Compilation of Exercises for the Exceptional State

[AshvinP]

I am starting a thread to share a preliminary compilation of exercises that have been developed on this forum for approaching and living in the 'exceptional state' - that is, the state where spiritual activity begins to observe and experience the full depth of its structure, beginning at the tip of our concentrated thinking. There are also many preparatory exercises for the control and enlivening of thinking, feeling, and will, such as those listed here and here. These are also critical to practice attentively so the tip of our concentration is put in the best position to invert through the 'pinhole of cognition' and allow the Spirit to incarnate in our lives, so we become a 'handmaid of the Lord'.





This compilation also fits very well with Scaligero's advice that Federica recently shared here.

Whoever does the exercise of concentration knows that. Let’s take this beautiful human specimen we have described, who holds everything in reflection. Let him do the exercise of concentration. At the beginning, it will work well for him, before a surprise attack by the adversarial forces strikes him. These beings are incredibly clever, but also, in a certain sense, naive. When someone all of a sudden initiates a certain activity, they are not prepared to block him, so at the beginning concentration works well. Then, as soon as the adversarial forces realize that he’s actively working at something specific, they do all in their power to impede him to pursue that work. That’s when concentration becomes difficult. As an aside, I would say that, when one experiences big difficulties, an advisable strategy is to change the type or form of exercise. It’s a good idea to tackle a different work, unplanned, if one is knowledgeable in a variety of exercises - our Doctor has provided many of them, indeed. Suddenly working with something that the adversarial forces don’t expect is an effective defense strategy. In this way, one can make progress. And once the enemies rewire their attack to hamper the new efforts, then one should come back to the initial exercises. You see, I am saying it rough and ready, but this is absolutely true. By the way, I can assure you that I never dare to offer technical advice without careful and precise consultation with our Doctor. You can have complete trust in that. End of side note.

In that sense, I propose to keep this topic as a sticky that people can visit often to refresh their palette of exercises to work with and add new ones, as they wish. Of course, a special thanks to Cleric for providing all of these great exercises out of his inspiration over the years! (there is only one triangle exercise from Steiner). I have taken the liberty to edit them in certain ways, mostly to constrict the length. I tried to start with the most preparatory ones first, but other than that, they are in no particular order. Plenty more can be added from this forum that are not included below and hopefully will be added in the coming days.

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Experiencing the layers of intuitive context

Zooming out: The totality of perceptual phenomena is relatively easy to grasp. Here’s a simple exercise to exemplify this. We can observe the way we move our focus through the forms in our visual field. But we can also try to ‘zoom out’ from any particular form and try to expand our focus and include as much as possible also of our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom even further out, while trying to include all other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state and finally we can include even the awareness that we’re doing this particular exercise. This is an easy and pleasant exercise and with little practice we’ll become so familiar with this expanded state of attention that we'll be able to move into it in one go, without having to build it up gradually.

Zooming in: Try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different periods of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, and learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way, only as background potential. Now let’s encompass the room we’re in with our sight. Notice how of the innumerable things that we know about everything, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, of all the places we have been, the knowing that we now experience has a completely specific timbre, we recognize it as we recognize the voice of a friend. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms. Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition and we now know what the object is.

Getting a feel for imaginative activity

For example, if we have to remember what we had for breakfast, we instinctively try to produce certain images of how our meal looked like, how it tasted and so on. Where do we draw these images from? It’s hard to tell because we don’t perceive the remembering process in the way we can see a book being taken off the library shelf. It’s simply something that lives in our intuitive orientation and we can distill it into concrete memory-thoughts.

...Let’s look more closely at our ability to remember things. Bring back again the memory image of your breakfast. Try to picture livingly the food on your plate and how you eat it, as if it is happening now. Now try to do the same but replace the food with something that you didn’t have. Keep switching back and forth between the two images to get a good feel for them. Then ask yourself what is different in one case and the other? How do you know that one image corresponds to the actual food you had, while the other is imagined?

If we introspect carefully, we’ll have to admit that the difference doesn’t lie in the perceptual qualities of the mental images. In general, the vividness with which we can remember something, is quite the same as the vividness with which we can imagine the food that we didn’t have. So the difference lies elsewhere. In both cases we do something with our spiritual activity in order to arrive at the images. When we remember things we not only summon a picture but we do so by instinctively seeking certain intuitive lawfulness. It’s not just any picture, it’s one that in a mysterious way feels to have some objective validity. On the other hand, when we summon pictures without any such concerns for validity, we call that simply fantasy. So we have something akin to two poles, two extremes of our imaginative activity. In fantasy we allow our images to flow in a completely unrestrained way. In remembering it is precisely the intuitive constraints that we care about. We don’t want to imagine just any picture, we seek the picture that fits harmoniously in our intuitive context.

***

"Let us suppose that we do not draw the triangle so that we simply say: Now I have drawn you a triangle, and here it is:





In that case the objection could always be raised that it is an acute-angled triangle; it is not a general triangle. The triangle can be drawn differently. Properly speaking it cannot, but we shall soon see how this “can” and “cannot” are related to one another. Let us take this triangle that we have here, and let us allow each side to move as it will in any direction, and moreover we allow it to move with varying speeds, so that next moment the sides take, e.g., these positions:





In short, we arrive at the uncomfortable notion of saying: I will not only draw a triangle and let it stay as it is, but I will make certain demands on your imagination. You must think to yourself that the sides of the triangle are in continual motion. When they are in motion, then out of the form of the movements there can arise simultaneously a right-angled, or an obtuse-angled triangle, or any other.

In this field, we can do and also require two different things. We can first make it all quite easy; we draw a triangle and have done with it. We know how it looks and we can rest comfortably in our thoughts, for we have got what we want. But we can also take the triangle as a starting point, and allow each side to move in various directions and at different speeds. In this case, it is not quite so easy; we have to carry out movements in our thought. But in this way we really do lay hold of the triangle in its general form; we fail to get there only if we are content with one triangle. The general thought, “triangle”, is there if we keep the thought in continual movement if we make it versatile."

