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May 31, 2012 - Clif High
38:53
20120531 – Clif High Audio #12
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Welcome to Cliff's Wujo.
A dojo is a place in which the martial arts are practiced.
A wujo is a place in which the woo-woo arts are practiced.
The woo-woo arts are all things officially denied and everything unknown.
Good morning.
It's 5.35 a.m. on May 31st, 2012.
Today's discussion is about the meditation techniques, I promised.
Finally gotten off my butt.
Here we go.
So, to refresh, a couple of caveats.
I have no way to know how it is for women.
Because there is physiology involved in the meditative practice, there are obviously divergent paths for the genders, simply based on physiology.
So, insofar as I know, from this point on, we'll be basically discussing how it is for males.
There obviously is some level that slops over because the physiology we're going to be discussing doesn't involve any kind of genitalia or anything.
However, there are areas where this does not hold.
So, the goal of meditation is to bring your key energy along after you die, so that when you die and you discover to your shock that your, let's just say the integral aspect of your being remains the same, that is to say, you are you, you will go to this place that, for lack of a better word, we'll call the bardo.
That's a Tibetan word, and it sort of vaguely in a half-assed way means kind of the same thing that the Catholics and the Christians consider with the term limbo, a place of transition, an intermediate way place, a way station.
Now, in limbo, I don't understand the details, and it's all complicated and crap, and it's really not even based on reality, so the details there are not pertinent.
Within the bardo, though, some of the details are very pertinent.
The nature of key is such that it can be, as an energy source, taken along with you after your consciousness separates from the body.
When the shoshona, the little energetic vortex that connects the core of your brainstem to the outer edge of the materium, is severed, the shoshona winds up and it goes to what we can think of as like the inside boundary wall of the materium itself.
And that's where the bardo is housed.
It's not necessary that there be space involved, because when you're dead, space doesn't exist.
You have no volume.
Anyway, so in the bardo, you can't move, you can't do anything except in a very limited fashion unless you take this energy along with you.
That limited fashion is what we can think of as like the basic universal mind.
It's the basic layer that allows the whole system to function.
Now, again, within the bardo, though, you have freedom if you have power.
It's a very interesting, and there's probably all kinds of speculation that goes along with it, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
And that is that you can indeed move around, you can shove people around, you can be a bully, you can get things accomplished.
There's no material stuff.
It's not like you have to pick up rocks or eat lunch or anything.
So you don't use your energy there.
The energy is all used within the interaction between, let's just describe it in a loose kind of a way, your personality and the personalities of the other beings you're going to encounter.
Bearing in mind, of course, that personality derives from your body, so it's a big difference.
In any event, though, to get there, once you're there in the bardo, to do anything, you've got to have this energy with you.
And it helps to have these physical batteries of key that you can take along.
And now we can get into the details of all of this.
Meditation works by basically joining the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system and allowing you to have conscious control over the sympathetic system.
Now, the differences between the parasympathetic and the sympathetic system basically come down to the automatic systems of the body that you think you have no control over.
In Western medicine, it's assumed you can't control your heart rate, your circadian rhythm, your liver function, kidney function, or any of that.
Now, this, of course, is untrue, as many tens of millions of people have demonstrated over history in the various areas of the greater Hindu Kush region.
You know, basically from Southeast Asia all the way over to the Mideast, the yogic centers of the planet.
Now, yoga works by the same way.
It also joins the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system and allows you conscious control of that.
Why is this?
It's because there are some parts of your combined system, the sympathetic system and the parasympathetic system, that you do have conscious control over.
The easiest one to grasp is breathing.
If you were to not think about it, you're still going to breathe.
Obviously, when you're unconscious and you're sleeping, you're still breathing.
But if you choose to, you have absolute, finite, in the now, millisecond by millisecond control over your breathing.
And since the breathing is your lungs and the entire respiratory system is both sympathetic and parasympathetic, this is your entree into ultimately being able to control all of the non-usually non-cogent systems, the automatic systems of the body.
And so yoga does this too as an approach.
So let's back up for a little bit and say that meditation is not the only way in which to gain this power and carry it with you.
Yoga, such as Hatha Yoga, intends to bring about through its term yoga union, yoga means union in Sanskrit, a union, a blending of these parasympathetic and sympathetic systems such that you have conscious control.
Because once you have conscious control, basically the idea is that you funnel off little bits of your key energy and you even do exercises to get more key energy and you pack them into these batteries that are built into your energy body that have analogs within your physical body.
See, it's real straightforward.
