Symphony

[Cleric K]

Of course, all these indications shouldn’t be taken one-sidedly. Otherwise, it would lead only to the lower kinds of visionary clairvoyance. The fact that we keep our concentration, already sets our activity apart from the more atavistic states. As long as we keep firmly that higher-order intuitive activity works behind everything and we’re open to intimately knowing this inner intuitive life, we should have a healthy counterbalance. Nevertheless, in one way or another, we should learn to do this transition if we want to really loosen the lower bodies and behold the elemental (Imaginative) realm.

PS: I want to really emphasize that this approach was given as an illustration. If we put as our direct goal to approach the elemental vision, naturally we may feel certain inner indeterminacy, as if we're not sure what exactly motivates us.

There's one thing that can always be used to re-center our whole existence. It is when our meditation coincides with silent prayer. With each in-breath through the pinhole of concentration, we surrender ourselves to God. We pray that the Divine Ideas and Life may flow in us through the breath and transfigure us. We breathe in not simply air but the Divine Love and Light. Then with the out-breath we exhale and let go of everything that prevents us from accommodating the Divine. In this way, with our focus entirely in the Divine, we can find ourselves in the elemental realm and even Devachan without noticing how we got there! And not only that but we'll be in a fully secure position, as radiant Sun in these realms.

We can't go wrong with such an approach. It can even be considered a kind of archetypal experience that will remain valid for all eons, even though transfigured in every stage. Everything else in life is like creatively working out the evolutionary details that lead us deeper into the Eternal Divine.

[Federica]

Thanks for elaborating, Cleric. I am clearly very far from all this. I was just wondering about ways to help rewire the experience of music in general, in much more basic terms, having in mind that it's soon the end of music that stirs feelings, as you recently said.

Let me first remind of what we've been talking recently.

We would be mistaken if we imagined that the alternation of transformation with strengthened ego feeling were regulated in the elemental world just as naturally as waking and sleeping are in the physical world. According to clairvoyant consciousness — and to this alone it is perceptible — it takes place at will, not passing so easily as waking here passes into sleep. After one has lived for a time in the element of metamorphosis, one feels the need within oneself to engage and use the other swing of the pendulum of elemental life. In a much more arbitrary way than with our waking and sleeping, the element of transforming oneself alternates with living within with its heightened feeling of self. Yes, our consciousness can even bring it about through its elasticity that in certain circumstances both conditions can be present at the same time: on the one hand, one transforms oneself to some degree and yet can hold together certain parts of the soul and rest within oneself. In the elemental world we can wake and sleep at the same time, something we should not try to do in the physical world if we have any concern for our soul life.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA147/En ... 26p01.html

We need to realize that these sleeping and waking comparisons are not just figures of speech. To expand consciousness into the depth of reality we really need to move to a special state that is between sleeping and waking. This is connected with completely measurable changes in the physical body, just like falling asleep is. If we study these closely, we’ll get some hint on how we can consciously steer our soul context towards these states.

I’m writing this in connection with ‘listening with the whole volume of the room’. I realized that this makes little sense if we don’t understand that it can only come about by certain changes not only in our ideal life but also all the way down to the physical.

What happens when one falls asleep? One thing is that the body relaxes (this depends on the quality of sleep, of course). Breathing also changes. I guess we all have had the experience of watching a movie with somebody when even without looking we realize that the person has fallen asleep by just noticing how the sound of their breathing has changed. The inhalation is usually slow and silent. The body very gently expands the chest, as if to do it with minimal effort. Then the muscle tension suddenly lets go and the exhalation happens on its own, as if a spring has been released, often sounding like sighing. This recurring sighing sound is usually what betrays that our friend has fallen asleep.

We can use these characteristics to help ourselves approach the elemental state. The difference is that we need to do that while remaining awake. We can’t make the transition while remaining in our daily beta brainwaves, which are present when we’re engaged in racing and fragmentary mental activity.

Let’s start with relaxing the body. This is something we must learn to do. Modern man lives with many tensions in all parts of the body. Imagine what most of us do just before we’re administered an injection. Usually our whole body stiffens, we may even squeeze our face in anticipation of the pricking. Whether we know it or not, such tensions could be present continuously and we don’t notice them just because they’ve become the ordinary background of consciousness (the fish and the water).

