Soloma369 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 05, 2024 12:46 am
Hi Luke, new guy here offering my three cents. Why not practice active meditation??? In this way you connect a circuit of multiple beneficial practices such as the high heart rate and low breath rate dynamic. This can be most effectively done in a very hot bath tub, it is how I meditate, the hot water turns my skin red as I get in. This is a much more controlled environment than meditating while exercising, it allows you to focus while artificially elevating your heart rate. Of course doing this offers other benefits such as sweating quite a bit which expels toxins from the body AND connects you directly to Spirit/God because water is considered the the Material manifestation of Spirit/God. In this way then the circuit you create is a coveted delta circuit, three positive actions combined in to one practice.
Obviously active meditation is much more difficult than regular meditation because of the elevated heart rate but do not let that deter you. The most important part is the initiation of the practice and the continued effort of doing your best which will lead you to incrementally getting better at adapting to the heat if done in a hot bath, which has a very releasing or transformative nature to it. This will certainly keep you awake during the process however when you are done, you could certainly fall asleep, especially if you get to the point where you can get very deep. At one point I was down to about 1.6bpm over about an hour long session, early on in the process I learned if I got up to quickly or stood up during an inhalation as opposed to exhalation, I could easily fall down or pass out. I most often would do this prior to going in to work so I would be much more relaxed and chill to the stress and non sense that inevitably ensued.
This hot meditative bath is the core of my personal practice and pairs well with a cold soak after, which I always affirmed to myself was locking in the released, reformatted state. It works wonders and can be taken to still yet other levels such that it can be tailored to connect to Spirit/God in a most profound way.
Hi Soloma,
do you see these hot tub meditations as a transition/training wheels? Or they are
the way to go for you?
For my part, just like Luke, I don't have a tub. But even if I had, I would still not be interested, simply because in my view, meditation shouldn't become dependent on any specific outer circumstances. To be fair, I would be very depressed if I had an impulse for meditation but can't give it a way because there's no hot tub around
Another point of concern is that we should make a distinction between meditation and simply finding a way to induce an
altered state of consciousness. Undoubtedly, hot tub, psychedelic, holotropic breathwork and so on can have such an effect but in all of these cases we should remember that our inner experience is
closely shaped by the conditions in the physical body. It is useful to reflect on to what degree this really is. We can try to conceive how our state would change if suddenly the hot water disappears, if the psychedelic substance is pumped out of our bloodstream and so on. We can only do that speculatively but it nevertheless heightens our awareness about the fact that much of our meditative experience is really
the inner experience of our bodily processes. We simply experience the way they stir our soul life and we reflect our inner activity in these stirrings. As a little extreme example, through mechanical stimulation we can obviously induce pain. This pain is a soul experience. It fills our inner space like a kind of painful aura. If we can ignore the unpleasant nature of the feeling, this painful aura actually can become a kind of inner imaginative screen in which hidden facts from our soul life can be reflected.
It is important to have these things in sight because otherwise we won't be able to recognize that through meditation we can also reach deeper states of existence, for which the forceful bodily states are actually a detriment. In such states the body is 'pumped up' such that within it we can experience non-ordinary reflections of deeper existence. But in order to know the deeper spiritual foundations of the bodily life itself, this pumped up intensity has to actually become transparent. Let me try to put that in a metaphor.
In our ordinary life we become quite numb. We maintain sensitivity only for the most trivial aspects of existence through which we go about our daily life. The forceful bodily states can be compared to energizing our bodily life (and that's why all such states are achieved through some form of modification of the bodily state) where it is as if the atoms of our body begin to vibrate much more vigorously. This is all metaphoric of course (although rising the temperature of the body do that also literally, but that's not the point). This pumped up bodily state feels as out-of-the-ordinary and our "I" becomes more alert, it finds means to imaginatively reflect within the energized bodily environment, deeper intuitions. However, as most things in this area, we also have the problem of
tolerance. Our ego quickly gets used to the modified bodily environment and soon the state loses its magic. This is quite obvious with psychedelics, for example.
To reach deeper states of consciousness, the ego has to find its being as if
in between the atoms of the body. In a sense, our ideal activity awakens within the spiritual streamlines along which formed existence coalesces, analogously to the way ferrofluid or iron filings are aligned along the magnetic force lines. Here, however, we're not speaking about some force field that we behold but instead our ideal existence flows along lines of
meaning (as in a kind of mathematical realm but alive and dynamic).
Such states can be reached only when our bodily processes begin to vibrate in resonance with the ideal streamlines. There's nothing forceful in this experience. Instead, as said, our body comes to feel transparent, as if superfluid or superconductive. It is utterly impossible to reach this state through forceful modification of the bodily state. This only makes it oscillate more intensely, which only deafens the subtle ideal life. It's like each point of our body is a pendulum that swings more and more vigorously and as such spends even less time near the point of balance. If our "I" is to find its spiritual essence, these oscillations need to be brough
in-phase with the ideal currents of archetypal meaning. Then an important inversion happens. We no longer feel that our lower bodies give us the foundation in which we reflect our consciousness but instead, we awaken to a spiritual world of living meaningful intents of beings, within which all lower life takes form.