I mean, it's practical, in no way is it's esoteric because it's internal, entirely a subjective and conscious sort of thing.
But from my viewpoint, meditation and yoga and all of that doesn't even count as woo woo.
I mean, it's base science.
Anyway, so breath control as the method for getting control of the various systems of the body is all in aid for what is the second sentence in the science of yoga, which is this great book I keep touting, written, you know, 13,000, 14,000, 50,000 years ago.
We really have no way, no definitive way of ascertaining when the original information was put down for the first time.
Everybody says it's really the sutras of Patanjali, but Patanjali is kind of a made-up guy, like didn't really exist.
Patan is a path name or a tribal name for people in the Hindu Kush.
Patan is also a path name, a version of the Taoism.
And Jali is a title.
So this individual, well, that's not really a person's name.
But in any event, so the second sentence in the science of yoga goes to this idea.
And that sentence is yoga siti vitri nirodha, which is yoga is all about calming the disturbances of the mind.
Because yoga, which we can take also as the very first or codified form of getting into the meditation part of it, is at its core the same science expressed in different words.
Now in yoga, they approach it from getting at all the body positions.
In meditation, you choose one or two body positions and then you work on the internals of the mind.
So it's just various different ways of getting at it.
One way is to get the body so totally involved that it becomes a super fine tool, and the other way is to get the body out of the way.
So either way, you end up with the same state, which is that the mind becomes out of the way, the mind falls off, and what is called will is exposed.
Now, will is a funny thing, and we can have all kinds of discussion about the nature of will and willpower and so on.
But willpower is a very key component, ha ha ha, of the meditative process because it allows you to direct and channel the key itself.
Without using your will, the key will not separate, will not do anything other than it's entrained to do, which is to follow these specific pathways through your various bodies.
Now, willpower allows for the conscious redirection of key, the flow itself, into your storage areas.
And then it also allows you to practice those techniques that basically bash all the key into a little lump and store it.
Now, yoga, Taoism, Vipassana, Buddhism techniques, Jain techniques, any of the techniques for meditation other than those that I've seen that are obscured by the religions around them.
So, for instance, I'm not very impressed with the Catholic monk meditation techniques because they don't discuss the real point of meditation.
It's off all in this woo-woo, you know, airy fairy shit that doesn't really relate.
But all techniques that are solid and legitimate and based on the meditative sciences include some level of what we can call sensory entrainment as the next step.
So, let's assume that you're going to do a meditative approach and not a yoga approach.
Then you're going to sit down or you're going to stand or you're going to lie down.
You're going to find that position of your body that acts as your first attempt at sitting.
And then you're going to basically attempt to do a sensory entrainment along with your breath control such that the two become bound and then you can use your consciousness to move between the entrainment with the physical system of the breathing to the other systems, including your senses.
Now, this is where it gets a little bit tricky.
Not all meditation for males is the same.
My techniques, while they're valuable and they can work for everybody, and they're not mine, I mean, I didn't men or anything.
A, they're not the only ones.
And B, they're people that shouldn't use them.
They'll find easier, better ways.
And this has to do with this idea of the sensory entrainment.
So, you need to discover the, as a meditator, you need to discover and root out your particular bent or proclivity towards sensory balance.
So, for some people, they're very acutely sensitive in hearing, others are acutely sensitive in smell, others in visual cortex, others in sense through the skin, etc.
So, you find the balance of the senses and find out which one you are dominant in, and then it is usually easiest to use that sense as your entrance to the entrainment of the physical breathing systems into the other parts of the body.
So, let's just say that you were visually oriented.
Well, if you're going to do a meditative approach, then what you want to do is you want to remove the visual cortex from the process of basically cogitation or thinking.
But this is not thinking like sitting around and analyzing or listening to your internal dialogue or any of that.
It's a different kind of thinking.
But basically, the idea is that if you're going to take the meditative sense entrainment approach, you want to remove these senses.
And or you want to heighten them so much, but that's like a 20- or 30-year process.
So, it's very difficult for anybody in the modern age to take that approach anymore.
I don't know anybody doing it.
Mostly, we're using the approaches where we're eliminating the senses through entrainment.
So, all of the sensory entrainment has as its first goal in the process, the removal of the linguistic center of your mind.
Literally, the shutting down of the internal dialogue.
Because that internal dialogue is just a royal pain in the butt.
It gets in the way of any kind of real interaction with meditation.
And it's because most people have been.
