If you have
made some progress with your initial jogging, you might even start training for
a marathon. During marathon training, during long runs, after one or two hours
at the earliest, you often reach a point where everything suddenly becomes
easy. You float effortlessly above the ground. No pinching, no pain, just
relaxed ease. The cause of this feeling of happiness is the endorphins. They
are something like endogenous drugs, not unlike opium. Endorphins are secreted
by the body after a certain state of exhaustion to overcome it. What
became difficult is suddenly very easy and you just want to run. Keep on
running, keep running. Runners call this happiness the runner's high.
Even with our exercises of concentration, mindfulness and meditation it will
take some time to find your way in, to find your path. Also, in meditation,
after longer training, similar experiences as in running occur, where a border
is overcome and everything seems to be very easy and simple. Again, these
feelings are caused by the body's substances, such as the neurotransmitters
anandamide and oxytocin. This high feeling lasts, like any drug high,
unfortunately not too long. Some consider this high feeling to be the goal. But
the hardest part is yet to come.
Long-distance runners know not only the Runner's
High, but also the "Man with the Hammer". The performance drops
rapidly, you can't go on, you want to stop immediately. The reason for this is
that our most important fuel, the carbohydrates, is completely used up. Like a
hybrid engine, our body must now switch to another energy source, fat burning,
to supply energy. Even during a longer meditation, we experience moments again
and again in which our body or our mind rebels. They want to stop, do something
else. As with running, you have to overcome your "inner bastard". We
will succeed in doing this better and better over time, but only until we meet
the hammer man here as well. This time our mental energies are exhausted.
However, no special drinks or gels, which every long-distance runner carries
with him/her on long or decisive runs, help us here. We cannot absorb the
additional energies we need in meditation to overcome this limit from outside.
They come from our inner being, from our center, from silence. To overcome this
limit, we must learn to use the energy of silence.
To reach silence, we must become silent. We must learn silence, the
inner silence. The louder we are, the more energy we consume. If we become
calmer, our thought stream ebbs away, our energy level
rises. Long before the discovery of brain waves and EEG, Patanjali wrote in
his Yoga Sutra: "The highest state of consciousness, the state of yoga, is
the coming to rest of the ever-changing mental patterns. Patanjali also
described how to control these mental patterns, the brainwaves, and bring the
mind to rest. This practice is called Abhyasa in his writings and means
constant practice, constant engagement with something, training and
habituation. All exercises to control the thoughts and
calm the mind are Abhyasa. So, we can do something ourselves to progress on our
way to silence. Let's not them stop us. Let's get on with our exercises.
Let's stay on the path.
"Know thyself" once stood above the oracle of
Delphi, the most important sanctuary of ancient Greece. "Know
thyself" doesn't sound very mysterious. If this is the solution, finding
the answers may not be that difficult after all. After all, we know us very
well. Even if we fool ourselves here and there, decorating something,
sometimes leaving something out, in principle we know very well who we are. If
we are asked about it, we can answer without much hesitation. We know our name,
our place of residence, family status, profession, our likes and dislikes, our
strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, what we think we know so well is only
our ego and not our Self. We are not born with an ego. Our ego is built and
constantly changed through our interaction with the environment, through
education, experiences and knowledge. The first experiences and realizations like I am my body, this is my name, I am a boy, I am a girl, I am smart, I am
stupid, I am this or I am that, shape our psychic identity. Many of these
assumptions are subjective and some are simply wrong. Yet we consider this
constructed identity, which we call our ego, to be an unalterable fact.
It is not the ego that makes our experiences. The ego itself is one of our
experiences. It is closely connected to the suffering and pain in our lives,
because it shows us what loneliness is, how painful it is to be separated from
everything. Because with the I also the you, the other and the others come into
being. We separate ourselves from our environment and lose our oneness with the
nature that surrounds us. Because we do not know what we really are, we wander
around as lonely, separated egos, fearing for our safety. We suffer because we
equate the death of this illusion with our death. We are not our body, we
are not our perceptions, we are not our feelings, we are not our mind and we
are not our ego. We recognize ourselves when we look in the mirror. But the
oracle does not say "Know you", but "Know your Self". To do
this, we have to look beyond the surface.
"Know thyself." We will not find the answers to the question about our meaning of life
in the outside world, not in holy scriptures, not in philosophical or scientific
books, not in an oracle. All answers to all our questions are ultimately to be
found within ourselves. We do not need an oracle. We are the oracle. All the
answers lie within us. When we find ourselves, we are at the gate to a higher
dimension. We are at the source of all information. To get there, we
have to detach ourselves from the identification with our ego, we have to
recognize and accept it for what it is: an unstable, transient mental
construct, an illusion, albeit an extremely useful and indispensable one.