Moving the ray of attention

Pick a random point, say, the corner of the table, and hold your attention still at it for a few seconds, then move to another point. It’s not important what the object is – it acts only as an anchor point. Try to feel the act of focusing your attention itself.

Then, after you get a good feel for this, try with eyes closed and focus your attention at random points. The eyes are closed only to avoid distractions, there’s no need to conceive of some parallel imaginary space or anything like that. You are in the same room space. Or think of it as, if instead of closing your eyes, the lights simply go down. Then you focus your attention in the space where, for example, the chair should be, the table, and so on. But this is only for reference. In reality, you need not try to imagine anything at the points of focus. At the center of the experiment is the very act of pointing your ray of attention at various points in space. You can also try something more advanced like smoothly moving the focus of your attention in circular, spiral, rectangular, etc. paths. Or the lemniscate we discussed before.

Now after you do this experiment, I guess you would agree that what you experience is not any thought/perception in the traditional sense. There isn’t any object that you try to focus on. No thought appears. All your experience is entirely within your willing of the movement of the focus of attention within empty space.

Undressing the layers of soul-life

To get into a position where we can address this topic we need to undress the layers of our soul life – our sensory perceptions, intellectual thinking, attraction, and repulsion of feelings. If modern man is to do this in meditation, there’ll be practically nothing left from our familiar conscious life. This is a state similar to the deepest dreamless sleep. Yet if we have worked to unite with the “I am” impulse, something remains in that state – the consciousness of willful becoming through time. Without uniting with this will, we can only remember that some duration of time has been experienced but with no continuity of our self-consciousness.

Let’s try to approach this through a mathematical example. We see a triangular form. It impresses as perception and evokes certain intuition – that of ‘triangle’. Then we can turn away from the perceptions and summon a memory image of the triangle. Now we’re doing elementary geometry, our geometric intuition is being expressed into a thought-image of our own making. Here we already have something analogous to Imaginative cognition. The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless. It consists of timeless relations. They have temporal character only insofar as we need to serialize these relations in thoughts. For example, when we think of the natural numbers, they are not subject to time. We need time to count through them but their relations are something timeless. Two is always between one and three – this is an eternal relation. This has nothing to do with Platonism. There’s no need to fantasize mathematical intuition as some exotic metaphysical realm. It is a simple fact of experience – when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts. Because of this frozen nature of mathematical intuition, when we’re thinking math we’re always alone. It is as if we walk through a frosty kingdom and any movement that we sense can only be our own, reflected in the ice crystals. The difference with Imagination in the wider sense is that in the latter we no longer feel alone. The reflections in our imaginative pictures are not only of our own movement but also of a kingdom teeming with life. It is as if we’re expressing in images intuitive life that continually changes underneath us on its own accord.

The next step is to turn attention to what we’re doing when we think the mathematical thought-images. For example, if we take the triangle, we can try to visualize it as if we trace its edges with our ray of imagination, as if it is the tip of a pencil. When we become familiar with this activity we can try to disregard the imaginative element and focus entirely on the experience of how we will our thinking gestures. It’s no longer about how our thinking gestures are perceived in imagination but how it feels to be the active force that propels them. This gives us a hint about Inspirative cognition, where we live not in images of the living kingdom but in the interference of thinking gestures that impresses in the images.

Finally, we need to relinquish even our thinking gesticulation and remain in the pure intuitive meaning of the triangle. This is exceedingly difficult to do without practice but in the end, the idea of triangle becomes the intuitive form of our “I”. We always live in such intuitions. They are present all the time as our intuitive background, as the meaningful context which gives us the feeling that our reality ‘makes sense’ and that we have a certain sense of orientation within it. To reach Intuitive cognition is to live entirely within this intuitive context, which is identical to our sense of what we are as a spiritual being. So when we think ‘triangle’, this is normally convoluted in several layers of inner life – the perception, the image, the thinking gesture – yet our sense of being is actually identical with the intuition of a triangle that we currently think.

When we live in Intuitive cognition, we are not focused on images, there’s no movement of thoughts, no pushes and pulls of sympathies and antipathies, but only the intuitive awareness of our being’s becoming. Someone may imagine that what is thus described is identical to the mystic’s pure awareness but there’s one great difference – the latter lacks the awareness of being one with the intuitive intent that metamorphoses the state. Without this, such a state is felt to border on the absolute nothingness, where all existence sinks into oblivion. Only through the union with the “I am” force, we can exist in that nothingness because through that force the intuition of our existence is being continually recreated as a fiery phoenix.

The 'law' of shrinking

Meditation is really connected with the law of ‘shrinking’. If we go in the woods with a ball gown, we’ll get tangled in every branch and shrub. Similarly, while we have our inner authority spread over all phenomena, we get tangled in everything. The solution is to grow small. When we relax the moles in the periphery, they don’t tangle in our gown as much. This has nothing to do with the 'letting go' through which we become susceptible to hypnotic states. We only temporarily entrust our periphery to higher powers, while we concentrate in a tiny spot in the head that is mole free, like the eye of a hurricane.

If moles keep coming up even then, we simply need to be patient and keep going. This is a process that takes time. It’s not that easy to relax the fabric layers of our gown. Moles grow to titanic dimensions in respect to us yet we now easily pass through their 'intermolecular spaces', just like two galaxies collide, yet no stars ever hit each other. Of course, all these references to scale and size shouldn't be taken in rigid spatial sense. We need to extract the living qualities from these concepts.

...Through the law of shrinking, we come to feel in a similar way also about our intellectual life. Every thought is like a being for which we can write a biography. It is born in certain circumstances, it can only be what it is because of its specific context. Where did the words that we use to express the thought come from? How did we learn about the concepts? Just like the substances of our body, our intellectual life wouldn’t be what it is if all the Cosmic factors were not in this specific constellation. And here we should give credit to the materialist because in that respect he is much more realistic than most spiritually inclined people who say ‘consciousness’ and imply some top-level mystery, of which nothing more can be known.

