Igniting physical bodily space
For many, meditation seems like an insurmountable obstacle because at the moment we try to let go of our sensory support we are thrown into an inner chaos of thoughts and feelings. Trying to exercise control over this inner storm exhausts us in no time. The sense impressions and bodily sensations, on the other hand, give us anchorage. By holding on to them we have the sense of stability and order that we are powerless to instill out of ourselves to our inner world. Fortunately, this inner strength can be cultivated gradually and we can use the stability of the bodily sensations as helping wheels, so to speak.
Let’s focus on the way we will the movements of our body. In a biological sense, every movement results from the contraction of muscles. The contraction on the other hand is really sliding of the muscle fibers against each other.
We know how the myosin proteins act like small hooks (the blue segment) that grip at the muscle fibers and pull against them much like we can pull a rope with our hands. These micro movements, however, can be present even when there’s no apparent contraction of the muscles. This is the so-called static muscle action. For example, if we start doing a pull-up and hold still halfway up, even though there’s no longer any apparent movement of our arms, the muscles are by no means inactive. Instead, we begin to feel a burning sensation in them. The myosin hooks try to pull the fibers vigorously yet succeed in doing that only as far as to balance the counteracting force of our weight pulling the fibers apart. An analogy with a car’s clutch can also be made, where the car is on an inclined surface facing uphill. If we release the brakes and the clutch is fully disengaged, the car will start moving backward. Yet if we apply gas and partially engage the clutch just the right amount, we can find the balance of friction to keep the car stationary. Even though there’s no apparent movement of the whole car, the engine is running and the clutch discs are rubbing against each other vigorously. If we engage the clutch further (by releasing the pedal further and thus increasing friction) the engine overcomes the car's weight and it starts moving uphill.
We can do less strenuous experiments with our face. This is useful, first because our face is very sensitive and we can make very fine observations, second, because we are usually quite unconscious of the way we move our face, and trying to make conscious movements can provide us with unexpected insights into our inner life. We can make an exaggerated smile by trying to contract the responsible muscles as much as possible. When we hold on to that grimace we can feel the tingling sensation of the static muscle action. If we prolong this state we start feeling muscle fatigue. Then we follow with complete muscle relaxation. Then we contract the muscles again but to a lesser extent, just enough to feel the muscle tension. In this way we try to achieve something like the familiar dampening harmonic.
Ultimately we should reach a state where our will impulse doesn’t result in any noticeable motion. It is as if we send our willing activity in the face but only as far as we feel the gentle tingling (the myosin hooks are grappling against the muscle fibers but without resulting in any contraction – working on ‘half-clutch’ so to speak). This sensation should be so gentle that it shall not cause any straining. It should feel pleasant and as if we can prolong it for as long as needed without getting fatigued. If we feel that too much effort is needed to support the sensation, we should continue seeking an even finer balance between relaxation and action.
When we experiment with this for a while (it may take more than one session) it becomes a skill on its own. We become able to send our will in the muscles such that the tingling sensation manifests immediately yet without noticeably contracting the muscles. Like the development of any fine motor skill, it is a matter of repetition and refining. However, unlike the ordinary usage of our will, the focus here is not on moving our body parts but on how we use our willing activity to ‘ignite’ the physical sensation.
The next step would be to experiment in the same way with the muscles throughout our whole body. Special attention should be given to the muscles that we normally move quite unconsciously, such as those that can move the skin on the back of our head and torso, the diaphragm, and so on. Initially, focusing on the different muscle groups may feel mutually exclusive – when we focus on one part of the body we lose awareness of the others – but similar to the expanding visual field exercise (see Ashvin's essay here), it is possible to do that also for our willing activity. Effectively, we need to find a barycenter of our being. We don’t do that by searching for a particular geometric point to look at but by virtue of the fact that we can feel the totality of our ignited physical sensations as something whole, without our attention jumping erratically. As a result, we should feel stable, motionless, and irradiating our surrounding bodily space with our will, which as a result feeds back on us a pleasant buzzing glow (not visual glow but tactile). It is normal that we wouldn’t feel our bodily form too sharply defined, but more like a less distinct cloud of sensations.
