Meditation

[AshvinP]

I don't discuss much of these things "IRL", so hopefully Discord is not representative of how people engage in general. On the other hand, I am talking about the servers dedicated to idealism and even spiritual outlooks like Anthroposophy (or the highly intellectualized version of it). The only adjusting of views is jumping from one Maya to another, from materialism to mysticism, from idealism to panpsychism, or something similar. There is absolutely no willingness to experience the real-time activity of thinking, the imaginative soul-gestures that get encoded in streams of intellectual commentary about the 'secrets of existence'. The trend is more concerning than I even previously imagined.

Not that I get overly judgmental or pessimistic about it - I realize these inner configurations are modulated by 'powers and principalities' that are working through the sheer momentum of ingrained soul habits at this point. But as objective patterns that can be discerned from the large dataset accumulated from interacting with many of the same people over and over again, they are unmistakable. Most of the interest is in speculating about NDEs or glorifying psychedelics, asking questions about what might happen after death but [semi-consciously] never hoping to hear a viable answer. Here is an example of a comment I made recently in response to such a question:

Met with deafening silence, except for - "Where are you getting all this from this seems like new age mumbo jumbo after you dead it's to late", from the guy who asked about why many NDE experiences were so "hellish". I don't see how anyone can reach the more demanding part of the task - calibrating our activity to be guided by the Good, which I agree will be of critical importance - before it is even suspected that there is a soul space of imaginative gestures to be guided. It seems to me the easy half is not so easy. Of course, that is not because of any externalized reasons like "it is too difficult to understand the esoteric terms or following the arguments" or anything like that, only because many people have lost sight of real-time thinking altogether and have used the commentary to convince themselves there is nothing to look for except reflected preferences and personal entertainment.

I guess the whole attitude with which people dabble in these questions is similar to the way they are drawn to criminal or horror movies, MMA fights and so on. They would like to flirt with some kind of stronger emotions but in no case they would like these things to happen to them.

Yeah, that makes sense. They want some indirect stimulation of the imaginative feeling currents but certainly don't want to live in those currents more intimately.

I was thinking the other day about how many physical animal gestures can be symbols for what we are often doing in our soul-gestures. For ex., if I pet my cat in a way that is antipathetic to her, or pick her up and put her in a place she finds uncomfortable or threatening for whatever reason, she will shake her head or whole body like she was doused in water and is shaking it off. These are the sorts of soul-gestures that I imagine are taking place when people are brought too intimately close to the currents of 'MMA fights' they otherwise seek through passive, indirect stimulation.

They feel like they have been picked up and placed somewhere that is very antipathetic to their current state of beliefs and expectations, that their etheric body has been stroked too directly with certain ideas, so they instinctively need to shake it all off. These subconscious gestures then get rationalized by the commentating intellect in all sorts of ways, even if the ideas expressed are intuitive and otherwise resonant with what the person has previously reasoned out about the structure of reality. Perhaps they say to themselves, 'This guy is speaking like he has concrete knowledge of what must take place after death and that is absurd... such things can only be passively speculated about. I will have no more of this!'.

[Federica]

I have a practical tip for meditation that I have used for some time. I am not certain it could help others but I think so. Last Christmas I was given a traditionally made natural wool plaid as a gift, and I have started wrapping myself in it when sitting for meditation. I have found that it definitely helps quiet the body and create a peaceful body-mind state. As a result, the body doesn't interfere as much with the meditative intention, and it's easier to find the proper mood faster. This works also in summer months because natural wool has special properties that regulate the bodily temperature, rather than warming it up. In my experience this tip doesn't work, or it works much less, with just any plaid or blanket.

[Güney27]

Are such breathing exercises and mantras harmful when practiced ?

„The syllable Om corresponds to what we call in Western tradition the logos, the creative word. In the Hindu tradition, it represents the original language and is associated with Kalahamsa, that mythical bird that laid the primordial egg from which the universe emerged. Om is a syllable with very strong vibrations that the Hindus have made a mantra. They repeat it tirelessly in their meditations. You too can say this mantra loudly or mentally. You focus on this word without thinking about anything else, and repeat: Om, Om, Om ... You can also combine it with a breathing exercise. You breathe in through your nose, mentally speak Om four times, then exhale very slowly through your mouth and repeat Om again. After a while, you will feel reassured and charged with energy. The syllable Om is composed of the letters Aoum and is also sung in this way. Those who are aware of the magical power of sounds gradually feel the perfect form this song evokes in their soul. Aoum can be compared to the word Amen, which Christians say at the end of every prayer“

[AshvinP]

Are such breathing exercises and mantras harmful when practiced ?