To relax the body we can consult any guide. There’s nothing esoteric here. It helps to voluntarily stiffen some part of the body and then with sighing exhalation release the tension, completely letting go. In this way we can really feel the contrast. We can go in this way body part by body part.

Next, we also need to relax the head-space. Here things become more psychic. This is also where brainwave patterns change more pronouncedly. We can start by gradually passing from the bodily sensations to the more internal ones. For example, we can focus on our nose and how we exhale through it. We can do that several times and feel how with every exhalation the nose is relaxed, it should feel a little tingly, as if we let it go and it moves a little out together with the air.

The next step would be to expand that sensation from the nose to the whole face. Our fleshy mask is a very artistic expression of our inner life and very often we don’t have consciousness of the grimaces we assume. Through this kind of breathing we can let go of the face mask with every exhalation, feeling how it becomes relaxed, tingly, and as if increasing the leeway between our inner life and physical expression. For some, this may already be a little difficult if we’re too merged with our face mask.

As a side note (this was mentioned a while ago), we can experiment with intending a very gentle smile. It doesn’t even need to move any muscles, it’s just the intention that we radiate with each exhalation. One may be surprised by how bright the whole experience becomes, especially if we realize how until a moment ago we had a very sombre mask.

Gradually, we encompass the whole head. With each exhalation we breathe out the sensations of our head, and even the fragmentary thoughts. We literally blow them away. This, however, can only happen if we correspondingly become more and more centered in a point. We can’t contract in a point by trying to compress our usual sense of self and usual thinking patterns. We need to let them go, exhale them. The point is what remains after stripping out and exhaling the outer layers. Also we shouldn’t forget that together with the face mask we should relax and exhale the eyes. As Ashvin noted recently, this will soon feel as certain dots and patterns begin to take form, however, we need to let them go, continue to exhale them.

When we inhale, we shouldn’t inhale what we have already let go. It’s better if we breathe in while completely focused in the point of concentration. It is as if we draw the air through a pinhole from unknown regions. Then we exhale and expand in all directions. This expansion should feel like letting go. We shouldn’t try to control what we exhale. What we exhale is now something independent.

Now if someone was to take an EEG, we would already be more towards alpha brainwaves (usually associated with creative flows and daydreaming) and even further. This is the point where the experience of music can markedly change. Through the exhalation, it is as if our head space expands together with the face mask and now a certain wider volume of inner experiences opens. If we succeed in letting go of the exhalation (instead of trying to possess it and control it) we’ll gradually begin to feel the anthill. Now the sounds of the music begin to feel like little dream fragments, as if each sound can become the seed from which a dream can begin to flow. The moment we try to grasp and control these fragments they are deadened. So the more we resist this, the more magical their movements become.

So we see that ultimately, our goal here is to fully relax our body, then our head-space, as if we’re trying to transition our body into a dreaming state but at the same time remaining awake at the center point. Needless to say, this goes hand in hand with slowing down. We should find for ourselves the rate of slowing down. It shouldn’t feel that we force ourselves, because then we’ll simply feel impatient – we’re trying to do something at a rhythm that our cognition is not synchronized to. Our intellect tries to cram too many things in one timeslice. Instead, when we smoothly exhale we should feel how the slowing down opens the liminal spaces that we normally miss in our hasty and aliased daily consciousness. As soon as we feel that they open we simply continue to exhale, let them go.

A time comes when we indeed feel how our whole body diffuses. This is something that happens each time we fall asleep but this time we remain conscious. Now the dream imagery really comes to life. We haven’t flown off into another parallel universe, we still feel our expanded bodily context and we still hear the music but now it evokes quite amazing dream-like images. It feels that the space of the sound waves and room is now part of our expanded inner space.

Of course, all these indications shouldn’t be taken one-sidedly. Otherwise, it would lead only to the lower kinds of visionary clairvoyance. The fact that we keep our concentration, already sets our activity apart from the more atavistic states. As long as we keep firmly that higher-order intuitive activity works behind everything and we’re open to intimately knowing this inner intuitive life, we should have a healthy counterbalance. Nevertheless, in one way or another, we should learn to do this transition if we want to really loosen the lower bodies and behold the elemental (Imaginative) realm.

As a side note, I’ve found that when we have trouble falling asleep, we can help the process by voluntarily changing our breathing into such a pattern – slowly inhaling and then letting go as a sigh. In this way we induce the body closer to its sleeping state.

