Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jun 17, 2022 8:56 am
2. When I tried the vowel exercise out loud first, I realized that the subsequent silent version completely relied on the fresh memory of the sound, which was a disturbance. So I never tried the vocal version again, but only the silent version directly. It makes me wonder whether you tried to visualize the candle from scratch. I imagine it’s way more difficult than the vowel sound gesture, which I find in itself difficult enough, but just asking.
Then of course at some point I would want to open this Pandora box of the etheric body, how you know about it, and how it’s a complete repository of all memories of sensory perceptions...
I would like to add further resolution to what Ashvin already said. This connects with what I said in the other thread - that we don't really create the sound or color 'substance' of our thoughts but it is much more that we perceive the mysterious
effects of our thinking gestures, within mysterious fabric of perceptions. It takes the highest forms of cognition to reach understanding of what exactly this fabric is - that is, to reach the true essence of what we call color, sound, taste, smell, feeling, etc. And once again this connects with the post that you said you had trouble understanding.
Think of the following. We take a sheet of paper and cut out a circle from it. Then we look at the cut out paper and say "This is a circle." But we can do also the following: we take the sheet of paper and say "A circle is that which is not paper i.e. a circle is where the paper is missing." This is highly simplified analogy but hints at a very deep mystery. What we call perceptions can be thought of as hollowed out spirit (or hollowed out intuition).
We can easily see that our science and philosophy are preoccupied with speculating about what reality
is. We try to say what everything is made of - energy, fields, consciousness, etc. A great revolution in cognition awaits everyone who finds also the reverse way of looking at things - that what we try to find as substantial is actually hollowed out, just like the missing paper from the sheet. Actually the substantial thing is our spirit, the ideal, the meaning. This is the sheet of paper. We look at the 'things' (perceptions) and seek their is-ness. Yet we're looking at holes. We understand the sensory world neither by chopping perceptions into smaller and smaller pieces, nor by simply staring at them. We do that only when our spirit finds its being in the wider spiritual world - the sheet. Then we understand also how perceptions arise by the world of Intuition being hollowed out. Evolution is the process of filling the holes back with the ideal.
For the reasons above, the voice that we hear in our mind is something complicated. It is not some pure creation of our free spirit. We can easily see that there are many factors at play. For example, our physical voice depends on our physical organism, which produces the unique timbre. On first thought, our inner voice is not dependent of the vocal tract so it shouldn't be constrained to one timbre only - we should be able to do the voice of Robert De Niro, Beyoncé. And it is really so, although not achievable as easily as one might imagine at first. So that's a question - what constraints me that I have to think with my own voice?
Personally, I can't do
vibrato. As Hedge would say, it's like I can't move my earlobe. I haven't developed the degrees of freedom through which I can do that. At this point I can not
imagine what should I do in order to produce that effect. Of course, I can 'manually' pitch my voice up and down but this is way too sluggish and imprecise in comparison to the real effect. I don't think that the real effect is achieved by simply doing these manual pitch variations faster. For this reason I can't produce that effect even with my inner voice. To some extent I can imagine someone else doing it, like when trying to remember the voice of a song, but if I am to become the first-person producer of that sound - I can't do it.
With all this I aim to show that our inner activity is not principally different from that rendered through the bodily nature. Our inner nature still consists of various degrees of freedom that we can utilize, even though of much more pliable nature. For this reason it is natural that we feel somewhat out of control of the actual texture of the sound.
The vowel exercise is not supposed to focus on that texture. We should accept with certain acquiescence that at this time we're not in complete control of the timbre and texture of the vowels. These are still highly dependent on our inner organization. The goal of the exercise is to focus on the fact that nevertheless, it is our intents that get reflected in the sound. This is most easily discerned when we
morph the sound between vowels. It's not so much
how it sounds but the fact that the morphing of the sounds mirrors our intents. It is similar with when we move the light dot. Actually very few people have vivid colorful imagination. I don't have it either. But that doesn't matter in the least because it is not at all the goal to experience vivid visual impression but to become conscious of the way we
steer that impression, no matter how dim and colorless it is. It might not be there at all. Actually, it could be even easier if instead of trying to imagine a dot, we focus our attention
in a dot. We can certainly do that
in our visual field - we can pick any fine detail and focus our sight on it. Instead of that, we can imagine we're focusing our thought in a point of inner space. We don't care if there's something at that point, its the steering of focused attention that we want to experience. Now as I think, this is a less confusing way to present this exercise because it doesn't distract us with production of visual phenomena. Instead we're completely
within thought and we simply steer our attention as a focused laser beam, with no concern whether there's something at the point of focus. The simple goal is to experience how we steer the focused beam of attention.