The shrinking leads us to see our inner and outer environment as sacred space, where many beings contribute, just like our parents, all the animals, plants, and minerals that we have ingested and all the people who have provided us with them, play some part in our body. Then we loosen our desire to draw a circle and say “mine” but instead we see our spiritual activity as the force that intently steers our becoming through the collective sacred space. It’s clear that we can move in that direction only when we give way to the impulse of Love.

Experiencing the true temporal 'law' of intuitive activity

Imagine a fly and how difficult it is to catch it. Why is that? You experience a sequence of ‘frames’ of existence. Each frame has the fly at a different position. You may be able to anticipate to some extent the fly’s movement but as a whole, in your consciousness, you don’t have any knowledge of how your perceptions of the fly are going to move. The fly's movements are quite erratic and keep surprising you.

Science seeks mathematical laws of physics that can be used to calculate how frames should evolve in time. But still, this gives us only a prediction. We have learned to mimic Nature’s appearances through mathematical art within our minds but the true essence of Nature still remains on the ‘other side’ of our consciousness. 

Now take an imaginary fly and move it around in your imagination. Try to compare how it feels in relation to a real fly. Can the motions of your ray of attention that animate the imaginary fly ‘surprise’ you in the way a real fly can, even if you make it very erratic? Can you 'miss' your ray of attention? It is really a very simple thing to observe yet today’s science and philosophy don’t pay attention to such things because it is considered ‘subjective’ and it is dismissed that it may have something to do with reality as a whole. So basically science searches for the laws of time mirrored in our intellectual formulas. What is suggested here is that the actual laws that govern the transformation of the flow of experience are of thought-nature. So very crudely speaking, if we expand our consciousness to merge with the forces that animate the fly, its movements will no longer ‘surprise’ us but will be felt as if we are one with the intuitive activity that thinks its movement.

Kinesthetic awareness of intuitive thinking gestures

Our imagining activity is still largely coupled with our physical eyes. We can actually notice this if we pay attention. When we imagine that we’re seeing the thought-image, our physical eyes indeed move as if they focus at a point in space. Put your finger at some distance in front of you and focus on its tip. Then slowly move it towards the base of the nose while trying to keep focus. As you get closer, your eyes begin to cross. At some point it becomes so uncomfortable that you simply give up – the eyes relax and look forward. Yet you still have a kind of kinesthetic awareness of where the tip of your finger is. This is pretty much what happens when we work with a thought-image (you can imagine your finger or even simply a point). We place it at some distance in front of us and slowly begin to move it closer. We’ll almost certainly feel that even though it’s only an imagined point, our physical eyes still try to follow it. Then we come to the point where our eyes strain as they cross. Then we give up and the eyes relax forward. Now we don’t see the thought-image in the traditional sense – and this is precisely the point! It’s rather that we now live in something akin to mental kinesthetic awareness of what we do with our thinking. Imagine you’re doing a yogic asana. You don’t need to stand behind yourself in order to see your body from a comfortable distance. Instead, you live in the kinesthetic sense of your body. It surrounds you and fills your consciousness. We don’t need to see our body – our inner experience of it gives a much richer awareness of its configuration. Similarly, our meditative concentration is like a spiritual asana – we assume a certain shape with our thinking gesture. We don’t try to see it from the side but feel its inner form.

This is probably most easy to approach by taking a simple geometric form, like a cube or a sphere. It might be easier if we first imagine it to be larger than us, as if we’re in the center of a room. Instead of imagining it visually, we can trace its edges with our imaginary fingers. In this way, we get a kinesthetic feeling for the cubic shape (something like an afterglow of the kinesthetic feel of our imaginary hands). Then we can shrink that mental kinesthetic feeling towards the head region. At some point, it will feel as if it becomes smaller than us. Through several iterations back and forth (growing and shrinking) we can find the sweet spot balance where we’re of identical size with the cube – that is, the cube is the form of our kinesthetic imagination! The face and eyes should be completely relaxed, we’re not ‘looking’ but experiencing the shape of our imagination. In a certain sense, the cube should disappear. If we feel as if we perceive it, then it means we're 'here' the cube is 'there' – there's polarization. The whole goal is to find the point where our thinking gestures are tightly clothed in the imaginative ‘substance’, similarly to the way our will is clothed in the kinesthetic sensations when doing yogic asanas. 

Centering in Space (see also above)

We can take the finding of the weightless point as finding our center in space. It’s important to realize that at this spot our invisible vantage point and our point of focus merge. Because of our sensory habits, when we think spatially we feel ourselves to be at a certain point and looking at another point.





So we have two different cases when we seek the weightless point. In one case we feel that we look at the thought-image in the point in the head, yet our ‘camera’ is slightly behind. The other case is when we feel our vantage point to be at the point but we look at a thought-image that we feel to be at a distance in space. In time, these two points both come closer and closer together at the spot in the head. Now the thought-image is no longer something that we keep at safe distance but feels as it has become our environment, as if we’re clothed in a thought-body. This is also why we need the shrinking. Normally we like to feel larger than our thoughts, as a great container, with the camera at the periphery and only looking at the tiny thought marbles below. 

...This shortening of the distance between the camera and the thought-image is related to the balancing of the two petal flower in the head, or the two brain hemispheres. We can say that in this way we fold the spatial intellect. In a certain sense, our spiritual activity finds its bearings in space.

Centering in Time

Let’s think of a clock. We have the hour, the minute and the seconds arrows. They are turning in exact ratios based on the gears. We can imagine a clock with many more arrows.