The ego is the last barrier on our path to the Self. This barrier is strong.
The path to the Self is not a wellness holiday. The ego does not want to lose
its dominance. It will resist with all its strength, it will show us heaven, it
will play enlightenment to us, but it will also confront us with our deepest
fears. Losing ourselves is our greatest fear. That is why many people stop at
this point and stop in front of the barrier. But we do not destroy our ego, we
still need it. We leave it only for a short moment and return to it. But after
our return, the ego is no longer our master, but our friend. Then we will
evaluate and define ourselves completely differently than we have been used to
up to now. We have to break through the barrier alone. No one can help us with
that. Everyone has to find his own Self, his own answers.
The closer
we get to silence during our meditation, the higher our energy level becomes.
Energy is vibration, is light and sound, is life. Besides high feelings, strong
feelings of happiness and deep calm, sooner or later we will also have
spiritual experiences. These experiences are often described as experiences of sound
and light. For most who get there at all, this is the endpoint on their path
of meditation. But there is more, you still can go on. Deep into silence, to
the source of all information, to the gate to a higher level of consciousness.
No matter can pass through this gate. Eternity cannot be entered by the
transitory, not even for a brief moment.
How can this transition be described? Let us (once again) come back to our consciousness process. Everything's
IPO. We started with the input, with our concentration exercises. The more we
concentrate, the more our mind focuses on fewer and fewer objects, the more we
withdraw from our outside world, until we finally arrive at emptiness, the
nothing, and our sense of space disappears. Our consciousness leaves the space
and we feel infinity.
Through mindfulness, through processing the perceived information, we influence
our sense of time. The more we simply accept information as it is and the less
we process it, i.e. analyze and interpret it, the fewer facts are generated,
the slower time passes until it finally stops completely. Our consciousness
leaves time and we feel eternity.
During the meditation, we wait for the output. We go into silence and put our
focus on infinity. We wait for the experience of spacelessness and
timelessness, of infinity and eternity. We wait for the experience of
potentiality, of pure consciousness.
As our IPO slows down, our mind slows down as well. When we are immersed in
deep meditation and the consciousness finds nothing to hold on to, it ceases to
be conscious of "something". This can be measured as a change in
brain waves via an EEG (electroencephalography). We relax deeper and deeper and
get further and further into our inner being. The condition resembles a deep
sleep. It is difficult at first and requires a lot of training to stay in this
area for a long time without falling asleep. Advanced meditators can put their
body into a deep sleep state while their mind remains awake. Brain scans show
that the brain processes energy with very high amplitudes. In these deep states
of meditation, meditators often report spiritual experiences.
If we go even further with our meditation, the frequency of the brainwaves
rises abruptly into the range of gamma waves. They are associated with mystical
and transcendental experiences, experiences of fusion, the feeling of universal
knowledge and loss of the sense of ego. A special feature is the
synchronization of gamma waves over large areas of the brain. The large-scale
synchronization of the EEG waves in the gamma range could be an indication that
the outer and inner worlds merge with each other during this meditation phase.
In a global synchronization of gamma waves, all perceptual contents would be
merged into a unified whole. All separation is overcome. The perceiving and the
perceived become one. In studies on meditators, it was found that the gamma
activity in the EEG increases through long-term meditation and is particularly
pronounced in long-term meditators with more than ten years of practice. It
takes a lot of practice to keep your consciousness in a state to receive clear
perceptions at this level. Usually, they only flash up briefly, like a shooting
star, a tiny moment and yet so bright and clear, before you sink back into a
kind of deep sleep. For yogis, this state is the fourth state of consciousness,
Turiya or Samadhi, along with waking, dreaming and deep
sleep. We experience pure consciousness and the perceiver becomes identical
with the perceived. Breaking the connection between body and mind, pausing the IPO,
experiencing oneness, potentiality, is the final goal of our meditation. It is
the state of pure consciousness. It is the state of conscious death.
We change our state of consciousness. All life functions are maintained. However, the meditator can neither
actively nor passively come into contact with his environment at these moments.
His consciousness has left the dimensions of this environment, our space-time.
In religious studies and psychology, this transition is often called "ecstasy".
This term comes from the Greek and means "to come out of oneself" or
"to be beside oneself". But we do not float away as a thin mist, as
something subtle. We have not changed our position in space-time. But space and
time no longer exist for us. Sensations in this state are very difficult to
describe because we are separated from our physical perception apparatus in
these moments. All perceptions such as colors, sounds, smells, space, time and
feelings seem to merge into a single sensation, to become one, inseparable,
timeless, boundless. We experience directly, without detours via sense organs.