It is important to realize that we should vividly feel how we are actively ‘electrifying’ our bodily organism with our will. The tingling sensation is not something that we imagine. It is a physical sensation just like the burning sensation when we hold halfway in a pull-up, except that here we try to refine our willing activity such that we get at the threshold of physical action. It is important that in our effort to activate the physical body, we shouldn’t stiffen. This borderline between the relaxed state and the energization of the muscles can be infinitely refined as if we split a hair with ever greater precision. When we develop this skill sufficiently, we may find it easy to ignite our whole bodily space through a single holistic action of our will, which fills our body like a fluid and produces the tingling sensation of gently activating muscles. In this state we should feel pleasantly relaxed and centered. All physical sensations should feel ‘equidistant’, so to speak, that is, they should feel present in the volume of our conscious field without us having to move the spotlight of attention such that we gain consciousness of one part of our body at the expense of another. We should feel submerged in these sensations from all sides. It is natural for our human constitution that we feel more aware of sensations that are in front of us. Yet we should also try to feel, even if less distinctly, that there are sensations also behind. The key however is that our bodily space is the stable ground against which this exercise is performed. There’s nothing imagined, nothing fantasized. There’s active will and true gentle physical sensations throughout our whole body, encompassed as glowing inner bodily space. If we feel that this inner glow is too ephemeral and we are unsure if it is only imagined, we need to simply increase the strength of our will to the point that we can feel subtle movement. It is an interesting exercise to make this glow as intense as possible yet without resorting to noticeable muscle contraction.
Energizing our bodily space in such a way, metaphorically speaking, feels like we pour our will as if trying to sustain a steady stream of water that propels the mills of our cells. In other words, even though there are no apparent movements, we should feel the tingling feedback of our constant flow of will that needs to be continually replenished. With this we’re not suggesting that scientists should seek to detect such a ‘will-fluid’. We are only expressing artistically the way the experiences feel from within.
The outpour of our will follows the streamlines of our ideal intents. After all, when we consciously energized the muscles in our face we didn’t do that by accident but in accordance with the general idea and goal of the exercise. In this sense, our ideal activity is a higher, conscious, and meaningful inner activity that guides the streams of will. This will, however, cannot be expressed arbitrarily. For example, we can’t experience true muscle tension in the third arm that we’ve never had. As such, the bodily space that we can energize through our activity has a structure that is quite independent of our imagination. This is also the reason we said in the beginning that for man in the present age, the physical body and senses serve as a stable foundation against which our inner activity finds its grip. By igniting bodily space through the above exercise, we should become vividly aware of this physical kernel of our present existence. It needs to be stressed that we are speaking of the direct inner experience of physicality, not our visual picture or abstract conception of a biological body, matter, atoms, etc. This inner experience does not depend on belief in some speculative mind-matter interaction (and thus the conception of the physical body/world as some distinct metaphysical reality) but is the entirely phenomenological exploration of the way our inner activity is resisted and perceptually fed back. We shouldn’t fantasize that we feel elementary particles when we feel our bodily sensations. Such particles (as far as our direct conscious experience is concerned) are only an intellectual overlay. What is truly given to our experience are spatially structured inner sensations that transform in lawful ways.
Wiggling imagination out of the physical kernel
Now that we have this experience as a kind of secure reference point, we can continue to explore how other aspects of our inner activity work into it. Above, our willing activity was strictly poured into the inner space occupied by the physical kernel. For example, when we squeeze our hand in a fist we feel the actual muscle tension in a specific part of phenomenal space. To find another aspect of our inner activity we can relax our hand and repeat the squeeze but by only imagining it, or basically by trying to actively remember what we just did. Please note that we are trying to imagine/remember the inner act of will and the sensations in the hand, not simply a passive visual picture of it. Naturally, this imagined movement feels much more ghostly. It by no means has the same intensity of the burning sensation we get when we squeeze our physical fist for a prolonged time. It is critically important to feel this difference as clearly as possible. Modern flattened philosophies that abstractly claim reality is dreamed/imagined, fatally smear out the factual phenomenological distinction between the sensations in the physical kernel and the overlaid imagined act. The simple phenomenological fact is that in the physical kernel, our inner activity meets objective constraints and corresponding sensations, while our imagined/remembered activity wiggles out as an inner ghost. It occupies the same inner space as the sensations of the physical kernel but is of a more volatile quality. Once again, here ‘objective’ doesn’t signify a belief in an independent metaphysical objective reality but only the fact that these constraints (and corresponding sensory feedback) confront our activity as something that we can’t simply imagine away. For example, we can physically press our palms against each other, and feel how there’s nothing we can do to prevent the sensation of resistance. Then we can try to remember/imagine the same activity. We can easily see that nothing prevents our imagined hands from passing right through each other as if they are only holograms. We need to specifically add imagined resistance that constrains our imagining activity. This is a completely trivial observation but the distinction needs to be firmly held in sight at all times.