They rotate like concentric dials in certain ratios. As in the Time-Consciousness essay, we can move from this sensory picture into our inner sense of time. In regards to our sensory environment, we have certain intuitive spatial orientation. We intuitively understand how we’re placed in our room, how we can employ our will to move around, how this room is placed in the whole building, which is in a certain place on Earth and so on. We can easily picture this spatial hierarchy and we feel this intuitive orientation. It is like our imagination fills the spatial world, we feel its continuity and lawfulness.

We also have temporal orientation but it is much more problematic because we have our perceptions only ‘a frame at a time’ and we understand time only as far as we intuit the continuity of the metamorphoses of the frames. So besides our momentary perceptions, we have in addition also memory images of past frames and thought-images of potential future frames. Yet there’s something more than simply the images. Otherwise, we would still feel them as belonging to the momentary perceptions, they would simply seem like a kind of ‘double-vision’ – we’re perceiving more than one image at the same time. What gives these images their special character is that they are united with temporal intuition. Just like we have an intuitive understanding of distance (we have some sense of how many steps it will take to get to the bathroom) so we have this sense of duration, we feel how much conscious experiences we’ll have to endure before the frame where we’re eating our dinner becomes our present.

So the classical clock with different arrows utilizes this sense of duration. We have a certain temporal intuition of how much we must endure for the seconds arrow to make a revolution. Now we can move away from the mechanical clock and realize that our inner life already presents us with such an inner clock. We simply need to make an attempt to grasp the metamorphoses of our inner states in the course of a day. They are contextual, just like the arrows of the clock. Our day goes through certain phases of our daily rhythms, which are composed of more detailed tasks and so on, until we get to the point of our flow of momentary perceptions and thoughts.

...We can picture these rhythms as the rotations of the clock arrows. Again – not as some abstract entities but only as symbols for our direct temporal intuition. A slower arrow may correspond to our changing moods, a faster arrow is the overall intuition of the daily tasks, an even faster arrow is the concrete thoughts and perceptions within the context of that task, and so on. We simply need to get a feeling for that contextual character of our temporal intuition. Usually, we do that only for the flattened sense of duration, such as when we think about days, weeks, months, years, but in our case, we need to livingly picture the transformations through which our states will go along that duration. Even if we can’t see the Sun and judge the time of year by the seasons, we still can judge time by the inner seasons through which we have gone. Some parts of our life are marked with certain interests, goals, then they change and so on.

In general, our inner flow doesn’t run very smoothly. In a clock the arrows rotate in precise ratios but in our inner life, it is as if these arrows constantly push in different directions. We only need to throw a glance over our hectic daily rhythms to convince ourselves that our thoughts, feelings and actions are all running quite out of sync. Our will is more or less anchored within the present frame but even here we can feel that we’re often trying to rush. Sometimes we can sense how when we walk our torso tries to move faster than our feet. In our feelings, we have greater freedom but we’re still anchored in certain moods and emotions. Yet we seem to move more freely through that past sad moment or that anticipated joyful one. In our thoughts, we’re most free. In one moment we can think of our birth, in the next about the moment we’ll release the bodily spectrum. But this differentiation is only one aspect. For example, we can’t literally think anything we want. Our thinking context (concepts and ideas) also develops through very long rhythms.

Centering in Time (2)

To find the origin in time we have to go in three steps.

1. We take the clock dial of thinking. We begin to rotate left and right. We think about what we did few minutes ago, we think about we’ll be doing a few minutes from now. We think about yesterday, about tomorrow, about birth, about death, about the beginning of the world, about its end. We can fly through time effortlessly in thought. As we feel the spring tension to left and right, past and future, we gradually feel the neutral now.

2. We take the dial of feeling. When we turn to the past, in the broadest sense we have positive and negative feelings. We feel nostalgia for what was good or regret for what went bad. For the future we feel either joyful anticipation – the things that we ‘can’t wait’ to come – or anxiety and fear. When we release the tension of the springs to the center, we find gratitude. This may sound strange at first but I hope everything said above gives proper context. We are grateful for the flow of time, for everything that continually incarnates in us and resurrects us to a richer life. The dial of feelings is more inert to move.

3. Then we take the dial of bodily will. Here we don’t have much to do because we can’t really will in the future and past. This dial is very heavy. All we need is simply bring to consciousness our present bodily life. I’m not conclusive about this but so far it seems that I can very easily center in the present bodily state if I focus on the sense of weight. Just feel how our body presses against whatever we’re sitting, how our organs themselves press into each other down. It’s very interesting that it’s almost impossible to have memory of weight. If we try to remember that bench press in the fitness, we can see the image, we can feel the exertion but in a certain sense, we live as a movie actor that lifts phony weights. In a way we have to pretend in our memory that we’re lifting a heavy weight. We can very easily modify the imagination and lift the weight with one hand, then throw it around, and balance it on our finger. The true drag of gravity we feel only in the present. Other senses seem to me more similar to the corresponding memory images. So an easy way to find the origin of our bodily will is to simply feel our weight and how with our will we have to overcome it.

...Once we have found the spatial center and the three temporal centers, we try to put them on the same axis passing through the center of space and try to keep things stable while time flows. The dials have their natural rotations in time and they spin with different ratios but we have to bring them to a musical chord... This exercise is not the end, it is only the beginning. When we have the origin and can sustain centered space and musical rotation of time, we begin to grasp much more clearly the incarnating flow of our being. We begin to sense peripheral discs of time that we haven’t suspected could exist.





Slowing down to experience textured intuitive activity 
 
Usually, things happen too fast to discern. We see only a lightning bolt. But when seen in slow motion as above, it’s a two-stage process where first the so-called lightning leaders ‘feel’ the environment and once a path for the charge is found, the main plasma channel forms.




We strive for something similar in meditation. Think of an ice hockey match on TV. It’s very difficult to trace the puck. One moment the player hits the puck with the stick, and the next moment we look on the other side to see whether a goal was scored. There’s an interruption from our perspective. So we strive for two things:

1/ We strive to slow down the whole process
2/ We strive for uninterrupted perception of the process

...