Okay, I want to say most people, I'm speaking mainly to people in the Western tradition where you've been bombarded with energies that are very high frequency, and they have a tendency to hype and accelerate the linguistic center of your brain such that you're constantly drowning in this internal dialogue and can't get away from it.
If you were to live in a more remote environment, if you were in the African deserts, Australian deserts, if you were out in the water, on the ocean, if you lived in the mountains, this kind of thing, in a different form of life, you would find that this is not the case.
That you would not be struggling with trying to control the linguistic center.
The dialogue would be far less, there would be far less of the pulse going into it, and so on.
I'm actually of the opinion that the linguistic center overload, the internal dialogue, is what drives a lot of people crazy.
And they have no control over it.
And it is also affected by external forces, and I know the powers that be are really pushing on that.
Okay, so there's where we come down to the first half of this whole idea.
So I'm going to do a little real recap here.
Meditation is about building key and shoving it in these various parts of your combined energy and physical body.
Meditation about taking that key with you into death.
That's its goal.
Now, before you're dead, there's all kinds of benefits from meditation.
You're calm, you can think better, you can actually use your mind as a tool, it's no longer your master.
Same thing with the linguistic dialogue component.
It's a tool, it's not your master, you're not a slave to it.
You can control your body, you have willpower, so you can say, no, I don't want that second potato chip, I don't want any potato chips, I'm not going to eat your foul material, and not be affected by the demand cycles that the media is putting into you on that stuff.
You just shut it off in your brain.
And also, I'm quite convinced that my meditative abilities were what allowed me to completely cure the eczema and deal with other bodily issues.
So, there are a lot of benefits to having meditation as a daily practice.
Now, here's where we get to the actual bottom of your foot meeting the rough surface of the road.
Be advised that anybody on this planet that's male, I don't know about women again, that can sit and have two minutes a day of actual meditative experience is a damn god.
Okay, so two minutes a day is your goal.
All you want to do is to have actually sat in a meditative state for two minutes, and you will create so much key power that, you know, as they say, when you walk, countries will tremble.
It is very difficult to even get one or two seconds of actual meditative experience in the beginning.
And so, if you can achieve a second in sitting 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, that's tremendous.
And from that point on, you'll never ever let it go because you will have achieved a state of being that you will find so intriguing that you will want to replicate it constantly.
So, it's a very nice feedback loop to this.
It is very, very, very difficult, which is why I tell you this up front.
There is no shame to trying and failing.
The shame in my mind is to stop trying because you will succeed.
I've never met anybody that persisted that did not obtain this state.
And I know a lot of people through a lot of years on this that have gone into this.
The vast majority have given up and fallen away.
But those few that have kept at it, even aiming, all they're aiming for is two minutes a day.
Now, initially, it may take you a half an hour to sit and get nothing.
And then you sit and you sit and sit and sit and sit and sit and or stand, depends on the various different techniques.
And you can vary them.
You don't have to be static about it.
But you may work for weeks to get that first millisecond.
You might work for a year to get that very first second of meditative experience.
And it will change you forever.
First off, in the process of that year, you're going to develop willpower that will allow you to shove your fingers through solid wood and not care about the pain, if there is any, because you can block it.
But in the end, the willpower is a secondary issue.
It is an outgrowth of your persistence, not the actual.
It's merely exposed by the process.
It is not created.
You have willpower the instant you decide you're going to use it, and it can never be taken away from you from that point forward.
But it is only exposed.
It is not created by this process.
So, now, let's talk actual techniques.
How do you get this linguistic center out of your brain?
How do you get it to shut down?
First off, most people have not mapped their consciousness, and this is something you can do while you're learning to meditate.
In the process of sitting, your mind's going to go batshit.
It's going to say, I don't like this, get your ass up, it's going to cause bazillions of distractions, it's going to try and do everything it can to have this not occur.
Now, this is because during that part of your meditative process, your mind is not your own.
It is actually controlled by this subcomponent of your overall body and being, which is called your ego.
And until you take it away, the ego owns the meditative process because it'll bitch and moan at you until you stop.
Because basically, I mean, I've got to tell you this flat out up front: two things, cautions here.
Should have done it at the beginning of this: meditation will change you forever.
Succeed or fail, it will change you forever.
And the other caution on this is that the changes may not be acceptable to those around you.
You have to be aware of that.
When you change this way, you will change your personality.
Once you start, for instance, removing, once you start exposing willpower, you find that, well, people all of a sudden think you have a super forceful personality because you just don't put up with the bullshit.
You're not subject to as many of the waves and tides and tides and time, as they say, that move the social order around you.