When we experiment in such ways with all parts of our body, gradually an inner experience emerges of something like a ghostly double of our physical being. There’s nothing mystical or fantastical implied in this statement. We are not talking about visually seeing from the side some imaginary figure that looks like us but about the remembered/imagined first-person experiences of our bodily life. For example, while our physical hands are held motionless we can imagine how we wave our imaginary arms. As such, we feel as a second being living entirely in imagination which wiggles out of the physical constraints. To perform an actual physical movement it is as if the imagined movement needs to be aligned with the physical kernel and guide the outpour of will. For example, after we wave our imagined hands for a while we can slowly move them such that they coincide with our physical, and then move them together – that is, our imagination should now activate also our bodily will and move together in lockstep.
With sufficient practice, alongside the glow of our physical kernel, we learn to know ourselves in imagined/remembered gestures and sensations of our physical life that can take any configuration and dynamics. It is very important to always feel the presence of the tingling physical kernel. Without it, our imagining activity quickly passes into a dream-like state where we drift in the relative nature of the experiences. This is also why the word ‘kernel’ was chosen. This is not to suggest that the physical kernel is the source of our conscious existence but only that it should always serve as the reference system against which more expanded states of consciousness stabilize and integrate.
Beyond bodily imagination. Inner space stretching.
With such exercises, we lift our being of imagination from the rigid constraints of the physical kernel and can experience fleeting phenomena that are replicas of actual bodily life, as if overlaid over the latter. Here we should also include all our thought processes and imagination that lift replicas of sensory experiences, especially those that include the production of speech. Our verbal thinking is like an imaginative simulation of physical speech. We wouldn’t be able to produce mental verbal phenomena were we not exposed to hearing of speech and had we not tried to produce sounds through our vocal tract. In this sense, the inner life of modern man consists predominantly of imaginative replicas of bodily life phenomena. All our accumulated experiences of bodily life serve at the same time as a palette for what form our inner activity can take. Imagination at the lowest level is simply summoning memory images of bodily and sensory life in novel combinations. But is it possible to explore degrees of freedom of our inner activity that do not simply produce replicas of bodily phenomena that we are already familiar with? This is indeed possible but requires effort and experimentation. This holds for all aspects of life – think of learning to ride a bicycle. We have no choice but to begin with inner activity that we are already familiar with, yet through it, we seek to discover novel degrees of freedom. We start with movements that we can perform in any way we are familiar with, yet we are open that some new kind of inner activity needs to be discovered. The familiar movements only bring us into the vicinity of a novel palette that can only be discovered through insight (not built through mechanical sequencing of existing degrees of freedom).
So first we have our physical kernel of sensory experiences against which we can exercise our will. Then we have the ability to summon memory images – ghostly replicas of bodily experiences and sense impressions. When these images are summoned as expressions of our dim intuitive life, and not intended to strictly represent scenes of past experiences, we call that thinking and imagination. Now we can use our familiar inner gestures but with the intent of exploring novel aspects of our inner life. One way we can do this is by building upon the video feedback exercise. There we used rotation – as if we turn an imaginary steering wheel – now we can also introduce scale.