That is an entirely new approach to me, thank you for going into such a level of detail and clarity, Cleric. I certainly don't do any of these progressive steps when trying to concentrate, but they are very clearly fleshed out - anyone can follow these indications, so I should be able to. I am a bit nervous that not much will happen in my state, and/or that I will fall asleep, but I only can know if I try

[Federica]

When you say, "how perceptions can be experienced as resonant with our soul currents and gestures", I'm trying to understand what is still missing for you. If we start with the perceptions of the letters you typed out in the post, clearly you experience these as resonant with your soul gestures, right? The letters I am typing out are not as resonant, yet you are still intimately familiar with the sort of soul gestures that gives rise to our collective posts on the forum - the sort of ideal and feeling life that animates them. So is it that, somewhere between here and the sensory experience of music, or between there and animal behavior, you feel the soul volume must exhaust itself and no longer coincide with the outer physiognomy in a way that can be realistically reached in an experiential way?

No, I'm not excentric to the point of feeling any such exhaustion of the soul volume. What is missing for me is the concrete experience of a harmonious whole that contains both thoughts and feelings on one side, and the sensory experience on the other. As said, I do see that it makes logical sense, and I have some diffuse consciousness that nothing is like it used to be in the large horizon of my overall flow of experience, that something has forever changed. But it’s only a feeling, and sometimes a more precise thought. It is definitely not a sensory perception. As I go about everyday life, there is no chance that I can fluidly and harmoniously find a more conscious, heightened way to experience the external world. In the flow of life, then, I am rather stuck with the same perceptions as before, while in study-meditation and exercises I try to filter out the flow of life and the external world (I never imagined to proceed with a body-soul relaxation in the articulated and precise way described by Cleric above).
So there's no real-time awareness of the meaning of the Phonograph metaphor for me, as I walk down the street, or do everyday work. If I want to recall that meaning - with effort - I have to pause and detach from the sensory spectrum. This is what is missing. Not that I don't get how it makes sense.

[Cleric K]

That is an entirely new approach to me, thank you for going into such a level of detail and clarity, Cleric. I certainly don't do any of these progressive steps when trying to concentrate, but they are very clearly fleshed out - anyone can follow these indications, so I should be able to. I am a bit nervous that not much will happen in my state, and/or that I will fall asleep, but I only can know if I try

Great! There's no better feeling than glimpsing into an unexplored direction.

Falling asleep is alright. If nothing else, you'll master the falling asleep technique that I mentioned

On the more serious side:

In this example, by means of meditation we hold the thought back so far that it does not connect itself with the brain. If in this way we unfold an inner activity of thinking that is not connected with the brain, through the effects of such meditation upon the soul we shall feel that we are on the right path. As in meditative thinking no process of destruction is evoked in our nervous system, this kind of thinking never causes sleepiness, however long it may be continued, as ordinary thinking may easily do.

It is true that the opposite often occurs when someone is meditating, for people often complain that when they devote themselves to meditation they at once fall asleep. But that is because the meditation is not yet as it should be. It is quite natural that in meditation we should, to begin with, use the kind of thinking to which we have always been accustomed; it is only gradually that we can accustom ourselves to give up thinking about external things. When this point is reached meditative thinking will no longer make us sleepy, and we shall then know that we are on the right path.

When the inner power of thinking can thus be developed without using the thinking faculty of the body, then and only then shall we acquire knowledge of the inner life and recognise our real self, our higher ‘I’.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA152/En ... 01p01.html

This has been puzzling for me before. It all began coming into place when I began taking concentration seriously. As mentioned numerous times, concentration is not about feeling as a conscious container that looks at a point. Instead, if we compare our inner experience to a fruit, then concentration is like peeling off the skin, the fleshy part, etc., approaching more and more the stone, which is infinitesimal. That's why we have these two otherwise contradictory elements - relaxation, letting go, and concentration.

We fall to sleep when our "I" is enmeshed with the bodily processes. Then as the body transitions to its sleep biochemistry and neural patterns, the "I" loses the ground beneath its feet - we lose consciousness. Thus, when we feel that we fall asleep in meditation, this hints that our ego is still too spread out, trying to control everything, and is being dragged down into sleep by the sinking body.

This also leads to the other problem. That by letting go in this way, we begin to feel the anthill, intimate inner activity that is beyond our control.

