II broke off my night meditation a little earlier to switch to writing meditation. A few things suddenly seemed clear to me. The need to align my own body in meditation, to find the right position, which for me means following the movements, the tensions and relaxations of the muscles, the skeleton, the spine. Then observing the breath, inhaling and exhaling, the turning point of the breath, pausing to observe how the thoughts begin to loosen up, following them attentively to see where they go. Establish a connection with the outside world and the inner world. How far do my thoughts wander? Where am I now? Is this real? What part of reality is this? The world of fellow human beings, the world of work or interest, the interpersonal world, nature or daydreaming, fantasy, vision, the world of fear and missed opportunities, the world of regret and hope, the world of art and philosophy, music and architecture. These are a few of my worlds, others may go into completely different worlds, worlds in which I do not live, all those worlds that are explored in crime series, for example.
There is then a correlation between one's own body in meditation and the world of thoughts that roams in memory, and the world of thoughts that is relatively freely associated and jumps around unguided and unconsciously. Seeing this interplay and realizing that there is a connection is a first step towards deeper meditation.
This process of inner alignment serves to position one's own self in a larger context. I can now meditate on my different levels of existence: my material body, my living body, my emotional world, my thought world, my intellectual world and the world of spirituality. I can meditate on my individual senses, the outer and inner ones and how they interact and what kind of experiences they have brought and how I can recall these experiences in my memory. I can meditate on how these experiences combined with desires and fears, with expectations, goals and conventions, develop them into a plan - a LIFE. After all, this life that I live is embedded in a context, the context of my own body, my own soul, the world in which I live and my environment.
This level of life is pure immanence. Everything flows together here, it is fed by consciousness, consciousness is its original source, it cannot be anything else, only here can life be experienced. But consciousness must now be understood broadly. It is not my reactive, unreflected, thoughtless associating and being caught up in patterns, compulsions, habits, desires and suffering, but it is consciousness as that which underlies all my experiences, an experience of consciousness as consciousness in itself. I have consciousness that fills with content, I can focus and direct, align and clarify, I can empty my consciousness and invite the new. Consciousness is the level of my existence, where my existence, my life, is constituted. Consciousness in itself, when it individualizes, makes life possible. This is the secret of the soul, the relation of Brahman, Purusha, Atman, Prakriti.
Many people around me talk about a psychic being and how it relates to the divine, to the soul, to one's own person and identity. As a philosophical concept, Aurobindo is not entirely clear to me, but I develop an intuition in meditation as to what it could be. It is that being which, for example, reflects on its own conditions in meditation and holds them together in an individualized way, that which underlies my ego, that which recognizes that the world of experience of the outer senses is an illusion, that which recognizes that a universal principle of individuation in the form of a soul or Atman or Purusha is the condition of my existence. That being which glides through the different planes of being, moves in the worlds of yoga, transcends time and space and understands the barriers of life and death as permeable. This seems to me to be the psychic being.