This also explains reports according to which blind people could
"see" during such an experience. The visual experience cannot be
explained by a restoration of eye function. Those affected describe their
environment in great detail and precision. The blind can see and the deaf hears again, light and sound. This only remaining sensation is no longer a sensation,
it is pure being, it is awareness. All thoughts have disappeared, all is
knowledge, all is light. We learn what we really are. The truth lies outside
our mind, we can only grasp it as pure consciousness.
In summary, this experience consists of the following sensations, each of which
can be differently pronounced, and which are not experienced as individual,
successive sensations, but as something unified:
- Light
perception
- Perception
of speed
- Timelessness
- Spacelessness
- Feeling
of happiness
- Omniscience
The
experiences are always subjective and individual. Such an experience is
timeless, it always lasts only a moment in which everything happens at once,
everything is experienced at once and still, every moment feels like an
eternity. These experiences are not easily comparable with the experiences of
our physical perceptual apparatus. It is the experience of potentiality, the
source of our life. We can only experience it when we are separated from the
limitations of our physical perceptual apparatus and the filters and
interpretations of our intellect. When our IPO has come to rest. When the
"in-form" has become formless again and we realize how and what it
really is.
Time is racing past us. We believe that it always runs from the past into the
future. But this is an illusion. When we are sitting in a standing train and a
train is passing the siding, we often have the impression that it is we who are
moving; that our train is moving. We are always in the present, moving very
slowly, bound by space and time. The flow of information always flows from
potentiality into reality. Potentiality is the future, the potential of our
universe. Our existing universe, space-time, is the past. The present is the
gate, the transition from the future to the past. This expands space-time, the
past, and we have the feeling of being driven into the future. But we'll never
get there. We always stay in the present. It is our consciousness process, our IPO,
whose action gives us the feeling of time. If this process slows down, less
information is processed, less past is created, and time slows down as well.
When our IPO comes to a halt, the future, present, and past flow into each
other, time stands still. We experience all past and all future in an extended
present. Past, present, and future are one. This is eternity.
Our ego is only a transitory product in space-time, i.e. it is
local, bound to space and time. By overcoming our ego, we overcome space-time
and experience non-locality. Non-local means that something is not in a certain
place within our space-time, but is space- and timeless, i.e. it exists
everywhere and at any time. Non-locality is a characteristic of the transition
to the supramental level. For example, we receive signals from other people or
events across all temporal and spatial boundaries. Here we have access to all
information, to all facts ever generated. We can encounter past places,
deceased people. We discover Long-forgotten memories in which we can see the
smallest details. All past, all facts are stored here, as well as potential
information, future possibilities. So, omniscience does not mean factual
knowledge, anything that can be read in books or Wikipedia, but rather a kind of
inner knowledge, a universal understanding. A knowledge, an understanding,
which we do not attain within space-time and therefore cannot communicate.
There are no permanent conditions. The higher states of consciousness require a
lot of energy, so we can only stay there for a very short time. These moments
are probably extremely short, but they seem longer to us. This is possibly
related to the time dilation described by Albert Einstein. During meditation,
we increase our energy, we absorb the released energy of the slower IPO, and
the time dilation (from the Latin dilatare, "to stretch", "to
postpone") causes all the internal processes of a physical system to seem
to run more slowly the closer one gets to light energy. Once we reach the light
energy, time stands still. A tiny moment, too short to be experienced in
space-time, becomes a timeless sensation for the meditator. However, we must,
whether we like it or not, return to the lower energy states of consciousness.
Awakening is not a fixed endpoint. Just as we awaken from sleep and yet always
fall back to sleep, we must also return to our local life in space-time after
the meditative awakening. When our consciousness returns to our reality, it
changes, so to speak, from the infinite information of the supramental level to
the small, finite memory of a USB flash drive, which we represent with our body
in space-time. That's why it's rather difficult for consciousness to return, it
doesn't like to return. A small part of the experiences we bring back from our
trip is stored on our USB flash drive and remains as a memory.
We can live on as awakened people and pass on our experiences, our images.
However, we are more likely to meet with rejection in our Western culture
because these images do not fit into the limited materialistic world view.
Since we only have the visual language to describe what we have experienced, we
have problems putting what we perceive into words and all those who are not
awake have problems understanding what is described. Those who know,
understand, they do not need to be described. Those who do not know do not
understand, it is impossible to describe it to them. I think the supramental
level is the next stage of evolution, the next level of consciousness. On the
higher levels of consciousness, the right action arises automatically. There, man
does not need commandments and prohibitions. He acts from an inner insight that
shows him the right way. Humanity has reached the shores of this plane. We are
in the process of networking our outside world via the Internet and connecting
to the large shared knowledge stores, the clouds. We move from individual
knowledge to global knowledge. The networking of our inner world and the
connection to the "cosmic cloud" is still to come. In this way, we
move from subjective consciousness via a global to cosmic consciousness. We are
already in contact with this plane. But we almost always are unconsciously and
only have access to a small part of it, our "personal user area". We
stand in front of the gate and don't see it. Some have been exploring this
transition for a long time, and more and more are starting to do so. Man will
populate this plane because that is where his home is. But then it is no
longer the person who is stranded on the shores. The person behind the gate is
no longer the same as the person in front of the gate.