Instead of a wheel or a disc, we can imagine a small sphere in our mind’s eye and once again picture rotating it left and right, trying to overcome the imagined elastic tension. Instead of trying to picture a sphere visually (which may be difficult) we can use our imaginary hands as if we hold the sphere and rotate it (we’ll see shortly why this is useful also for another reason). Then as we continue to turn the sphere left and right, we slowly begin to expand it. Soon we reach a point where the sphere is of a size comparable to our head and encompasses it. To make the experience more vivid we can slightly tilt our head left and right together with the rotation (this tilting, however, should be subtle). Then we continue expanding even further until the sphere encompasses our whole body – we can think of the Vitruvian Man. Now we can gently rock our whole body to get a vivid feel.
The expansion from head-scale to body-scale should be very carefully observed. In our age we are used to imagining and thinking about things through their visual and verbal representations. For example, even though we may be thinking of a galaxy, we usually hold in our mind a small image of it, say, the size of a plum. We can make a similar mistake when we try to imagine the sphere encompassing our body. Instead of expanding our imagination and picturing that we hold on to an encompassing sphere, we may be imagining a small picture of the Vitruvian Man in our mind’s eye and rotate that instead. This is why using our imaginary hands is useful – by stretching them out and imagining that we turn an encompassing sphere, it should be less likely to imagine a small third-person picture.
Then we can expand the sphere even further. Now we already hit a limit if we are willing to use our imagination to only replicate strictly bodily phenomena. If our imaginary hands are exactly the size of our physical, then we can never grasp a sphere larger than our bodily circumference. Now we are not suggesting to imagine grotesquely elongated arms but only to send out the rays of imagination into that which is far greater than us. Here we can learn from a baby that is asked “How big will you become?” and it responds by stretching its arms as if reaching toward an unknown future state. In the same way, when we reach for these spheres larger than our bodily, it is not something that we can encompass and control within our consciousness but more like sending ripples left and right, and chasing them with our attention into the infinite vastness of phenomenal space. This space should be felt not as something completely opaque but as something that our head-space opens and rays into.
Beyond our bodily sphere we can imagine that the whole room is tilting. It can help if we imagine that the room is a cabin on a rocking boat. Then we can reach for the tidal waves of the ocean, then the whole Earth, and so on into infinity. Remember that we are not simply radially expanding but using smooth torsion at each step.
When expanding, we shouldn’t think only of the surface of the sphere (like a shell) but the whole volume. In that sense, every larger shell also elastically swirls the space in which all smaller spheres are contained, and conversely, the smaller spheres elastically pull on the larger (remember the image of the steering wheel and rubber bands). Then we can reverse the process and wiggle back toward the head-scale. Then we can go even further and imagine the sphere shrinking more and more until it becomes an infinitesimal point that feels almost like a tingling spark in the head region of the physical kernel. Now the rotation feels as if we have pierced a compass through this point and turn it left and right.
This whole process can be compared to ‘stretching’ in inner (phenomenal) space. It’s like grasping our left forearm with our right hand just above the wrist and twisting in one direction. Then we move our grasp a little bit toward the elbow and twist in the opposite direction. Then we continue alternating the twists until we reach the elbow. In our case, we twist a form in our imagination going through the scales from the smallest to the largest. The scale should be gradually increased (or decreased when we do it in reverse) as if to make sure that there are no scales that have been skipped and left unstretched. It needs to be stressed once again that special attention should be given to the ‘inversion’ from imagining spheres that can fit in our bodily space, to encompassing spheres that we need to reach out to picture. In the former case we feel like an encompassing sphere that looks and reaches from the periphery toward the center, while in the latter, we reach and gaze from within toward the periphery.
Those skeptical may say that such an exercise demands an apriori belief in some metaphysical imaginative space that can be ‘stretched’. Such a belief, however, is completely unnecessary and even harmful. We don’t need to imagine and believe in the existence of any such space. All we need is to stretch our ‘imaginative muscles’, that is, to exercise our inner imaginative movements in probably unfamiliar ways. These inner movements are a simple fact of experience, no matter whether we believe in some ‘medium’ of imaginative space.
