Volume 11 nr.13
Every good path leads to the groundless openness
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Text Satsang
From a talk in Gouda, May 12, 2010
Self Meditation (2). The necessary intensity of consciousness
Douwe: With self meditation your internal self-consciousness should have a high intensity, because otherwise you easily go off to sleep. When I speak about the deeper meditative stages, many people become either semi or fully asleep. This is a typical reaction, because you experience less and less forms so there is no material for creating images. You go towards an emptiness and for most people emptiness means sleep. It’s very important for you to remain conscious in that situation, in the movement back to the same open state of dreamless sleep.
Visitor: Can you become aware of that dreamless sleep state?
That’s what you are, as self-being without form, without definitive qualities. Can you be aware of that? It’s only possible when the intensity of internal self-consciousness is incredibly high. Again, if the intensity is not high enough, the clarity of the consciousness disappears. In your normal waking state it’s not a factor, because all kinds of hard things come at you. These things are so rough that you certainly should be aware of them. If you aren’t, you end up running into a wall or under a car. Then you notice the coarse world, which is relatively easy to be aware of. In this regard it is said that you are incarnated into a gross material body, in a coarse material world, in order to achieve a clearer consciousness. Of course it’s good to become more aware, but the best thing you can learn is that your own being-awareness does not depend on the coarse material condition. Otherwise you remain stuck in it. It’s about the quality of your own self-being as consciousness, as being originally free.
So self-meditation is an always increasing return to yourself with a higher intensity of consciousness, an openness, an expansion and release of forms and qualities, remaining perfectly clear without concentration, without tension.
Find out what that means: a totally open, but very lucid, highly-intensive awareness. I referred to the sphere of the air frost with little sleigh bells. In a great crystal clarity you can tap everywhere and get clear notes: ting, ting, ting, ting – everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. Your consciousness with its crystal, diamond-like quality is everywhere – not concentrated somewhere. It’s about this quality, this high intensity of clarity. Within it everything is open. You go back into yourself and from there everything opens up. That occurs in the ongoing self-meditation. You remain internally aware of your inner clear consciousness.
There have only been a few for whom it truly continues. There have been lots of people here. Most are gone without having really picked up on the crystal clarity. Almost all are more aware, but when does it really break open? When the consciousness becomes so perfectly clear from inside-out that it rediscovers itself in the greatest clarity, independent of anything whatsoever.
The bodily clarity
In this development, all aspects of your life change, even your own physical sphere. In your reflexive experience the physical sphere will have the same qualities of clarity and tingling that I have mentioned. This means that your laziness goes away. This is important, because what would you accomplish spiritually if your body was very lazy. No, the quality of your body also becomes that of the crystal-clear consciousness. Then this quality no longer has anything to do with the physical condition of your body. That physical body has its own laws and its own development. There is a decline as you get older and there can be illness, and so on. At a certain point it doesn’t matter anymore, because you remain in your own self-being with that clear quality. And thus that also concerns the body. You notice immediately that in this way you have become independent, and are independent of your physical body. If you remain completely identified with your body, you know that all the vicissitudes of the body concern you too: now my body is sick and so I am sick; now I notice fatigue and so I’m tired. When you return to yourself and in a practical way become aware of yourself as a clear and spacious being-awareness, then you see that the physical sphere receives the same quality. Then you are no longer dependent on the material body. This means letting go of the old identity. Of course, the physical body continues to appear for as long as it lives, but you are no longer completely stuck there. You are the expansive being-awareness in which everything has a place.
The continuous affirmation
In order to allow this consciousness to become stable, at a certain stage you need to continually affirm it: this, this, this – constantly, constantly, constantly, as long as it’s necessary to do so. If you practice this meditation, then there is knowledge without doubt. If you don’t confirm in this way, then before you know it, you’re back again in the limited dualistic form of consciousness which we call attention.
By returning to yourself in self-meditation, besides relaxation there is also a change in the quality of your consciousness. Your consciousness becomes increasingly clear and more current, more spacious and open, more intense and alert, an increasing quality of crystals or diamonds. There is always more release, especially of the ego-centeredness. Everything opens up. And through remaining there, it becomes stable. Is that clear?
Internal reflexivity without distance
You spoke about reflexive consciousness …
Reflexive means that everything which appears in consciousness is reflected.
But that implies that there is still a distance.
Yes, but now it’s about how the reflexive distance disappears through drawing attention back towards yourself; through this you continuously merge with the perceived. Then there is a phase of an internal reflexivity without distance.
But then there’s not really perceiving anymore.
No, I already said: then there is a clear consciousness that is internally aware of itself without distance.
The construction of the world
Psychologists have demonstrated in many different studies what we already knew, namely that sensory perception always depends upon the individual situation. Of course there is the biological conditioning of the senses which can register only a portion of the spectrum of the available electromagnetic and sound waves. The psychological and existential situation also determines perception. A lot can be found about this in psychological journals, the Scientific American Mind (July / August) is great holiday reading.
“When we judge distances, attractive things appear closer than less attractive things.” When you’re thirsty, a bottle of water seems closer than when you aren’t thirsty. The distance to a gift certificate of $ 25 – is estimated to be less than a voucher worth nothing. Conclusion: how we see the physical environment, depends on what we want.
Other research shows that there is usually an overestimation of the slope of an escalating path that you wish to ascend. Skateboarders at the top of the hill, who are more anxious than others to descend, experience the slope as much steeper than the others do. Baseball players perceive the ball as bigger if they hit it well and smaller when they miss. Soccer players see the goal as smaller when they have missed than when they have kicked it in. Conclusion of the writer: there is no objective perception, being human means seeing the world through an ever changing lens.
Our conclusion is that every situation of perception arises from out of a field in which there appears to be a duality of the perceiver and the perceived, but that duality doesn’t exist. The perceiver and the perceived mutually determine each other. Self-being is thus determined by the internal and external conditions of perception. Thus it’s high time to become aware of the highest possibility of yourself as perceiver and also of yourself as free from conditions.
thegroundlessopenness 