’t be simply thought out, yet we can make them somewhat more gradual.

In order to approach the meditative experience we can start from something which each one of us experiences although with varying degrees of awareness. I’m speaking about the episodes of daydreaming, mind-wandering and so on. Normally we’re too engrossed in our inner life of images but from the outside we can easily tell when someone is in such a state. They usually become motionless and the eye focus becomes relaxed into infinity.

We can turn this into an experiment where we can try to enter such a state at will. It is interesting that we might feel certain reluctance to do that. We do it all the time without noticing but if we try to do it consciously we may feel a certain obligation to remain connected with the sensory flow. And let’s be clear that in a certain sense this is normal. We’re not supposed to drift off when we are in the middle of conversation. Yet interestingly, we may feel something similar even when we’re alone. It is as if we don’t want to be rude to our sensory environment. Thus we are sucked in by all perceptions, we’re fidgeting, changing our body posture – all kinds of things through which we affirm our presence in the sensory spectrum.

When we’re by ourselves we can try this without the risk of insulting anybody by not being present. It’s preferable to do this with eyes open. We can choose any point in our visual field and use it only as an anchor. We relax our eyes into infinity as if we look through the point. It’s normal that our sight can become a little blurry. Then we can stop all bodily movement. It helps if we ‘breathe out’ our bodily sensations. Normally our bodily sensations are like small hooks that try to capture our attention. If we take a deep breath and breathe it out smoothly, we can imagine how we relax and push away all bodily sensations which become a kind of blurry sensory aura.

Once again, these are all things which normally happen automatically when we get deeply engrossed into a stream of our inner life, except that here we do it consciously. The trick is to become comfortable with this blurry cloud of bodily and perceptual sensations which is always there, without feeling obliged to give our attention to its hooks.

This is connected with the law of ‘shrinking’. Some time ago I mentioned a metaphor that in sensory life it’s like we’re wearing a fairy ball gown through the woods, which gets tangled in every branch and twig. Everything hooks us and demands our attention. So the key is to pack our gown tightly and relax the forest periphery. The smaller we’re in relation to it, the more fluidly we can move about.

I might be wrong about this comparison but it feels to me that it gives a relatable example about the way our inner life should be transformed. Of course this shouldn’t be taken as encouragement for daydreaming and drifting off when doing important things and conversing with others. But I think there’s value in becoming conscious of what happens when we unintentionally do drift off in this way.

There are many instances when we can experiment with this even in the midst of our busy everyday life. For example waiting at a traffic light. Most of us drift away anyway in that case so it doesn’t hurt to make this into an experiment, relaxing our gaze and bodily sensations. Having movement in our environment actually adds a specific flavor to the experiment because we feel that the blurry sensory totality is alive around us, while we’re concentrated. Everyday movements can be too distracting but rhythmic movements like that of a wall clock’s pendulum, are much easier to relax into the background.

If we try to experiment with this (and this is far easier than trying to meditate), I believe it could be easier to get a more tangible feeling for what meditation should be. Basically, to advance to meditation we should shrink even from the flow of our ordinary imagination and thought-stream. When we daydream we’re practically drawn by a stream of imagery which is usually connected to certain desires, problems and so on. In meditation we try to shrink back even from this subtler flow, similarly to the way we shrink from the cloud of bodily and sensory perceptions. Our concentration on a thought is similar to choosing a point in our visual field that we look through. The difference here, of course, is that we have to support that inner ray through our own forces.

Presenting things in this way may give the impression that the farther we go the more disconnected we become from reality. Initially it seems so because our normal environment becomes a blurry cloud. Yet later higher order patterns within that totality begin to spark our intuition. Thus the reason why most esoteric teachings speak of passing through a dark zone (similarly to the darkness with the walls LR speaks of in the video).