Our first marathon is usually the most difficult one. Just as for a marathon, we can also train the
transition to the supramental level. Many, especially the runners among us,
will find a marathon much easier, but for the experienced meditators, it may
seem different. In a marathon, you can check by distance and time whether you
have reached the finish on time and whether you can call yourself a finisher.
The marathon is a run in the outside world. Meditation, on the other hand is a
run in the inner world. There are no objective measuring instruments here. The transition from our outer to our inner
world, which takes place during meditation, is expressed in an EEG as a transition
from the so-called beta brainwaves into the range of alpha and theta waves and
in deep meditation even beyond that. Brain scans, for example using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a nuclear spin procedure, can be used to
prove that regular meditation enlarges and changes the brain. But the
experiences on the mental level cannot be reproduced on the physical level. On
our inner course, there are no objective finishers, there are always only
subjective finishers. In meditation we cannot measure the result, we can
only experience it. Hints for such an experience were given in the contribution
of transition. But those who have this experience do not need these clues. If
we stand before the gate, we'll recognize it. No knowledge, no insights and no
experiences in life are as certain, as unambiguous, as immovable as the gate.
When we see it, we will recognize it, we will remember. It's the same place we
started from, it's pure consciousness, it’s the conscious death, it`s our home.
We awake, we come home.
"One
wants to live without aging, and in reality, one aging without living."
(Alexander Mitscherlich, psychoanalyst)
When I ask
someone about his age, I always get a number in response. But how does he know
what age I meant? Or does everyone assume we only have one age? I suppose
so. But, we have more than one age. We
have three ages.
The first
is the chronological age. It describes the section of time we have already
spent on time. It is the common temporal age, which is calculated according to
the date of birth. We celebrate our birthdays and when we are young, we wish
their number to be larger (finally grown-up) and when it is large, we wish it
to be smaller again (to be young again). It is always past, is fixed and cannot
be changed. Although completely meaningless, it is the age to which we pay the
most attention. But no matter how hard we try, we cannot influence it, we
cannot change it.
The second
age is the biological age. It corresponds to the present and describes the
state of the body. It influences and limits our life span. It can be measured
and often there are significant deviations from chronological age. One possible
method of measurement is to determine the length of the telomeres. Telomeres
are the ends of our genetic threads, the chromosomes. The telomeres are
structural elements of the DNA, which are responsible for its stability. With
each cell division, they shorten until they fall below a critical length and
the cell stops further cell division or triggers active cell death. In contrast
to chronological age, biological age can certainly be influenced, i.e. it can
be slowed down, in some cases even turned back slightly. The methods used to do
this are often found under the term anti-aging. Of course, we can also
accelerate it. In fact, this is what we do best. Decisive for our biological
age is our lifestyle, especially nutrition, exercise and relaxation. Our modern
lifestyle with fast food, predominantly sedentary work and constant stress
accelerates the biological age enormously. Medical advances can extend
chronological age, but not a healthy, full life.
The third
age is the spiritual age. It corresponds to the future. It is the age of wisdom
and knowledge. Here most people achieve what they want for their chronological
age. They stay young and hardly age at all. In contrast to chronological or
biological age, a high age is desirable here. For here a high age does not mean
decline and death, but development, experience, and knowledge. Just like
biological age, we can also influence our spiritual age through our lifestyle.
Decisive for this are our thinking, compassion, mindfulness, heartfulness or
meditation.
The
chronological age is simply the passage of time. The biological age is our
physical/material development and the spiritual age is our mental/spiritual
development.
Although
usually negative, aging is always positive. If we did not age, we would not develop,
and we would not progress. Many don't want to age, but they also don't want to
spend their whole life as a newborn baby.
Strangely, we
pay the most attention to the age we have no influence whatsoever, namely the
chronological age. As you get older, you discover your biological age and start
to care more about your body. But we hardly care about our spiritual age. That
is a pity. At best we can slow down our physical decay, but we cannot stop it.
Instead, we should rather worry about our imperishable part and prevent our
soul from atrophying as well. To do this, we must age spiritually. Spiritual
aging is beyond all time.
It is not
so important how old you get, it is much more important how you get old.