Consider the following. When we dream at night we never know how the dream started. We simply find ourselves in certain circumstances, where the dream world is completely independent of our dim dream activity. This is very different in our waking consciousness. The sensory spectrum is quite independent but in our inner life of thinking and imagination we feel more or less the solitary master of our inner world. Even if thoughts emerge spontaneously, we simply assume that we do it subconsciously.

Now imagine what it would be to pass from this waking state into a dream state without losing consciousness. At what point would the inner imagery begin to have life on its own? We see that this feels disturbing. Normally, if we begin to be overwhelmed by imagery that flows on its own we'll most likely decide that we're losing our mind, that we're going crazy! However, this is precisely what must happen if we're to transition to the elemental state. Not to become crazy, but to find inner experiences that are quite independent of our activity. Our sanity is guaranteed by the concentration and the . So we need to lose our (ordinary) mind without losing the inner core that normally animates it. Then we may feel as if our being falls apart. Just as we can see our body as made of parts, so our whole personality feels as composed of short first-person 'clips' of existence. These are the elemental patterns that weave our habits of will, feeling, and thinking. The disturbing thing is that they seem relatively independent. In our Earthly life our inner being clothes in them. I don't know if you have used macros (short for "macro instruction") in products like Microsoft Office. In the simplest terms, these can be considered as a sequence of several actions that can be pre-recorded and executed with a single key. So in that sense, our elemental nature is like such living macros that we trigger with the impulses of our inner activity. However, these elemental macros are dynamic, they grow and develop, and could do so by different influences, not only those that go through our "I". One such macro could be 'loading the washing machine', but things become more recursive when we begin to realize that even most of our thinking patterns are such macros. Language is essentially macro-based. We barely need to construct our sentences word by word. Except when we struggle to write a phenomenological essay for example, where we fight to forge every word. That's why this is so beneficial - our "I" has to be present all the way down to the finest details.

The secret is to overcome the fear that we'll lose ourselves. This is what really happens if we enter such a state without preparation but when we have our stable center of concentrated spirit and we are further united with the that keeps our back so to speak, not only that we don't lose ourselves but we find ourselves in this ever thinning but more and more brightly shining Sun-like point.

[Federica]

Great! There's no better feeling than glimpsing into an unexplored direction.

Falling asleep is alright. If nothing else, you'll master the falling asleep technique that I mentioned

On the more serious side:

In this example, by means of meditation we hold the thought back so far that it does not connect itself with the brain. If in this way we unfold an inner activity of thinking that is not connected with the brain, through the effects of such meditation upon the soul we shall feel that we are on the right path. As in meditative thinking no process of destruction is evoked in our nervous system, this kind of thinking never causes sleepiness, however long it may be continued, as ordinary thinking may easily do.

It is true that the opposite often occurs when someone is meditating, for people often complain that when they devote themselves to meditation they at once fall asleep. But that is because the meditation is not yet as it should be. It is quite natural that in meditation we should, to begin with, use the kind of thinking to which we have always been accustomed; it is only gradually that we can accustom ourselves to give up thinking about external things. When this point is reached meditative thinking will no longer make us sleepy, and we shall then know that we are on the right path.

When the inner power of thinking can thus be developed without using the thinking faculty of the body, then and only then shall we acquire knowledge of the inner life and recognise our real self, our higher ‘I’.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA152/En ... 01p01.html

This has been puzzling for me before. It all began coming into place when I began taking concentration seriously. As mentioned numerous times, concentration is not about feeling as a conscious container that looks at a point. Instead, if we compare our inner experience to a fruit, then concentration is like peeling off the skin, the fleshy part, etc., approaching more and more the stone, which is infinitesimal. That's why we have these two otherwise contradictory elements - relaxation, letting go, and concentration.

We fall to sleep when our "I" is enmeshed with the bodily processes. Then as the body transitions to its sleep biochemistry and neural patterns, the "I" loses the ground beneath its feet - we lose consciousness. Thus, when we feel that we fall asleep in meditation, this hints that our ego is still too spread out, trying to control everything, and is being dragged down into sleep by the sinking body.

This also leads to the other problem. That by letting go in this way, we begin to feel the anthill, intimate inner activity that is beyond our control.

