Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2024 6:31 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2024 8:41 pm
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.
RS wrote: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.