You can stand with your mind centered and let the chaos flow around you and then decide how to act.
That sort of thing.
So, you will change.
Your friends will notice.
You will notice.
Family members will notice, and a lot of people will not like this.
And one thing that really won't like it is your ego, because it has to die in the process.
And it knows this.
Now, the fact that it's just a subset of yourself and all of this, and it's not real entity, and so on, is secondary to the thing, and there's no real death that way.
It's not like you're taking acid and your whole body's going to fly apart for five hours, and maybe you're going to recover.
So, anyway, back to the meditation techniques.
The ego is going to really bitch.
And so, during that period of the process, when you're just sitting and you're learning to sit, and that's going to hurt, there's going to be pains in your body all over the place.
Persist.
The pain is temporary, as we say in Raven Tribe, a moment of pain, a lifetime of pride.
So, persist through the pain.
It's just merely pain.
Change, shift.
You know, you go through these things.
You ought to see beginning meditation practices with lots of people where you get 30 or 40 people in a room, they're going to say, sit for even an hour.
The first, say, 56 minutes is all the shuffling and noises and little body movements and groans and aches and stuff, because it takes you a long time to learn this.
Those same 30 people, if they persist and they're in there a year later, will come on in for an hour's meditation.
It'll probably be more likely an overnighter.
And they'll sit, and within, oh, maybe two minutes, three minutes, the place is totally silent.
Maybe you'll hear the wind rustle the geese a bit if they're wearing the light geese in the summer.
But other than that, there's just no noise.
And that's because you have learned.
You've taught yourself the process of how to sit.
Now, the same thing is true of standing in the Nikung form.
I do not, for the early meditators, recommend the lying down techniques.
I've used them myself, but they're really more for the advanced adepts that know what they're doing because too many people simply fall asleep.
So now, the idea here, sorry about that, is to move and shift your consciousness around during the period of time that you're learning to meditate.
The moving and shifting of consciousness is not the goal.
We'll get to that in a minute.
This is something you can do along the way because it'll help you out.
When you're sitting there and your mind's bitching at you and your ego is saying, let's stop do this, my butt hurts, you know, scratch your left ball, your knee is aching, all of this kind of thing, pay attention.
Not to what it's saying, just disregard that.
Every single time a thought arises, every single time a word comes into your brain, simply ignore it.
Stand back from it.
That's your goal during this early part of time, is to allow yourself to feel the separation between you and the internal dialogue.
Once you've felt that separation, then you will realize how controlled you are by it.
Once you feel the separation, then it becomes possible to encapsulate this little thing and get it under your control and put a leash on it.
But part of the key part of this process, during the early sitting phase, when you're going to sit for that first half hour and not achieve any meditative goal, go for the other goal.
Map out your consciousness in a meaningful way.
When you see it, feel it, hear it, say a thought.
Try and locate that relative to where you are, such that you are able to discern that there is a difference between where the thought arises and where the you, that is you, is.
It sounds strange, but it's quite practical, quite true.
If you try that during those first few hours of sitting, you're going to save yourself all kinds of time later on because you will have mapped out your internal layout of your own consciousness.
And in that process, you're going to need to know that later on.
Okay, so actual techniques for sensory entrainment.
Again, we're going to use visual sensory input as the first part because most people are actually dominated by that simply because of the size of the visual cortex at the back of the brain.
Secondary ones are usually dominated by sound or voice.
Third by hearing.
And fourth by smell.
Fifth by, it's kind of a debate between the smell and the body sensations.
Anyway, though, there's two kinds of sensory entrainment, either through deprivation or through persistent refinement.
I've never gone the deprivation route.
There are people that go into chambers and all of that.
It's highly effective.
I've heard very good reports from it, but I have no experience there, so I can't speak to that.
Probably the same thing occurs, and it's the same result, and at some point you pick up, and these techniques that I'm offering would also work under those circumstances, but I can't say when or where.
In any event, the all-time favorite okay, so in refining senses, obviously the thing to do is basically what you do is you locate your willpower, and then you put the willpower on the sense in order to do an entrainment.
All the while, by the way, you're controlling your breathing, because your breathing is your route in there.
And so some people, when they start meditating, they'll start counting their breathing, and all they do is count their breath.
This is called the throwaway thought method.
That's where you sit and you focus all your attention every single time you sit on your breath.
And if a thought comes up, you have like a little mental finger and you flick it away and you go back to thinking about your breath.
And you just keep doing this.