„The syllable Om corresponds to what we call in Western tradition the logos, the creative word. In the Hindu tradition, it represents the original language and is associated with Kalahamsa, that mythical bird that laid the primordial egg from which the universe emerged. Om is a syllable with very strong vibrations that the Hindus have made a mantra. They repeat it tirelessly in their meditations. You too can say this mantra loudly or mentally. You focus on this word without thinking about anything else, and repeat: Om, Om, Om ... You can also combine it with a breathing exercise. You breathe in through your nose, mentally speak Om four times, then exhale very slowly through your mouth and repeat Om again. After a while, you will feel reassured and charged with energy. The syllable Om is composed of the letters Aoum and is also sung in this way. Those who are aware of the magical power of sounds gradually feel the perfect form this song evokes in their soul. Aoum can be compared to the word Amen, which Christians say at the end of every prayer“

Guney,

Don't take what I say as any specific advice to do or not do these exercises. I just want to offer a few very general thoughts.

It is my sense that the main thing is not whether we do breathing exercises, but how we do them. In all cases, we want to permeate all exercises thoroughly with our thoughts. We want to sense concretely and lucidly why we are engaged in this particular exercise, how it relates to our current life situation, our current spiritual path, the knowledge we have gained, the ideals we have, etc. In other words, we don't want to become like a clanging symbol, just repeating the words tirelessly and somehow trying to change our spiritual nature by way of the bodily nature, the mantra/breathing. Rather, the spiritual nature should intuit harmonious patterns of being, the Cosmic symphony of the World Flow from the other thread, and allow these harmonic patterns to naturally impress into its bodily nature.

What that means practically is, of course, the path of intuitive thinking, the cultivation of the virtues, prayer, etc. This deep cognitive practice should be allowed to gradually work its way into deeper modulation of the psycho-physical being, and we will naturally be given feedback on what areas we may need to focus more particularly with the help of various exercises like the one you shared. In that sense, if we are still not at all inwardly sure what these practices are about and whether they are harmful, then they may turn out to actually be harmful if we just jump into them anyway. We determine our fate with respect to the practices in this way.

It is my opinion that some people in Anthroposophy take Steiner's remarks in this area too rigidly and feel like any practices related to systematic breathing should be automatically shunned. But Steiner's emphasis is always on not focusing on the physical process of breathing and making that the anchor of the exercise, instead focusing on the supersensible ideas, the intuitive movements, that give the AUM and the breathing their meaningful valence. It's not some dogmatic injunction to never go near ancient Eastern practices, but to only approach them from the proper direction once we are sufficiently established with our intuitive orientation to their ideal significance.

For ex. if we do the vowel exercise, modulating the string like "aaaaAAAAeeeeEEEEEoooooOOOO", we can first do it out loud to see how it feels and sense the some of the inner qualities. Then we do it inwardly and try to first decouple this from our physical modulations of the larynx, which will still subtly be present, and then even decouple the modulation from our inner voice. It's like the inner sound is growing fainter and fainter and we are living more and more in the pure inner movements. These inner movements are the ideal basis of the feeling qualities we dimly sense in the vowels and in the variations of pitch. We can live more purely in those qualities by decoupling the movements from their strictly physical-sensory expression.

Once we feel sufficiently oriented to living in these purely intuitive movements, we may be able to approach some of these other exercises drawn from the ancient Wisdom anew. There is inestimable inner significance for the pronunciation of AUM and, of course, our breathing rhythms are highly spiritual processes as well that modulate our soul life. But we no longer need to submerge ourselves in the breathing process and try to extract some magical evocation from it, and indeed this could become problematic for our soul life, because we can reach its purely ideal basis, the deeply aesthetic and moral basis, through our intuitive activity. Then we use such exercises as an anchor to experience those intuitive movements in greater and greater purity. We can permeate the physical processes with lucid intuitions and harmonic ideal patterns.

[Federica]

When it comes to practices, I think that, for the many, one risk not to underestimate is the search for new exercises under the influence of more or less the same impulse that makes people hooked on for example fast fashion: exercises to get a little variation, to spice up the practice, to be entertained, inspired, by some novel set up, which usually is novel primarily for the physical body. This however, as we know for fast fashion and many similar trends, may also become addictive and detrimental.
In this sense, a certain consumerism of spiritual practices - especially, but not only when powered up, enabled, by ai tools (I believe we will see more and more of this sort of spiritual practices) - may consolidate the way for Ahrimanic impulses in relative disguise.

PS: to be clear, I don't mean that I believe this is the case of Güney, but it's something to keep in mind when searching for exercise variation

[Cleric]

And according to our experience, in some cases, we skip the premeditation phase and act immediately, but in some other cases, we do have pre-meditation phase when we first consider alternative options and then make a choice for only one specific course of action out of all alternative options. So, it seems to me that when a number of alternatives of action exist, there is a pre-meditative phase in order to make a decision on which alternative to choose before manifesting it.

Influenced by the last post, this morning I was doing some experiments. I would like to share something simple.
When we quiet down, we can look at some object in our room and explain something about it. For example, I look at a lamp and think in my voice "This is a lamp. It is used to illuminate the room. It is controlled by a switch. It needs electricity to work."