Now 2/ is relatively easier to grasp. We understand what it means to focus our perception on something as if we don’t want to skip a beat. We try to keep laser sharp focus in such a way that whatever happens, there should be no chance we can miss it. If our sight strays even for a split second, we may miss that which we were looking for. It is interesting to observe this focused perception when we contemplate the Sunrise and we try to catch the first ray. We don’t know with full precision when the first ray will appear so we look with all our attentiveness at the brightest spot of the horizon. If our gaze gets distracted even for a moment, when we return our gaze we may see that we have missed the moment – the first ray is already shining.

1/ is not that clear. At first, this seems like science fiction, how can one slow down time? But things become much more clear when we remember that we’re observing our thinking, so it is thinking that we must slow down.

Let’s consider the verbal thought “I think these words”. When glanced over superficially, these are just like any other written word. Even if we verbalized them while reading, they still sound not that different from “Johnny went playing”. But things become much different when we in fact try to think these words in such a way that we fully experience their meaning.

This meaning is of a quite different kind compared to “Johnny went playing”. It is a real-time testimony of our intimate spiritual activity. Let’s look at the two parts of the sentence.

“These words” refers to the inner perception of our thinking voice. We indeed hear our voice in our mind. “I think” refers to the fact that our thinking process recognizes itself in the words. We don’t care about any metaphysical speculations about what an “I” is. In this direct experience, the word “I” is only a symbol for self-reference. It simply means that we intuitively feel to be one with the cause of the word perceptions.

For some, such an experience can be disturbing at first. In the sensory spectrum, we have Eisoptrophobia (fear of seeing one’s own reflection in a mirror). Our inner words are like mirrors of our spiritual activity, so similar fear is possible. But gradually we can learn to not so much seek our image in the words but rather to know our degrees of freedom. Non-dualists are right in this that the image that we create for ourselves is quite illusionary. The true self-image comes not from what we think about our Earthly character but from clear experience of how and what we think, feel, and do.

Now the two parts of the sentence have to become concentric, so to speak – the auditory perception of the words and the intuition that the words are being thought. In other words, this intuition should be present throughout the whole time while our words sound. This is most easily achievable when we try to slow down the whole process.

...

In this experiment, we begin to think in ‘slow-motion’ the words “I think these words” while trying to feel them as a fitting glove for our intuitive activity. Gradually the words should become much ‘larger’ than what normally fits in our temporal aperture. Instead of verbal pebbles that we contain in our mind, they become like scenes of a theatrical play that we move through. It is important to note that here thinking in ‘slow motion’ doesn’t mean that our cognition becomes sluggish and drowsy. Instead, we should feel how we’re creatively active in every curve of the sounds, in the way they morph into each other. Like the lightning above, we should feel that slowing down allows us to experience our voice in higher resolution, it’s like zooming into a highly detailed experience which in our normal thinking is barely noticed. Thus our activity should feel quite intense. Slowing down doesn’t mean to speak the words at greater intervals, like “I… think… these… words”. No, the sounds themselves have to be spoken in slow-motion, they have to be stretched in time. We shouldn’t try to encompass the whole sentence. As said, we should feel as if somewhere along a theatrical play, fully engaged in the current act.

Then we continue to repeat the words more and more slowly. Finally, we stretch them so much that they become like a very long single tone. For example, when we start with the “I” (aye), we basically hold ‘aaaaaaa’, without reaching ‘ye’. Then the sound should become softer and softer until we barely hear our thinking voice. It’s like softening our real voice until it becomes whispering and then even further until we only have the movement of our breath. So we have stretched our words to such an extent that we now live not in vibrating sound but only the smooth flow of our thinking-breath. Since this is now a laminar flow, we can basically say that we’re in a state of concentration. Concentration doesn’t mean freezing. Probably the best example is the waterfall. Its ‘concentrated’ image looks like a static column. Yet the water is constantly replenished. Similarly, when we stretch our words to such an extent, we remain with our laminar thinking-breath. Our thinking form is concentrated but we live in the intuition that we’re continually replenishing that form through time with our thinking-will. Thus our intuition that we’re thinking the words is still valid, except that the words’ vibrations have been stretched to laminar flow of thinking-breath. It’s very good if we succeed to feel this softening of the sound and attaining to that smooth and laminar thinking flow.

Incarnating the higher thinking organism via Time

This is an interesting exercise to try out. We can spread our hand and hold visual and kinesthetic focus on the tips of individual fingers. We hold focus for some time and switch to another finger. Now what if we want to feel all fingers simultaneously? If we know nothing else, we may try to switch our focus faster and faster between fingers as if to blur together their sensations. This however doesn’t feel satisfactory. The natural way is to focus and feel our whole hand. Notice that this is not simply the mechanical sum of the sensations of the individual fingers. The feeling of a hand is a unique sensation in itself, yet the kinesthetic feeling of the fingers seems to be embedded in it.

In a similar way, many of the things that we understand in the course of inner development are the result of actual changes in our inner organization. Some descriptions may seem logical but they can’t be grasped as a whole. Blurring them together by thinking them faster and faster in sequence doesn’t help. Our thinking organ has to grow a ‘hand’. Then we say “now I see!”
...Here’s where our present mindset becomes conflicted. We believe that the solution is in front of us, within the puzzle pieces and we simply need more time to experiment with their combinations until we find the one that clicks. To grow the hand, however, we need more of a different kind of time. Here it is really a problem with our present civilization and we’re all affected.

The missing understanding is directly contained in the intuition that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Yet we’re not clear how the whole comes about. In truth, this whole continually incarnates in us. Think about it. Even one minute from now, you’ll be a being that knows a tiny bit more than what you know now – even if this knowledge is merely the fact that you have existed for one more minute. In this sense, our thinking should be seen as a two-fold process. On one hand, we exert ourselves to focus on the fingers one by one. Yet no matter how fast we switch, we can’t get a feeling for the hand. So we need the second part – to realize that our thinking of the fingers really prepares the body into which the whole hand can incarnate.