[Federica]

Thank you, Cleric, very helpful analogy! If we continue the parallel with the LR video and those 4 steps, I understand your illustration is a unitary experience, whilst in LR the steps are proposed as a sequence. Do you think there is any value in first becoming very familiar - as a preparatory phase - with relaxing the soul and working at becoming insensitive to the sensory hooks (1), then actively thinking the thought (2), and possibly only later relinquishing it (3) and the activity itself (4), or is it an unnecessary and confusing decomposition? Because in your explanation it feels like, as soon as you relax the hooks to the external cues and internal soul movements, the relinquishing movement will start, as a natural simultaneous experience (if the metaphor of daydreaming is meant to be that close to the reality of meditation). But my problem, before hearing of LRs 4 steps, was that I didn't know where to go, how to deal with the verse/image, where to direct, or not direct, my activity. In other words, is it OK to first intensely think about the verse, buiding up that activity first, before preparing to leave it behind, or should we expect that, by relaxing the external cues, the relinquishing phase starts by itself, if only the gawn is held tight enough? (as it happens in daydreaming).

[Cleric K]

Thank you, Cleric, very helpful analogy! If we continue the parallel with the LR video and those 4 steps, I understand your illustration is a unitary experience, whilst in LR the steps are proposed as a sequence. Do you think there is any value in first becoming very familiar - as a preparatory phase - with relaxing the soul and working at becoming insensitive to the sensory hooks (1), then actively thinking the thought (2), and possibly only later relinquishing it (3) and the activity itself (4), or is it an unnecessary and confusing decomposition? Because in your explanation it feels like, as soon as you relax the hooks to the external cues and internal soul movements, the relinquishing movement will start, as a natural simultaneous experience (if the metaphor of daydreaming is meant to be that close to the reality of meditation). But my problem, before hearing of LRs 4 steps, was that I didn't know where to go, how to deal with the verse/image, where to direct, or not direct, my activity. In other words, is it OK to first intensely think about the verse, buiding up that activity first, before preparing to leave it behind, or should we expect that, by relaxing the external cues, the relinquishing phase starts by itself, if only the gawn is held tight enough? (as it happens in daydreaming).

I don't have a certain answer because I myself try to understand more about the way development happens with different people. From what I can tell the steps are never strictly sequential (Steiner has also said that), there's certain overlap.

It is true that we can distinguish the steps but also they are not like completely independent activities. For example, if we have to cook there are steps: scramble the eggs, put them in the pan, fry them. We can think that we shouldn't be hurrying to put them in the pan until we have become really proficient in scrambling. On the other hand if we're impatient we can easily proceed to the next step or even we can ask someone else to scramble the eggs for us so that we can go to the next step. In meditation obviously we can't do that because the steps are more like one within the other. When we proceed from concentrating on the thought-image towards its relinquishment in a certain sense this is not like saying "OK, enough concentration, now let's go to the other step". It's rather that the concentration goes even deeper. We can probably compare that to zooming into a fractal. When we concentrate on the image we're operating at a certain 'scale'. The more we develop our inner forces with which we maintain that concentration, the more the images become something we can shape freely. Then it naturally becomes possible for us to go deeper. Thus in an interesting way the relinquishment is simply the fact that we continue to zoom even deeper and our previous scale is left behind, as if like a periphery. Of course, this zooming analogy shouldn't be taken in its spatial sense. Neither are the different scales only quantitatively different. So it is true that there are distinguishable stages but it's also true that these stages are gone one through the other so to speak. When we relinquish our concentration on a thought-image we don't stop concentrating in order to do something else but concentrate even further into the forces through which the image was supported in the first place.

[Federica]

Thank you, Cleric, very helpful analogy! If we continue the parallel with the LR video and those 4 steps, I understand your illustration is a unitary experience, whilst in LR the steps are proposed as a sequence. Do you think there is any value in first becoming very familiar - as a preparatory phase - with relaxing the soul and working at becoming insensitive to the sensory hooks (1), then actively thinking the thought (2), and possibly only later relinquishing it (3) and the activity itself (4), or is it an unnecessary and confusing decomposition? Because in your explanation it feels like, as soon as you relax the hooks to the external cues and internal soul movements, the relinquishing movement will start, as a natural simultaneous experience (if the metaphor of daydreaming is meant to be that close to the reality of meditation). But my problem, before hearing of LRs 4 steps, was that I didn't know where to go, how to deal with the verse/image, where to direct, or not direct, my activity. In other words, is it OK to first intensely think about the verse, buiding up that activity first, before preparing to leave it behind, or should we expect that, by relaxing the external cues, the relinquishing phase starts by itself, if only the gawn is held tight enough? (as it happens in daydreaming).