Then, if we try to notice, we may find that we produce our speech quite automatically. It is almost as if we only set the intent, while our well-trodden circuitry breaks it down into verbal sequences. We focus on what we try to explain and not so much on how to structure our speech.
Now we can increase our precision a little by thinking in a more clear and eloquent voice. It may help if we imagine how we would talk to a foreigner who doesn't understand the language very well.

And then we come to the point that was at the focus of our conversation with Eugene. We can imagine that the way we formulate our thoughts is very important. As if someone's life depends on it. As if we talk live and our voice is broadcast to millions. Whatever we say remains forever on the web and people will make memes out of it. Now when we look at the object and explain it, it is almost as if we try to hear our thoughts before they are pronounced, as if to arrest them if they are not right. This is achievable when we need to explain things out loud. Then we can test the words in our thinking space. But when we are already in thinking space, the problem becomes very interesting.

Let's first relieve ourselves of the constraint of pace. It's not like we are in an improv band, the metronome is clicking and we have to come up with something good at the right time. Thus we may try to very slowly initiate the pronunciation of the words. It's almost as if the teacher asks us a question and we hesitate between two single-word answers. Then we begin to very slowly pronounce one while trying to read the teacher's expression. If we sense disapproval we cleverly morph the word into the other answer. We are in an emotionally similar situation when we try to know something about the words we are about to think in our mind, except that we can no longer pre-think them. Here we need great vigilance. Our intellect will try to make a mental replica of the physical situation. For example, we'll quietly mumble some thinking-words and then repeat them again in our mind but clearly and loudly. This is cheating, however. We should seek that elusive horizon where the thinking words manifest for the first time.

Depending on our skills or simply our present condition (how relaxed or nervous we are), we may find that we can't help but simply let out torrents of word-thoughts. On the other extreme, we may experience something like inner paralysis, where we are able to arrest our inner voice but at the same time our whole explanation activity ceases. Yet, if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

Gradually, by experiencing more closely this horizon at which our thinking words manifest, we begin to realize that our inner being always lives in rich dream-like flow. For example, behind the dry words "It is controlled by a switch", we can feel something expanding like a whole theatrical scene - we reach for the switch, flip it and the room is flooded with light. This is what our soul being really lives in. Every intuition of our deeper being is like the meaning of a movie scene. The thinking words are like dry symbolic encodings of this deeper life. So our soul being continuously experiences the World flow in such rich dream-like scenes, each of which makes a certain degree of intuitive sense. They either resonate with the general intuition of the World flow, or they rattle like notes out of place. Our waking self normally lives only in the semi-automatic symbolic encodings of this hidden dream flow.

Our inner chatter babbles all the time but we rarely stop to recognize what is it that it really describes with the words. For example, we may think "I better finish that project at work, it's already overdue." This is a dry, prosaic thought. But what does it describe? Behind it, a whole dream scene can be felt. It's like our soul has experienced a dream compressed to a point, which if expanded could look like a movie scene where we are being yelled at by our boss. This movie scene is meaningful. It potentially fits in the general movie flow. So it's like our intellectual self has sensed in a flash this compressed movie scene, without really registering it, and all that precipitates are the dry words. It is sometimes possible to recover the dream scene that has stimulated the thought by backtracking it. We can ask "Now why did I think that?" Initially, we may find that we've been weighed down by a heavy feeling. It is almost as if we have experienced the dream scene, absorbed the unpleasant feeling of our boss yelling at us, but then we forgot the richer content of the dream and were left only with the heavy feeling. This sometimes happens with ordinary dreams. We wake up and can't remember what exactly we have dreamt but we still feel that it was something unpleasant.

Of course, we shouldn't generalize from these isolated examples. Our inner life is much more complicated and modulated from the most varied directions. What I wanted to point attention to is only the fact that by trying to be vigilant about what exactly we describe in our verbal thoughts, we necessarily begin to gain deeper intuitive awareness of the dreamy part of the World flow where our soul being steers.

[Federica]

Stumbling upon a Euler's disc, I though it makes for a good sound-metaphor for meditation/concentration:

[AshvinP]

Stumbling upon a Euler's disc, I though it makes for a good sound-metaphor for meditation/concentration:

Thanks, that's pretty good! It anchors well for me the experience of trying to stabilize the chaotically reverberating thoughts and feelings which keep 'bouncing off' the primary meaningful flow, spiraling them together with that flow and 'silencing' the jerky attentional movements. In a certain sense, we do need to start by letting the contextual time-rhythms settle down of their own accord, calmly accepting the fact that we are somewhere along those rhythms and cannot force them into alignment like we are changing the hands of a clock. At the same time, of course, we should actively concentrate our 'Euler's disc' into the unitary theme/image that we have responsibility for, prayerfully trusting the peripheral context of feelings and sensations to the 'concave mirror' that is truly responsible for instilling the order to the inner flow that we are unable to instill ourselves.