[Güney27]

Thank you for the effort Ashvin.
It is very helpful, to have such an overview.

[AshvinP]

'Smooth Pursuit' Concentration

In the last decades, humans have been forced to use their senses and cognition in ways that were nonexistent before. Today we browse with a few open tabs, constantly switch between them, respond to emails, check social media, and so on. If we observe ourselves in these daily routines, we can see how hectic and erratic our cognitive activity is. When this is combined with emotional stress, always in a hurry, chasing deadlines, etc., we're like a person whose feet run faster than the torso can follow or vice versa. Our thinking-feeling-will rhythms are out of harmony. I have always struggled with this myself. 

But there's a simple way to work on these tendencies: slow down! It is actually quite easy to discern at the purely logical level that the time we lose in constant jumping of attention, losing track, starting over, etc. is more than the time it will take us if we simply slow down.

Of course, in our times where we're drowning in information, it is indispensable that we can also filter. So it is useful to be able to 'diagonal read' an article or forum post just to catch if there's something of interest. Yet if we decide to read it from beginning to end and we find that we're jumping around a lot, it's worth trying to slow down.

This slowing down has to be accompanied by a certain smoothness and fluidity. We can connect this directly with the two kinds of eye movements: Saccadic and Smooth Pursuit (check out the videos below). When in the hurry of our daily rhythm, our eyes move primarily in saccades and we can sense this by the way our visual focus jumps around the text. This can be counterbalanced by slowing down our breathing or even holding it for a while. Then we can try to focus our gaze at the beginning of the sentence and then start reading smoothly, moving the gaze only in one direction and reading the words clearly. If we're still erratic - slow down even more. Our business mind will rebel that we're wasting time but we have to reach the point where we can move our reading gaze smoothly without interruption, as if we move a pencil and want to draw a nice continuous line. We may have to slow down so much that it is really impractical, but even if we read in that way only one or two sentences, we'll still attain something for the transformation of our habits. 


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_pursuit

All of this is directly related to our cognitive life and these skills translate in a very interesting way to our meditative time. The ordinary beta brainwave rhythm of modern man is tightly related to the saccadic movement of the eyes. When we have trouble calming down and concentrating, we'll almost surely find out that our eyes are constantly moving much like in the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep state. Even though we may not be looking at anything outside, the eyes still follow our attention as they move in saccadic patterns through our thoughts and imagination.

Considerations like these only remind us that we can't that easily separate our soul states from the bodily context. When that separation happens, we can easily convince ourselves that our inner state is highly spiritual while we're completely oblivious to the ways that inner state is shaped by the other layers of biology and physiology (as it happens in psychedelic and superficial mystical states). It is true that our real focus in modern meditation has to be led into the point of spiritual activity, but our bodily state is also important because it shapes our context. Otherwise, we're like someone who can't meditate because of a toothache but is so fixated on his effort that he doesn't recognize the source of the problem. Likewise, we can benefit if, at the start of meditation, we relax our physical eyes (and the rest of the body). Then we can slow down and work with our thinking activity in such a way that all our inner movements become like the 'smooth pursuit'.

***

Another means of deepening the will entails bringing special attention to the normal actions of daily life. In the world of Buddhist mindfulness, Jon Kabat Zinn has made popular the conscious eating of a single raisin. Such attention can be given to any action we choose. So choose something: a short walk across the room, the drinking of your morning coffee, or the weeding of a single flowering rosebush. Slow the pace; attend to each intention and subsequent action. “Soften” the will so you enact each phase of the journey with receptivity. The world works back on you with each action of your own. Imagine that your work is part of a sacred ritual that is unknown to others, but which completes a large ceremonial composition. You morning coffee becomes a Japanese tea ceremony, your weeding a holy trust to care to the Earth. Each act is infused with artistry and meaning by being caught up in the imaginal, in story or myth.

A firm will is remarkably efficacious and can overcome apparently insurmountable adversity. The stories that most inspire are often those of human achievement against great odds, for example Helen Keller, who overcame blindness and deafness, or Ernest Shackleton, who led his crewmen to safety through seas of Antarctica and severe weather when all seemed lost, or Lance Armstrong, who overcame cancer and won the Tour de France seven times. Mahatma Gandhi observed that “Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.” Yet the will, like thinking, requires schooling. Starting with small, simple exercises and practicing them faithfully can help enormously to strengthen one's resolve. Having practiced daily, when a firm resolve is required later we can be surprised at how deep the reservoir has become.

Zajonc, Arthur. Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love

***

Sometimes, after a more turbulent day, it might be difficult to concentrate right away. We can try the following.

With eyes closed, we simply move the focus of attention in figure ∞ around our eyes. It is as if we trace the frames of glasses shaped as a lemniscate.





This could be easier than immediate concentration, because the moving focus is more engaging for the intellect, so it may be easier to avoid distractions.

The more smoothly and uninterruptedly (without lifting the pen of attention) we can do this, the better. We may notice that we have the tendency to 'toss' our attention from one end to the other. This should be avoided. Instead, we need to feel our activity as the firm (without any slack) driving force of attention at any point along the path. Then from time to time we can stop at the crossing point and stay still for a while.

When the inner state is turbulent, concentration feels as if placed within boiling inner phenomena. Distractions pull us in all directions quite chaotically. When we move our focus of attention in the described way, it is as if we instill a certain order, as if we are ‘combing’ the imaginative streams in the head. Then when we stop at the crossing point distractions will come again but they may feel differently, more like smoother waves.