Even with this said, the contemporary mind may have difficulty taking the imaginative stretching for something of value because today it is felt almost by default that our inner world is only a personal simulation bubble existing within a wider world of a completely different nature. For example, in physicalism, we imagine that our conscious simulation arises from the processes in the brain, whose reality, however, is to be found on the ‘other side’ of conscious experience, in the real physical world with its forces, substances, and processes. Things are felt in a similar way in any belief system that sees our personal bubble of conscious experiences as resulting from some kind of technological simulation (i.e. the Matrix) or existing in a special kind of dimension/realm within a greater spiritual reality. In all cases, we feel like: “What’s the point of stretching our imagination when this is only an illusionary projection confined within our personal simulation bubble? Our imaginative activity by no means reaches into the real world beyond our bubble. We are being naive if we imagine that this activity somehow lives in the true space of reality, whatever that might be.” Yet, interestingly, even if that was the case, we would still benefit from stretching our imaginative movements. Why? Because we already use them instinctively in the first place to picture the ‘real’ world beyond our personal bubble. Yes, if we are honest in our self-examination we’ll easily recognize that when we think of the ‘real’ physical space outside our head or the ‘real’ spiritual space beyond our soul bubble, we already stretch our thinking rays into the expanses of the one phenomenal space that we ever know. In other words, we are simply being hypocritical when we call the imaginative stretching ‘naive’ since it doesn’t recognize that it is stretching only a personal bubble, while at the same time, we use the very same imaginative stretching to reach out and imagine a ‘real’ world beyond the bubble. Thus, when we do that stretching consciously, we may at least gain more intimate insight about what we otherwise do quite dimly and instinctively when we philosophize about reality.
After we become more proficient in rotating the spheres with the help of our imaginary hands, we can dissolve them (like ice melts into water, then vapor) and fill a larger volume of imaginative space. To make this more comprehensible, take some object in both hands and try to feel its form very well. Try not to focus so much on the object but on the tactile sensations in the fingers and the way they are constrained by the shape of the object. Try to feel the shape from all sides. Then put the object down and try to physically move your fingers as if you are still holding the object (this might be easier if you have chosen a simpler object, like a cube or a ball). The goal is not to imagine the object visually but to focus on the hands' movements as if the object is there. Interestingly, whether we want it or not, the intuition of the object will inevitably be there, much like we perceive nonexistent shapes in visual illusions. The next step would be to repeat that experiment entirely using our imaginary hands. Then we can imagine how our hands become fluid-like, as if every point of the fluid is like a sensitive finger and we touch the object from all sides simultaneously. Then we can expand this fluid and fill a greater volume of imaginative space, thus touching and feeling it as a whole. It is in this expanded hand-field that we can produce elastic torsions by moving some of the point-like fingers. One shouldn’t feel discouraged if this exercise feels utterly impossible at first. Our imagination is initially quite constrained in the ‘channels’ of our bodily experiences and thus we can readily imagine only movements that feel like memories of actual bodily movements.
After going back and forth along the scale gradient several times, we should feel a pleasant holistic glow, analogous to what we achieved with our physical kernel. Now, however, this glow is not felt as strictly localized in the physical kernel but in our ‘imaginative muscles’ through which we can make movements filling the whole of imaginative space. Just as physical stretching exercises are not an end in themselves but serve to increase blood flow, relax stiff joints, etc. – things that increase our mobility in life – so our imagined sphere rotations are not to suggest some fantastic objects but to expand the degrees of freedom of our inner activity and make us sensitive to it.
It is natural that we may feel inner resistance to such exercises. Usually, we are prone to philosophize about and criticize the exercises, which effectively keeps us locked at the sub-head scale, where we arrange small symbolic images and the sounds of our criticizing inner voice. We would rather rotate an external picture of the Vitruvian Man than become that Man and spread our imagination in all directions. The thought of performing such inner movements may make us feel insecure and even strangely embarrassed, not unlike the way someone who doesn’t dance feels about dancing. We are not used to knowing ourselves in such a light and would much rather cling to our old and familiar palette of inner movements. If we overcome this resistance, however, we quickly begin to discover how our inner being awakens, as if until recently it has been tied down and muted, manifesting only dimly and instinctively.
, and I almost was about to overthink it again. Fortunately, Cleric's and Ashvin's descriptions were suddenly so on-point after my experience that I can be pretty sure that I'm on the right path. Again, thank you everyone. 
