Güney27 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 12:26 amHello Federica,Federica wrote: ↑Mon Jan 15, 2024 9:47 pmGüney27 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 15, 2024 6:41 pm
I made an interesting observation (at least for myself)
that I can concentrate more deeply when I connect thought concentration with my breathing.
I come to the point where my body feels more light and my thoughts become more intense easier.
I think the exercise posted by Cleric is from OMA (correct me if im wrong), he has given a couple of breathing exercises.
Does anyone else have made the same observation?
For my part, based on what I understand from Cleric, I try to stay away from any sort of momentum that would leverage breathing to effect thinking activity. I believe the exercise above was given as a sort of emergency technique, to use in situations when equanimity couldn't be maintained.
If our feelings are all over the place and our physical body is following behind them, upset, then we can use the exercise to harness our feeling situation by involving the body in the exercise, to reestablish balance. But in a context of peaceful soul, prepared for willed thinking activity, it's best to let thinking be as free as possible from the senses. At least that's how I understood it. Otherwise, taken to its extreme, one ends up going the kundalini way.
And as I recently read on Trees and Triads' Substack we can be fairly certain that kundalini is a type of pasta served with curry sauce
I don't try to manipulate my breathing, but to follow its natural course and then match my contrentration object with it.
Steiners gave his pupils breathing exercises too, like Omraam mikhaël aïvanhov and Daskalos.
But they critique certain forms of breathing exercises.
For example do you think that the exercise of breathing light (visualization of light connected with the breathing) would be harmful?
Why would OMA gave his pupils potential harmful exercises?
But I agree that it wouldn't be beneficial to do Wim hof type exercises.
Hey Güney,
I don't know the breathing light exercise. If you have a link at hand, I would like to read it. But I'm sure that, in the way it was given by OMA and Steiner (I don't know Daskalos), it is not harmful. Yet, there may ba a proper and an improper way to understand the instructions. Not saying that you are getting them wrong, of course.
However, in general, let's face it: there is always a possibility of potential harm, if exercises and instructions are not understood and applied wisely. Steiner has warned about these risks at various levels. I know OMA less, but I can imagine he also did it. In a way, it's a luck, because it means we are free, and we are adults. I would like to quote from Esoteric Lesson n. 19, GA 266:
Steiner wrote:An esoteric should realize what he is really doing with the exercises that are given to us. We've often mentioned that an esoteric is trying to loosen the etheric body and in general the four bodies from each other. This can happen in an esoteric and an exoteric way.
One can prepare the physical body sufficiently through diet, breathing exercises, etc. so that it ejects or squeezes out the etheric body. Our vegetarian way of living is basically intended to support the physical body in this striving. These are exoteric ways to loosen the bodies. The esoteric ones are our exercises. And here one has to say that the latter are the main thing. In our materialistic age many a materialist would gladly follow the most extensive dietary rules, would do breathing exercises for hours if he could attain something that way. To exert oneself spiritually is much more inconvenient, and here the spiritual inertia often becomes evident.
If we would squeeze out our etheric body by merely physical means the physical body couldn't give it anything to take with it, and it would go out into the unknown empty. Then states arise where for instance we can't grasp something with our thinking when we want to think it through. Our etheric brain can't use the physical one properly. It's as if we were swimming in water and wanted to grab something that kept on eluding us. Under such conditions a sensible esoteric will tell himself that he must first create order here through suitable willed concentrations and thought exercises. Even in normal development some things will arise of which we must tell ourselves that it's a temporary suffering. For through the pulling out of the etheric body and physical body undergoes something similar to a plant that has its sap withheld from it for awhile. It dries up. And although one doesn't see it physically, part of the physical body dries up and if it has predispositions for diseases, they appear. But if the etheric body has permeated itself rightly with spiritual truths it thereby receives new forces, and they have a healing effect on the physical body. One can observe that cuts and other wounds in the physical body heal more easily if the man permeates himself with spiritual truths or if he just lets the theosophical way of thinking work on him.
In other words - as Cleric and Ashvin have often described - we are aiming at the loosening of the etheric body from the physical. The etheric body, [Ben, you have wondered about that] among other things, keeps together and alive the physical elements of our physical body, making the difference between our body now, and our body as the decomposing corpse it will become in the future.
This means, as I understand it: we are trying to lift them apart from each other a little bit, so that they are not perfectly in the shadow of each other, and we can distinguish a little more clearly the etheric background of our spiritual activity from the normally perceived end-thought-images, coalescing at the surface level (brain) of our consciousness.
However, this process is potentially harmful. If you unstick ever so slightly the physical body from its etheric source of lifeblood, the physical will suffer. It will start to dry up, as Steiner says. It will be exposed to decomposing forces, to exaggerate a little.
So it's important to do this operation in controlled, willed way, initiating the process esoterically - from within sense-free thinking expansion - rather than forcing it from without, in unconsciousness, by altering the physical body, be it with breathing, drugs, hot baths, or any other external aids. In the former case, we are consciously driving the process, in the latter case we are enduring the same effect, but it falls on our head, so to say. Instead of taking the controlled path - we are awake in thinking, we can control and direct the transformation of our experience - we take the detour that goes through the mystery of the bodily will (remember, as Ashvin often say, at our present stage of human evolution, we are unconscious in Will, dreaming/half-conscious in Feeling, and fully awake only in Thinking).
This is also an answer to Soloma's:
It's not about frowning upon the use of aids. In a sense, we have to use aids, we have to eat, and we have to decide to navigate this and not that physical environmment with our body all the time, and our choices have more or less intense effects on our entire constitution. It's only about not relying primarily on unconscious bodily stimulation (unconscious in the way it works) to obtain spiritual results, because we risk not to understand them properly, or not at all. Former humans, at previous stages of evolution, did not have the awake state that we now have in our Thinking. They were dreaming allthroughout the spectrum of their becoming. Now we have this possiblity open for development. We are finally free to realize it, and that's where we should go. In this epoch, we are far from mastering from within the physical laws of transformation, and pass through walls, so we can only be innerly unconscious in those effects induced through physical aids.Soloma369 wrote: ↑Tue Jan 16, 2024 12:50 am ...I suspect the use of aids around here is frowned upon. Why I do not know, it did not hold me back from being lifted up by God back in October, to each their own of course. In other words, I found great benefit from the use of visualizing white light, both for relief of health issues as well as a way to trigger OBE.
As a rough metaphor, it's like those people who think they can get fit and improve their athletic performances using EMS (Electric Muscle Stimulation). Surely, the muscle mass will grow, but they won't 'know' how to use that extra energy potential in practice, when that power has not been obtained through actually developing the skill, exercising the athletic activity with full physical and intentional engagement.