Article by Mark
When it happens, there may come the State of Pause itself and the “dissolving” I have described before. Dissolving, lightness, a slight disorientation, pause, vanishing of the object of meditation for it was needed for only one purpose – to lead to The State. When the goal is achieved, there is no need to continue the Mind effort. You do not have to concentrate on anything…
By the way, just to illustrate the analogy, – Christian Hesychast uses the method of Our Father prayer and the Reverend Seraphim Sarovsky used to say about it:
“To feel Grace we have to pray and keep vigil (read – mantra and devotion, in terms of Eastern mystics). When with the help of the prayer you brought the state of Spiritual Holiness, you must quit the prayer”. Use it! I may express it the following way: Just imagine, you invited me for a cup of tea to your place. I came and I am waiting for you to offer me a cup of tea… but you keep sitting and muttering as an idiot: “Come, oh, come!..”. The same goes for God. What are you – stupid? If Lord came to you, enjoy the fruit of your prayer, give up the means when the purpose is achieved by this means!”.
It goes something like this, or maybe a bit different. That’s the way I remembered it. Hope, Christians won’t take offence on me…
About Patanjali… Having achieved the State you should not do anything. On the contrary, action may hinder the State and constant agitation of mind won’t let you deepen the State.
There is the other statement in Patanjali describing the same thing: “Meditation is when the left becomes right and the right becomes left”.
All my Yogi associates have racked their brains, thinking over this definition and having no understanding what the legendary and long-dead creator of Yoga Sutri meant them to get…
But everything is not that complicated… I have already written about this: at first, organs of sense start misleading the practitioner and I may hear the sounds from the opposite direction or get surprised why it seems to me that I am sitting facing the wall though I know for sure that I started sitting with my back on it…
Well, it is just occurs in the beginning of the practice. In few years it usually gets settled.It seemed important the forefathers to clarify the starting processes for us; they knew we would be able to grasp the further aspects with practice as long as we have proper start, however partially or controversially they may have described it…With further personal practical experience, disorientation in the space is not the only phenomenon you may be faced with… sometimes you realize the more delicate things lose their shape and verge… Who are you? What are you? Where are you from? Is that you sitting on the sofa or you are a sofa that is occupied by…There is one story about a butterfly and Ch’uan Chi… Ch’uan Chi sees a butterfly in a dream and he wonders whether he is Ch’uan Chi who is seeing a butterfly in a dream, or whether he is a butterfly flitting over the sleeping person who is having a dream, in which he can’t understand who is flitting around… That is a fable about the intensity of the practice and about conscious meditation even during the sleep…
Well, what do you expect? Remember that childhood play when you interlace fingers on both hands and then turn your hands with palms facing out, and then you try to fiddle the finger your friend points at? That child’s play was enough to completely confuse your poor brain. And that confusion is nothing compared to deeper meditative states, with their sensations of heat or trembling of some parts of your body with activated Qi energy, or with visions produced by release of tension from our brain cells as our brain is still getting used to work properly under new conditions. There is only one thing to be advised: sometimes it takes years of patient waiting and you should not pay attention to all the phenomena and visions. Just practice the State…
And then … If you have been practicing the State regularly for quite a long period of time, then your breath stops. You just do not wish to breathe. From that moment on we may speak about more or less complete State. The practitioner experiences an awakening of new (extrasensory) organs of the world perception and he starts to see the world differently…
I would like to remind that WCZ Qigong calls this stage “The Pause”. To prevent suffocation, the 2nd stage practices special skin breath exercise. On one hand, it intensifies the natural skin function of absorbing the oxygen; on the other hand, it slows down your metabolism so you need less air.
With further practice and getting into deeper State eventually your heart stops beating – this is the fourth basic Wu Chan Zhong Qigong Stage and it is called “The Stoppage”. In several minutes after that the Soul may go out of the Body through Zhong-Mai channel. The body does not die, Qi “make the blood circulate” as Chinese Masters say. Temporarily energy assumes the cardiac function.
Soul also possesses its own organs of perception.
Thus, the State of Meditation is:
First of all, an instrument to develop understanding of the world and oneself, while the “Soul” is still within the body; and our perception and awareness expand due to the opening of extrasensory organs of perception, due to regeneration of Great Brain “pixels”, and due to training and development of consciousness…
During the States of “Pause” and “Stoppage” our Nature starts changing greatly.
Taoists attribute it to the development of the Immortal Embryo when what we call Soul or Spirit starts transforming into the higher and more complex energy and information structure.
At the same time our Mind clears itself from attachments, which are progenitors of all our agitations and anxious thoughts about the past or the future. And so, we find ourselves in the new place, we are coming to “here and now” and the clouded thoughts are replaced by the new enlightened Awareness. It may be the state of enlightenment “not yet for all times”, but just a satori – single, short illuminated blooming understanding, leaving the adept as soon as he quits meditating…
Second, when the Soul reaches certain level of development, it acquires the ability to consciously go out of the body and start getting to know the world and itself… it learns and develops; it remembers, for example, the skills learned during previous lives; and the person gets quite the different quality of awareness… It is the true liberation called by many cultures Salvation, because mastering the practice allows to achieve such levels of Soul development that after the body’s death the Soul consciously enters other worlds of existence, without losing self-identity or acquired knowledge.And that is the purpose of the development, the purpose of practicing the State and all the Great Systems, because our Soul is what we are.
The Soul development and its further transformations, training, and changes is called SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT.
You may be a good person, but it mainly reflects the Mind function, the effect of your upbringing, your affections and so on. Spiritual development is something completely different…
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I can share my personal experience…
Once, few years since time I began practicing, I started to realize that I “see” (perceive) some Being inside of me. It started to come alive. You may call it whatever you wish – an Immortal Embryo, Soul or something else…
And I clearly felt that if It was living off my “silence”. And I understood it was wrong to say that spiritual practice (so called “real” Qigong) starts when the Soul goes out of the body and acquires the ability to develop and learn…
Spiritual practice starts from the first moment, once you relax and close your eyes. Even at that moment, even during your very first and timid meditation, you start the processes contributing to transformation of the Being within you.
Awareness, Consciousness, Soul… Where is the border between the one and the other?… How all these should be named, differentiated and categorised? In China they name “all these” with one word, one philosophic category: Shen.
Due to what sources does Soul develop? Due to energy development? Due to development of the perception sharpened by meditation practice? Due to gradual and consecutive replacement of an overshadowed mind by our True Nature?
Once, you will come across this phenomenon and find Something within you.You will feel as if this Something is feeding and growing. This is what spiritual growth is, the growth of the Soul, growth of the New Life inside of you. This Something lives on what is produced during the “quiet state”. For example, when we are doing the exercise Yang-Qi. That is why the Masters say Yang-Qi to be Rearing of Life and Qigong (or any higher practice) to be the skills (art) of Life Rearing (fostering). Everything is lucid, fair and simple. It can hardly be expressed better…
The statements like: “real practice will start only after we are able to drive our Soul out of the body”, – are simply harmful. They generate complexes, stress and an urge to speed up the events; they prevent us from appreciating our present quality true worth; they create the idea that now everything is difficult and bad and we do not have any progress, but some day in future there will be some result…
But it is not true! We already have everything in us. Since the very first moment of practicing we practice the good and proper thing. And in a proper way. When I realized that everything was going on in a right way for me at that very moment…I just calmed down.
Now I am confidently telling you: your Soul will go out when your Being grows stronger… When Zhong-Mai