Consider the following. When we dream at night we never know how the dream started. We simply find ourselves in certain circumstances, where the dream world is completely independent of our dim dream activity. This is very different in our waking consciousness. The sensory spectrum is quite independent but in our inner life of thinking and imagination we feel more or less the solitary master of our inner world. Even if thoughts emerge spontaneously, we simply assume that we do it subconsciously.

Now imagine what it would be to pass from this waking state into a dream state without losing consciousness. At what point would the inner imagery begin to have life on its own? We see that this feels disturbing. Normally, if we begin to be overwhelmed by imagery that flows on its own we'll most likely decide that we're losing our mind, that we're going crazy! However, this is precisely what must happen if we're to transition to the elemental state. Not to become crazy, but to find inner experiences that are quite independent of our activity. Our sanity is guaranteed by the concentration and the . So we need to lose our (ordinary) mind without losing the inner core that normally animates it. Then we may feel as if our being falls apart. Just as we can see our body as made of parts, so our whole personality feels as composed of short first-person 'clips' of existence. These are the elemental patterns that weave our habits of will, feeling, and thinking. The disturbing thing is that they seem relatively independent. In our Earthly life our inner being clothes in them. I don't know if you have used macros (short for "macro instruction") in products like Microsoft Office. In the simplest terms, these can be considered as a sequence of several actions that can be pre-recorded and executed with a single key. So in that sense, our elemental nature is like such living macros that we trigger with the impulses of our inner activity. However, these elemental macros are dynamic, they grow and develop, and could do so by different influences, not only those that go through our "I". One such macro could be 'loading the washing machine', but things become more recursive when we begin to realize that even most of our thinking patterns are such macros. Language is essentially macro-based. We barely need to construct our sentences word by word. Except when we struggle to write a phenomenological essay for example, where we fight to forge every word. That's why this is so beneficial - our "I" has to be present all the way down to the finest details.

The secret is to overcome the fear that we'll lose ourselves. This is what really happens if we enter such a state without preparation but when we have our stable center of concentrated spirit and we are further united with the that keeps our back so to speak, not only that we don't lose ourselves but we find ourselves in this ever thinning but more and more brightly shining Sun-like point.

That's illuminating. Or at least I have the impression that it's giving me a better and better sense of what will be going on from a certain point onward, and how to navigate it, in that passive-active balanced intention you have spoken of before. Making this into an experience is a whole different story than reading and nodding here, of course. I feel somewhat like a timeless battlefield. I wonder if the concentration intention should be clearly set before starting the body-mind relaxation. I would think it should, to create that secure alignment with higher intents?

[Cleric K]

That's illuminating. Or at least I have the impression that it's giving me a better and better sense of what will be going on from a certain point onward, and how to navigate it, in that passive-active balanced intention you have spoken of before. Making this into an experience is a whole different story than reading and nodding here, of course. I feel somewhat like a timeless battlefield. I wonder if the concentration intention should be clearly set before starting the body-mind relaxation. I would think it should, to create that secure alignment with higher intents?

Well, if you have something on your mind, you can prepare it. But if not, you can always use as a wildcard. Just like we go to bed with the intent to rest and restore our energies, so we can approach the meditative times with such general intent - to seek a closer experience of the higher being. Here the word 'general' shouldn't mislead us that we're speaking about something indeterminate. Our concentration is once again laser-sharp, we're splitting the now. We should also loosen our expectations because they act like paralysis. To expect something means that we maintain a certain form of our "I" and we should let that go too. One way to think about it is that time spent in concentration acts a little like sun tanning. We don't see the effects in real-time, yet they accumulate. The more familiar we become with these states, the more courage we gain. There are of course also more abrupt transitions but as a whole we can't force them. We prepare the conditions and patiently wait. Here again, 'wait' should be understood in a different way. It's not like passively waiting for something. As we concentrate, and resist the nudges, all this feels very interesting. And the more we resist, the more interesting it becomes. This could be considered as sign that we're really snapping into the right attractor. Even when nothing particularly spectacular happens in meditation, our time spent is still experienced as something very interesting.

Also, it's good that when we sit down to meditate we don't force ourselves into concentration right away, but instead start with relaxation only. Relax the body, breathe several times out as if to blow out the daily thoughts, and then gradually we begin to bring our inner activity into focus.