I don't have a certain answer because I myself try to understand more about the way development happens with different people. From what I can tell the steps are never strictly sequential (Steiner has also said that), there's certain overlap.

It is true that we can distinguish the steps but also they are not like completely independent activities. For example, if we have to cook there are steps: scramble the eggs, put them in the pan, fry them. We can think that we shouldn't be hurrying to put them in the pan until we have become really proficient in scrambling. On the other hand if we're impatient we can easily proceed to the next step or even we can ask someone else to scramble the eggs for us so that we can go to the next step. In meditation obviously we can't do that because the steps are more like one within the other. When we proceed from concentrating on the thought-image towards its relinquishment in a certain sense this is not like saying "OK, enough concentration, now let's go to the other step". It's rather that the concentration goes even deeper. We can probably compare that to zooming into a fractal. When we concentrate on the image we're operating at a certain 'scale'. The more we develop our inner forces with which we maintain that concentration, the more the images become something we can shape freely. Then it naturally becomes possible for us to go deeper. Thus in an interesting way the relinquishment is simply the fact that we continue to zoom even deeper and our previous scale is left behind, as if like a periphery. Of course, this zooming analogy shouldn't be taken in its spatial sense. Neither are the different scales only quantitatively different. So it is true that there are distinguishable stages but it's also true that these stages are gone one through the other so to speak. When we relinquish our concentration on a thought-image we don't stop concentrating in order to do something else but concentrate even further into the forces through which the image was supported in the first place.

Thank you, I retain that the steps are one within the other and not sequential, which I had not understood. I suppose the reason this is not yet clear to me is that I haven't built enough strength to get the zooming in going, so I'll stop now thinking of trying only step one and two, and I'll just know of a continuum.

[Federica]

This morning I was trying to meditate on the Self - the higher identity who lives within us in seed form, whom we are to awaken to, so we can start being it in full awareness, and it can start steering our life - and I've come up with another metaphor for the process Cleric described above as zooming in thinking as in a fractal. I understand the zoom-in as bypassing the thought-phase, the thinking about the anchor of concentration (stage 2 in the Astral Arc step by step process) and maybe the analogy I have visualized today can illustrate a way to facilitate that process, by maintaining an inner space open for the zoom in to happen.

I start the meditation by means of the known Steiner verse, that I use as anchor: “More radiant than the Sun, Purer than the Snow, etc....”, so the anchor is audial - the imagined sound of the words - and/or visual - the image of the written words. I’ve been using the German verse, for two reasons: first, to come closer to the verse's archetypal value, by recalling the words as they were written; second, because for me the original words are a stickier, thus better, anchor point, to the extent that it’s more laborious for me to call forth correct German words compared to English. Hopefully, by the end of ths post, I will have made clear what I mean by this. The English words would be more familiar, they would flow into awareness almost by themselves and, in their rush and momentum, they would easily compel me to contemplate the meaning they convey. It's as if they would drag and whip the meaning, and I wouldn’t be able to control my thinking and move past it, zooming into the anchor. In a way, it’s as if the sensorial "forest periphery" Cleric speaks of is not only thorny, but also blown up by a breeze. It has momentum, and comes to my gown to tangle it, even if I hold it tight. So not only do I have to keep the gown tight, but I also have to find a spot in the forest where the breeze ceases. This I achieve by anchoring the meditation to the German verses, but obviously it only works if one is not fluent in German.