When we have some sense of this inner flow we may try an interesting extension to the exercise. We anchor our attention at the crossing point and do the movement only with fluid-like peripheral flow. This may feel impossible at first. It seems that we can't have our attention firmly anchored and yet do things with its periphery without our focus moving there, yet gradually we can learn to do it. The center point may not be perfectly stable it may nudge with the peripheral flow but the experience is unmistakable. This can actually give us some sense of the nature of the Imaginative state because in that state our ordinary attention is firmly anchored in the center of our Mandalic experience, yet the intuitive panorama of soul phenomena is grasped precisely through the way our expanded periphery of thinking attention moves.

[AshvinP]

Feeling the difference between Thinking and Thinking + Willing

An important distinction that we should make is that in the imagined hammer we're working entirely in the domain of Thought. When we lift the hammer with our arm we also activate our Will. The reader may take few seconds to feel the difference. Try to imagine moving your hand as vividly as possible. Wave it around, spread your fingers, clench them in a fist. Now repeat the exercise but also activate the Will - make actual movements with the hand. Do this as many times as needed in order to get a good feel for the imagined and the actual willed movement.

So the difference between the two hammers is really the difference between how we transform our conscious state through Thinking alone and how we transform it through Thinking+Willing (things are more complicated than this. Even Thinking is Willed but let's keep it simple here. With Will here we refer exclusively to bodily will). With Will we always feel that we're diving into something much deeper and unknown than the surface where our awake Thinking lives. Most of the attacks on Idealism are based on the impression that Idealism claims that reality is made only of the Thinking layer. And there really are schools which present things in this way. I have personally criticized many times the superficial (flat) mysticism which presents reality as a thin dream picture. This results when there's no proper understanding of the mysterious Will.

These things are really not very well understood even among Idealists. If everything is of purely thought nature why can't we imagine the world in any way we like? This is a strange paradox for flat mysticism, which then goes on to invent convoluted mechanisms of dissociation, veiling and what not. There's no need to invent anything. We must simply investigate what is there in the given. If we observe objectively and without preconceived ideas we'll recognize three main forms of inner activity - Thinking, Feeling, Willing. Arranged in this way we go from thinking, where we're fully conscious, towards feeling, which becomes much more nebulous and slippery, and finally to willing, where everything sinks in deep mystery. Here one might wonder what's so mysterious about will. I've given this example many times: it's enough to imagine paralyzed limb in order to distinguish (like the exercise above) our willing intent from the actual perception of movement. We simply don't have control, neither we know what is happening between our conscious intent and the perception. It is as if our conscious intent sinks into mysterious depths and as a result we see movement. If our limb is paralyzed we send the same conscious intent, it sinks in the depths but nothing echoes back.


Focusing spiritual activity through vowel perceptions

Let's experiment with vowels. The goal will be to produce vowels - a, e, o, u, i - while freely morphing between them. For example, we start with 'a' and smoothly morph into 'e' - aaaaaeaaaeeaaeeeaeeeeee. It's advisable that we first warm up with producing the sounds with our physical voice. We take a deep breath and begin slowly and smoothly morphing among random vowels in one continuous sound until we run out of air. After we get used to it, we continue the exercise but now with producing the sounds in our mind only.

There's very interesting difference when we do the exercise in our mind only - we can do it indefinitely - we never run out of air! The voice in our mind is independent of breathing (well, there's still relation but it will go well beyond the scope of this post to go into that). As a matter of fact it might be interesting to experiment also without breathing - we take a deep breath, hold it and begin producing the thought-sounds. We can't produce physical sound without passing air through the larynx but we certainly can in our mind. The reader may find that it is easier to focus when the breath is held (breathing may act as source of distraction). After we get the hang out of it we can breathe normally and hold the sound as long as possible. If we can morph the sound continuously, without any interruption, without any distraction, for about half a minute, that is actually pretty good. But even if we can keep it for much less, there's no need to be discouraged - even ten seconds can be enough if we do it with the needed concentration and intensity.

The goal of this exercise is to experience our thinking spiritual activity as clearly as possible. Yes, even producing a morphing sound can be considered a form of thinking. When we produce the sound we do that with our inner voice, the same one we use to think with verbal words. The most important thing is to feel as tightly as possible how it is through our own activity that the morphing of the sound is accomplished. The sound should feel as continuous, gradual morphing. The slower we do it, the better we can feel it. The sound should be an expression of our thinking will, of our innermost being. We should resist the temptation to split from the act of sound producing and observe it from the side or think about it. The goal is to fully engage precisely this voice which has the tendency to move in the background and imperceptibly comment on conscious phenomena as a bystander. We need to gather all the forces of this bystander and project them into the sound. We should feel this act as giving us inner stability, as if our sound producing activity finds its stable center in the sound perception. The center where the sound is focused at should be felt in the head region. As long as we're being drawn away from that center, the concentration is not yet as it should be. When our activity meets the sound in the right way, we feel very characteristic stability, almost as if a key fits a lock.

[AshvinP]

Cultivating pictorial thinking

So it's not about simply abandoning verbal thinking but uniting its hierarchical structure of meaning with pictorial thinking. The first step would be to simply relearn how to think pictorially, even if somewhat flatly. For example, you may have some plans for tonight. Usually we think verbally "When I get home I'll do this, I'll read that" and so on. You can try to make these plans entirely pictorially. Just picture yourself doing what you intend to do. It doesn't have to be vivid picture, but it must engage your full-body and senses imagination.

Probably it won't be immediately easy, you may find yourself 'commenting' on everything you imagine. That's OK. With little practice you'll see how you can pictorially imagine whole episodes of activities without having to utter a word. All the meaning that you intend is already reflected in the images. If you find that you think verbally, don't get frustrated but simply take what you just verbally thought and say "OK, let's see how that thought could be expressed in a completely pictorial way."

The important thing is that you can be fully creative in this pictorial flow. The spiritual activity that we employ in the flow of pictures is of the same essence as that which flows into words. We are only channeling it differently. In verbal thinking we channel it mainly through the etheric larynx. In full-body imagination we engage the full spectrum.