[Cleric K]

So there's no real-time awareness of the meaning of the Phonograph metaphor for me, as I walk down the street, or do everyday work. If I want to recall that meaning - with effort - I have to pause and detach from the sensory spectrum. This is what is missing. Not that I don't get how it makes sense.

One more note here. Living in expanded consciousness in our daily lives is not something that we should aim for. The key here is that through our work in the specially designated time, we gradually transform the elemental macros, we're instilling good habits. In our daily life we depend on these good habits. The most we can do is pray, even if for a split second. We can say in our mind "Dear God, be with me in every step and in every move." This takes only an instant. As a personal example, in my profession when I have some more demanding installation of equipment, I constantly use such split-second prayers. Not only that they in no way act as a distraction but quite the opposite - they only intensify the focus, calmness, smoothness of movements, and so on. But of course, the working habits need to be also developed independently. In the intense work conditions we only seek the center of coherency that helps us unfold these habits in the most beneficial way. And this holds true in all areas of life. In sports, all the good habits are formed through long hours of training. At the time of the event we simply try to play out these habits in the best way. It's too late to experiment, analyze, etc. So it is in our spiritual development. If we speak with somebody and we try to observe our thoughts at the same time, we'll look spaced out. Not that there's no value in such experiments, but we certainly shouldn't see it as something that should become the norm. Instead, in daily life we should have confidence and faith (further facilitated by the split-second prayers) that we can be constantly inspired to play out the best we have developed in our quiet time.

[Federica]

Yes, our verbal thinking mediates between the imaginative space and the sensory space. Here I am speaking of the form that sensory experience takes through the physical organism. We could think of the article Cleric recently posted about the Himbas possibly perceiving the color spectrum differently through the mediation of linguistic space. This clearly doesn't' mean the linguistic space solely governs the objective and lawful transformation of sensations in relation to our will activity. Even if I liberate my thinking from the conceptual space and enter the imaginative state, I won't be able to walk through a wall or fall through the floor. It's only that the sensory qualities will be released from their constricted form and will become the ideal background of existence, which still orients all spiritual activity as a standing 'gravity wave' but experienced 'from the same side' as that activity, unlike normal sensory experience (especially colors and sounds) that seem to confront us from the 'other side' of thinking consciousness.

I think the statement in that article is a presupposition (that language shapes perception) and not at all an evidence emerging from the study (by the way, the linked study does not report any of the visual tests given in the article). To state that they don't see the one blue tile among the series of green ones because they don't have a specific word for the color is like saying that a baby doesn't feel any difference between a soft summer breeze and a cold strong wind since it doesn't yet have the words to tell them apart. For the Himba, the other possibility is that - since percepts of colors and percepts in general are never perceived in isolation, their human organization and environment lead them to experience color in frames that are very different to the ones we may be used to . So their ideas that comprise the color concepts are different from the usual Western ones, and their language reflects that, it follows the shape of their visual flow as it combines with their ethnic soul configuration.

When you speak of the 'language to understand' in this context, do you see how simply reasoning through what we are communicating and seeing if it makes some intuitive sense in light of the facts of living experience you are familiar with already gives some of that language?

Yes, to the extent that both activities (reasoning through what you are saying, and effectively doing the exercise) are executed through thought. When I say "language" in that context, I am using a common "language expression". I could have equally said "medium".

[Federica]

So there's no real-time awareness of the meaning of the Phonograph metaphor for me, as I walk down the street, or do everyday work. If I want to recall that meaning - with effort - I have to pause and detach from the sensory spectrum. This is what is missing. Not that I don't get how it makes sense.

One more note here. Living in expanded consciousness in our daily lives is not something that we should aim for. The key here is that through our work in the specially designated time, we gradually transform the elemental macros, we're instilling good habits. In our daily life we depend on these good habits. The most we can do is pray, even if for a split second. We can say in our mind "Dear God, be with me in every step and in every move." This takes only an instant. As a personal example, in my profession when I have some more demanding installation of equipment, I constantly use such split-second prayers. Not only that they in no way act as a distraction but quite the opposite - they only intensify the focus, calmness, smoothness of movements, and so on. But of course, the working habits need to be also developed independently. In the intense work conditions we only seek the center of coherency that helps us unfold these habits in the most beneficial way. And this holds true in all areas of life. In sports, all the good habits are formed through long hours of training. At the time of the event we simply try to play out these habits in the best way. It's too late to experiment, analyze, etc. So it is in our spiritual development. If we speak with somebody and we try to observe our thoughts at the same time, we'll look spaced out. Not that there's no value in such experiments, but we certainly shouldn't see it as something that should become the norm. Instead, in daily life we should have confidence and faith (further facilitated by the split-second prayers) that we can be constantly inspired to play out the best we have developed in our quiet time.