And here comes the metaphor I wanted to share, in case it can be useful to someone else. It’s as if, in that calm forest I am dwelling in, I have arrived at the shore of a tranquil lake, and I'm watching the shore. Some tiny tiny waves are quietly brushing the shore, bringing forth some small shells. The shells are the words in the verse. The tiny waves that bring them ashore are the metric energy of the verse, whose words, unlike in prose, are connected and cradled by an underlying carrier energy. Still, as I said, when I inwardly recite the verse, words don’t come to awareness super easily. Their shared energy isn't strong enough by itself to make them flow in cohesively, because it's hindered by my scarce language proficency. It's as if I looked at the shore, I looked at the shell pieces that come forth, and some pieces are missing. Effort is required to recall the missing words in the correct form and put the verse together, but here’s the thing: there are two ways to go about it.

One way precipitates thinking into the thought about the verse, impeding the zoom-in, whilst the other way is more conducive to going beyond the verse as anchor point. In the first way, I actively and energetically go about recalling the exact missing words. All my focus goes to the memory effort. It’s as if I lifted the gaze from the shore, from the small shells lightly oscillating in the shallow water, and walked in the lake, chasing the missing shells. If I do that, I will certainly find them, I will recall them from memory, but I will also become fully occupied with the activity, and ultimately remain captive in it. In the second way, I keep watching the few shells that have come ashore. The intention, and only it, is oriented towards the missing shells, but I resist getting sucked in the actual activity of chasing them. I am only open to their coming in, I know the verse will eventually bring them ashore, so I resist the recalling effort. The main difference is, in that in-between I have now opened an ideal space in which the anchor remain present, it still works as a supporting anchor - thanks to the tension exerted by the missing words-shells - but also doesn’t impose itself in all the captivating power of a fully formed sensory hook (the complete and functional verse) that my thinking would be unable to resist.

So basically the trick is to first make the seizing of the anchor somewhat strenuous, and then remain half-way, remain a bit lazy, or patient, or watching, in respect to that strenuous task, without rushing into the effort. Though I need to try it again soon, at this point the trick looks to me like a viable way to balance the traction coming from the anchor, against the tension created by the slow-coming words, so that I can remain conscious, but inactive, in the exact middle point between the two, hopefully able to listen to anything else that could breach into that floating opening.

[AshvinP]

I start the meditation by means of the known Steiner verse, that I use as anchor: “More radiant than the Sun, Purer than the Snow, etc....”, so the anchor is audial - the imagined sound of the words - and/or visual - the image of the written words. I’ve been using the German verse, for two reasons: first, to come closer to the verse's archetypal value, by recalling the words as they were written; second, because for me the original words are a stickier, thus better, anchor point, to the extent that it’s more laborious for me to call forth correct German words compared to English. Hopefully, by the end of ths post, I will have made clear what I mean by this. The English words would be more familiar, they would flow into awareness almost by themselves and, in their rush and momentum, they would easily compel me to contemplate the meaning they convey. It's as if they would drag and whip the meaning, and I wouldn’t be able to control my thinking and move past it, zooming into the anchor. In a way, it’s as if the sensorial "forest periphery" Cleric speaks of is not only thorny, but also blown up by a breeze. It has momentum, and comes to my gown to tangle it, even if I hold it tight. So not only do I have to keep the gown tight, but I also have to find a spot in the forest where the breeze ceases. This I achieve by anchoring the meditation to the German verses, but obviously it only works if one is not fluent in German.

That's a very interesting technique, Federica. Thanks for sharing!

I may try it out as well. I can tell it will be difficult at first to resist 'rushing into the effort' of remembering the German words and trying to inwardly pronounce them. I have recently started doing the Lord's Prayer with certain Eurythmy gestures and I meet a similar problem there, although it is getting better after practice. But the strategy of avoiding the 'fully formed sensory hook' of the English verse also makes sense.

After some practice, I am able to recite the English verse without getting too tangled up in contemplating the conceptual meaning. Actually the visualizing of the Hermes' staff that you shared before, and the concrete sensing of helpful spiritual beings behind it, really comes to my aid. But using a different language is definitely a unique approach and may work well for some people.