For example, we can take a single thought that we first express verbally - "I'm taking the cup from the table". If we observe closely we hear that thought in the head area (since this is where normally our sense of hearing is experienced) but if we are very observant we may sense how we very subtly speak the words as if through our larynx. The next step could to imagine only visually that we take the cup, only as a picture. And in the next step we can try to imagine clearly also the movement of our arm as kinesthetic feeling, how we have to overcome its weight, how we feel its position in space as it extends, how the weight of the cup is added and so on.

[AshvinP]

Tracing the direct experience to which "I" refers

We can't hope to penetrate into the intimate nature of thinking if we are unable to distinguish thinking from language or in other words concept from thought-perception. Probably the easiest way to make this distinction is by thinking about a concept in different languages. Let's take the word "red" - rojo (Spanish), rouge (French), rot (German), okubomvu (Zulu). We can turn this into a meditative exercise. We can pronounce in our mind these words and observe the meaning, the concept that we experience. We can only claim to make the distinction between the concept and the word (the thought-perception), if nothing changes in the meaning that we experience while switching the words. The words should carry the same concept, the same meaning. This may look like a childish exercise but it is tremendously effective. We can never advance in our comprehension of thinking if we can't clearly distinguish concept from percept.

The next step is to observe that the original concept of red was discovered by us (probably in childhood) by experiencing it in relation to the visual perception of red. Only when we have experienced the concept, we can incarnate it in different words, symbols, etc. Then we can say that we have abstracted out the concept. We can now think about the concept of red even in the absence of the actual color perception.

What I tried to show in the previous post was that the word "I" emerges in the very same way - thinking attaches a word to direct experience. We must be perfectly clear that the "I", as far as it is something that we think about, is a concept. But this concept originally emerges in relation to a real experience, just as the concept of red emerges in relation to the color experience. Then, just as the word "red" is only a though-perception of the concept, so is the word "I". We can doubt the usage of the word "I" only when we lose sight of the experience that motivated the use of the word in the first place.

For example, when I say "red" I'm thinking about the living, direct experience but someone else might be experiencing the idea of photons with a certain frequency... There are so many layers of abstraction between the concept of photon and the experience of red, that we simply have no justification to speak of any "reality". It is the same with the pronoun "I". At the moment we begin to presuppose different things, like neurons, "I" as some metaphysical thing in itself, we are really entering speculation. We can speak of reality only when thinking connects concepts to actual, direct experiences.

...

Let's see how this observation can be made with another simple exercise. We can form a thought, for example - a fiery ball. It's not about visualization, it's not needed to have any inner imagery. The most important thing is to have the clear concept, the understanding that we're holding a fireball in our focus, even if we don't see anything visually. And that's all. We simply concentrate our activity on this single thought for as long as possible. We are doing it willfully - that is, we do not dissociate from the thought and say "This fiery ball is there on its own, there's no one imagining it". On the contrary, we aim to experience as clearly as possible how we, through our own effort, make the ball shine. To make the exercise even more intense, we can try to make the ball brighter and brighter, as if by willing more and more strongly.

Note that, even though we speak above as "we will", there's absolutely no need to form any picture of an "I" whatsoever. It is a pure experience, there's only one thought - the fiery ball, we don't think about ourselves, we think the fireball.

Gradually we can distinguish, even without thinking about it, the experience of the will and the experience of the thought-perception. We experience how we are willing the thought. These are two things. It's not something that we fantasize, they are clearly distinguishable qualities of the experience.

Let's now meta-observe what we are doing. If expressed as a thought it can sound as "I think the fireball". And here's the most crucial observation that we can make. Only in the above way it is possible to experience the meaning "I think the fireball" and at the same time keep willing the fireball. It is very important that one gets a living experience of this. If we are able to experience it the right way, we can feel that our meta meaning in no way interferes with the willing experience of the fireball. It only adds denser meaning to it. In a similar way, when I observe red color and think "red", this in no way diminishes or deviates me from the perceptual experience - it only makes it meaningful, without degrading it in any way.

Contrast this with a meta-meaning like "the fireball thinks itself" or "the Great Mysteriousness thinks the fireball". If we are really able to experience in meditative calmness this, we'll feel the unmistakable perception of "switching places". The experience changes! When we try to see the experience in this way, we are no longer able to feel as if we're willing the fireball thought. We have quickly become dissociated from the experience. The fireball now seems external to us. Now we will the thought "the Great Mysteriousness thinks the fireball" but this is rarely consciously registered. This switch of places is very sneaky and we have to be very vigilant if we are not to be fooled by ourselves. In a somewhat humorous way, we can compare this to the following: a child plays with a toy that it is not supposed to. Then someone enters the room, the child drops the toy and exclaims "The toy was playing with itself!"

This exercise can be further extended by replacing the word "I" with its corresponding in different languages: Ich, je, yo, and so on. In this way we can further purify the concept of "I" from its verbal vessel. In all cases, we should feel the "I think the fireball" as something transparent. It should in no way modify the experience of the self-willed fireball thought. This could be used as a test if we really experience the concept of "I" in the correct way. If we feel that by saying "I think" we're presupposing something in the word "I", this simply means that we avoid taking the concept of "I" from the experience itself and instead we're putting something abstract, that we have ourselves created. In this elementary exercise, nothing is presupposed, postulated, or axiomatized in the word "I". We don't know what "I" is. But it signifies a direct experience.

We can do another exercise. We can name the objects in front of us - display, keyboard, desk - and then we suddenly add the word "I". If "I" is clear of any preconceived notions, we feel an unmistakable reversal of attention. While we were naming the objects, our attention is directed towards their perceptions. At the moment we say "I", attention is reversed and instantly we become conscious of our willful activity. In this way, we can see that the concept of "I" truly corresponds to a real experience.

The reasons that such elementary observations are avoided, actually go very deep. Way deeper than the surface of consciousness. We should be under no illusion about this. One of the greatest secrets of evolution is concealed in the fierce avoidance of these simple observations.