The goal of such exercises are to awaken for a kind of activity that is normally completely unconscious. The goal is to get a feeling for our activity within the etheric body, if we need to get technical about it. This is how we attain to clairvoyance for the etheric body. It's not that we simply begin to see some additional exotic colors overlaid on our ordinary perceptions. To see the etheric is to experience our degrees of freedom within it. As an analogy, a blind man 'sees' his unsuspected arm by finding the degrees of freedom through which he moves it (assuming he can't touch it with other parts of the body and get an external sensation for the arm). Through much experimentation he gains intuition of the volume of perceptions that he can probe with his will. That's how he becomes clairvoyant for his arm. It is analogous with our spiritual activity. Most of the life of modern man proceeds as a movie, uncontrollable stream of phenomena. The exercises help us discover deeper strata of our being which can steer the thought perceptions. By probing this activity for a long time, from different directions, we begin to gain intuition of the
volume of these degrees of freedom. This is what we call etheric body from the perspective of cognitive seeing. It is cognitive seeing because it is our thought force which is liberated and begins to probe its constraints, which normally format it into completely templated stream.
This also hints at your other question. To know our arm in depth is to have a feeling for the innerly experienced volume that we can sweep with it - the degrees of freedom. When we explore the degrees of freedom of our thinking life, we discover also the volume of all the things that we can potentially remember. That's why you have the intuition that remembering is a form of thinking activity and why I say that every memory is a degree of freedom of our thinking organism. In the course of spiritual development, as our spiritual activity probes more and more of this volume of degrees of freedom, we begin to gain holistic intuition of all those degrees of freedom that we can use for remembering. In this way we reach an experience which otherwise can be glimpsed at only in abnormal circumstances - namely, the so called flashing of one's life before their eyes. What in near death experiences happens in abnormal way (loosening of the etheric body through trauma) is achieved gradually and in a completely safe way in the course of spiritual development.
As one more analogy, which hopefully will get that more into focus, let's remember the '
man on the couch' metaphor. Our spiritual activity is like drowsy man on the couch, in a pitch-black room, whose finger half-consciously slides along a tablet screen - representing the world of perceptions.
It is interesting to note how modern user interface on phones and tablets uses certain feedback visualizations for tapping. For example, ripple effects like this:
Tapping is the
thinking gesture, the ripple on the screen is the
thought perception. Note that our gesture is not completely responsible for the actual ripple - it's shape, color, etc. Analogously our spiritual activity usually doesn't have perfect control over the texture of the sound or the intensity and vividness of the light dot. Yet we do feel that our thinking gestures trigger the ripples.
The initial goal of modern meditation is to gain consciousness precisely of these, otherwise unconscious, spiritual gestures. The more we come to know the degrees of freedom of this spiritual being, the more we begin to intuit the structured volume which we probe. Within this volume we begin to experience more and more of the forces which shape and constrain the actual texture of our timbre, habits, inclinations, preferences, likes, dislikes and so on. In other words, we come to know more of the sheet of paper of which our ordinary perceptions are hollowed out. Just like our physical voice is shaped by the vocal tract, so the expressions of our thinking, feeling and willing character are funneled by our subtle organization.
As one last remark, it's worth noting that being able to think in more than one language is already a very good way to loosen the etheric body, if we turn it into a conscious exercise. If we meditate on producing the same meaning in different languages, we'll quickly see that our spiritual being lives in the meaning itself. The languages are only symbolic gestures expressing that meaning. When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words. Thinking pictorially about the sensory world is a good preparation. Most people in the morning may think verbally something like "I need to make a breakfast". Instead, we can exercise to think that pictorially. We can imagine ourselves preparing the breakfast. It's the same meaning except that we think it in much more immediate and living forms.
Things become more challenging when we have to think about supersensible things. For example, the circle and the dot that Ashvin wrote about above is one such example. To understand that symbol doesn't mean to have some abstract theory. This symbol becomes alive when we live through the spiritual gestures of the most varied polar activities - expansion of attention - focusing of attention, sympathy - antipathy and so on. It's not about the dry concepts that we extract in this way - it is the living experience of our spiritual movements as we morph our being through these polarities. Then gradually the sum total of these movements begin to take holistic shape and we come to feel certain supersensible
axis of reality (axis not to be taken in purely spatial sense). We begin to sense the fundamental polarity of existence, which similar to the
two areas of the Mandelbrot set contain within themselves the infinite Time fractal of states of being.