I see that one can't force a permanent state of exercise into everyday life, but I was referring to the naturally occurring (after spiritual development is pursued) loss of demarcation between perceptual and soul realms described by Ashvin:

I noticed this demarcation in one of your prior comments and tried to briefly address it in a few recent comments. I remember when I started meditation, there felt to be a clear demarcation between meditative sessions and non-meditative life. It felt like all the real work had to be done in the former and the most that I could do in the latter was study spiritual science. In many ways, this feeling is a reflection of our experiencing a clear demarcation between 'inner soul volume' and 'sensory world'. We also mentioned this in the context of people feeling that the sensory world is some large space 'out there' while the soul life unfolds within the small space 'in here', so how could the former possibly be structured in some mysterious way by forces flowing from the latter? It isn't suspected that there is a hidden assumption in such questions born from ingrained thinking habits. We should try to gradually decondition from that assumption, that inverted perspective, and reorient to the intuition that these spaces are entirely co-extensive. 

Our phenomenological (vertical) thoughts about the soul volume should become much more temporally extended. Even our modern intellectual thinking can be traced quite far back, for example to the linguistic pathways of Greek and Latin that have evolved over centuries and dispersed into many European languages. As we know, these linguistic molds structure how we make sense of the World in a quite literal way. Our feelings and impulses can be traced even further back. We could approach this by contemplating the difference between plants, animals, and humans. In many ways, we could say that many qualities which still live outwardly in the sensible gestures of plants and animals have been entirely inwardized in humans, raised into the soul life. The gestures have become supersensible in humans yet they are still there, instinctively unfolding beneath the surface of waking consciousness. When we look upon these kingdoms in the sensory world and contemplate the inner meaning of their gestures, we are literally perceiving domains of our own 'soul geometry'.

If we simply gaze at and delight in the beautiful blossoming flowers and elegant (or funny looking) animal movements, though, these deeper intuitive gestures within our own soul life won't become apparent. They come from the opposite direction of the perceptual experience, like when we concentrate on a mental image. We have to actively direct our attention towards these gestures, to be actively receptive to the intuitive context in which our thinking-perception is embedded, so to speak. It is in that way the sensory landscape can be experienced as more coextensive with our soul atmosphere and gestures.  

[Cleric K]

I see that one can't force a permanent state of exercise into everyday life, but I was referring to the naturally occurring (after spiritual development is pursued) loss of demarcation between perceptual and soul realms described by Ashvin:

Our natural consciousness indeed changes in time. The simple rule is that this shouldn't happen in such a way that it disrupts our normal activities. Obviously, seeking elemental vision while driving a car is a bad idea. But many things begin to integrate in non-intrusive ways. For example, when we speak with somebody and we're currently listening, we can surely concentrate and try to empathize with the inner life of the other person. Then it is possible to have imaginative flashes. But probably the best way to keep this higher consciousness in our daily life is precisely through such split-second prayers, formulas, stopping for a few seconds to relax certain tension, and so on. We indeed develop practical skills to manifest more spiritually in our daily life. And it all ties with developing these things as healthy habits. When we begin to gain consciousness of our daily mental flows we may be astonished at how much of it is really idle talk. We don't really solve anything most of the time, we don't make concrete plans, we don't find solutions to problems. We're most often reverberating through certain thoughts that resound in our tunnel of experience. It's great progress when we begin to notice these idle cycles and be able to think a blessing, a word, a picture, that give more holistic direction to our flow. As said before, when these things are in place, not only that they don't distract us but exactly the opposite - we become more centered, focused, smooth, and so on. This takes time but it happens. Living in the world should not be equated to being on the hamster wheel. Our life indeed becomes a quite different experience. This is where the teachings of OMA and BD are indispensable because they are full of such small advices that with little practice can become integral parts of our daily life.

So to what Ashvin says: of course we should have very clear separation between meditation and our normal life, just like we separate sleeping and waking. But this doesn't mean that the nature of our Earthly experience doesn't change. It does.