Federica wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 3:12 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 3:00 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 2:55 pm
Well on second thought, this attitude doesn't seem to be possible for me at this point. This is a work against nature, squared. Or x-ed. Where is the point of balance? I can't see it. Why not go to sleep on a bed of nails at this rate? A soft bed is highly consumptive and incredibly passive.
What is an example of something that feels to be a bed of nails at this point? For ex. do you feel that way about resisting certain impulsive speech or bodily gestures that practically unfold on autopilot, without the presence of your thinking-will?
Nothing feels like a bed of nails, because I don't know that sensation. But resisting the flow of music certainly feels mortifying. Nervous bodily gestures are good to control, and impulsive speech too. But one can easily imagine valid reasons to exert such control that have nothing to do with mortifying our earthly existence.
I'm not sure where the association to 'mortifying our earthly existence' came from. All we need to recognize is that this
is the work of gradually 'dismantling the personality', as you quoted from Cleric previously, so we can let the higher self shine through into earthly existence. To begin with, it is simply the work of bringing more presence of thinking-will into our routine habits, which normally go on autopilot quite independent of our core spiritual activity. We should be clear that this work is what makes our concentration efforts more fruitful as well. Those efforts meet so much resistance when we meditate precisely because our thinking-will is normally entrained by barely conscious waves of sensations, emotions, and sense-based thoughts. Its concentrated energy is routinely dispersed into these various waves throughout the day, and this is the soul atmosphere we inherit in our meditation.
For ex., when we wash our hands/faces or brush our teeth or many similar routines, we often let our minds wander to a bunch of different unrelated things. Our intent, thoughts, emotions, sensations become misaligned. By remaining present in the intentional activity, which is greatly aided by dedicating it to the spiritual archetypes at the basis of the solid, liquid, gaseous, and warmth elements that make the experience possible, stabilizing it within that depth of intention as discussed in the truthfulness essay, we accustom our inner organism to keeping its thinking-will energy concentrated. We smooth the currents of our soul life and restore some order into its flow.
As long as we strengthen our intuition for why this resistance work reestablishes our concentric alignment with our native spiritual existence, we can make better
informed decisions about how to apply or not apply the 'work against nature' in service of our higher ideals.
You play musical instruments if I'm not mistaken. How can you let the harmony emerge as sound if every note you play you are resisting, decomposing, searching for the corresponding gesture... I don't get it. Again, beyond the easy examples of nervous bodily gestures and automatic verbal expressions, where is the point of balance?
The nervous gestures and verbal expressions are simple examples to point to but by no means easy to resist in practice. In fact, if we start with those and make some progress, we will have taken huge strides forward in our inner development. It's probably more than enough to focus only on those to begin with.
Playing music is already something more intentional and active, yet it is often the case that I am playing a song and my mind wanders to a bunch of other things, especially when I am very familiar with the movements and the playing itself becomes a routine habit like driving home from work. That's something I have been working on lately as well.
It's
not about intellectually analyzing the process of playing the song, which is actually another way of letting the mind wander and dispersing the energy, but actively seeking to remain more present to the inner gestures by centering in the depth flow. One can try to
intuitively register how the intuition of the song has condensed into imagination and flowed through to the physical limbs, how the flowing melodies and harmonies speak meaningfully as a story of spiritual evolution and initiation, how the higher archetypal beings are providing the psycho-physical support matrix in which our local musical intent is unfolding. The law of shrinking greatly helps here so we don't rigidly identify with our psyche and body, but sense them as much greater and mysterious curvatures through which our thinking-will is embedded and steered.
All of this requires a certain amount of discipline and attention that is normally lacking, especially when we passively witness the playback of the movie and nod along in enjoyment. In that case, we simply let the inner gestures run their course beneath the surface and take no active interest in them. The points of balance are what we need to intuitively discover for ourselves. But the key point is that we simply have no basis for that intuitive resonance until we build enough of a 'dataset' by exposing our inner organism to varying degrees of resistance across domains of sensory-conceptual experience. This is how we build the inner
sensitivity to the ways in which our soul life is deviating from its points of balance when we let our spiritual activity be entrained by various sensations, emotions, and thoughts.
It's like our thinking-will normally feels to be swinging its 'limbs' through the unimpeded air, but now the air densifies so it more concretely senses the grooves it is
always flowing through and the snags it is bumping into along the way. It is really about awakening to how normally unbalanced and misaligned our soul life is, in what specific ways, and gradually restoring some alignment and balance.