And eventually, you will indeed reach a meditative state because you will have entrained all of your consciousness on to the joining of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which is your breathing, and you will have bypassed the linguistic center and all of that.
Many people find this very difficult to do, though, to maintain that level of focus.
So there's other ways, there's other techniques.
And also, I advise not staying with a particular technique for months and months and months.
When it starts to reach a certain point, I change and go into something else because it becomes less effective the more you pursue it because of the nature of the mind itself.
Bear in mind, the mind is infinitely complex.
It will run ahead of you and figure out all kinds of traps to have this not work because it is not in the ego's interest that this should occur.
And we can discuss the ego and relative to the powers that be and all of that crap later.
Anyway, so let's talk about refinement of a sensory situation.
In my case, we're going to use vision as the first of our technique.
And this is probably going to be the first of many, many, many discussions because the nuances involved in this we can go on for hours.
But persistence of vision is really a good one.
And this is the one that people use when they use candles or lights or they do the sun salutation and they meditate with the sun.
They are using persistence of vision as an entrainment tool.
Now here's what goes on.
In meditation, you'll usually see that most people have their eyes closed, and then they are variously controlling their body through breathing, etc., but the eyes remain closed.
I'm going to talk about another technique that's different in just a minute, but let's stick with the persistence of vision.
In order to do the persistence of vision with the eyes closed technique, many people start off by staring at a candle.
And it's not like they really stare at it.
You sit down, get yourself comfortable, get through all of the aches and pains of the body, you know, get your sitting bones good on the floor, all of that, or wherever.
Then you light, you got your candle lit, and so on.
And the idea with the persistence of vision candle approach is that you stare at the flame for a minute or so, and then you close your eyes.
And you will see that you still see the flame as though you were looking at it.
Only that image is going to fade very, very rapidly within a millisecond or two for the novice.
And then you'll open your eyes and you'll look at the candle again and you'll close your eyes again.
The goal at this point, the intermediate goal of this method of technique, is to maintain through sheer willpower that image in your mind.
That's the goal.
What you want to do is you want to look at that candle, close your eyes, and make sure you can hold that image from dissipating.
And you'll say, oh, that's not possible.
Well, I beg to differ.
It is certainly possible, and I know people, including myself, that can hold that image as long as we desire because we practice.
We've put in the years and the time on it.
And basically, the idea comes down to recreating in your mind.
Well, again, once again, you're exposing the willpower and telling, and the will is telling the mind, there's no real reason for this to dissipate.
The light does not exist here behind your eyes.
It's an image within your mind, so let's just hold it there.
And see, here's the beauty of all of this.
If you take this approach, in my opinion, there is more to be offered in the modern world this way than some of the other sensory linkups.
That is because you can use this image later on to do things like 3D modeling, interact with the solid platonic geometries that the sun presents and all these other cool things, which I don't know if the sun is presenting sound because I'm not a sound guy.
It may indeed have an analog there in that form of meditation that exists the same as the visual fellows.
But because I don't know, I can't say for sure.
So, again, a light of any kind is not necessarily going to be good for you.
You can get, for instance, a 10,000 looks LED light for vitamin D creation and look at that, and you will not be able to, after you've closed your eyes, you won't be able to see that image fade for I don't know how long.
And that's because the energy of the 10,000 looks lights is dominating the persistence of the vision.
This may work.
You may be able to then hang on to that image and learn to control it internally because you've sort of like totally irradiated your mind with it, and it'll persist naturally longer.
I didn't come up that way, so I don't know.
I came up from candles, and it's a different form of technique, trying to keep the flickering candle flame flickering and active in your mind.
The static light system with the 10,000 looks lights is being touted among some of the meditators in Eastern Europe and so on as being very effective, and it may well be.
There's all kinds of machine augmentation these days, none of which I've tried, so I really can't comment on.
But there's like headphones, sound systems, all of this sort of thing that do the mental entrainment.
I actually am of the opinion that you're captive to the machine then and are not in control, but that may be wrong.
I just don't know.
It's just a thought from the outside.
So, you've got your candle, you're looking at it, and you stare at the image.
And this is your basic goal for I don't know how long, but you'll know when you've achieved it because you'll be able to just wake up in the morning, open your eyes, look at the light, and so on, close your eyes, and hold any image you just saw.
Or if you want, you can call back up the candle and just hold it there.
And so, this, by the way, this process of the image retention will allow you to map out, once again, your consciousness, how it lays out, where everything is, and this kind of thing.
Because you will feel that image in a particular place, and I'm using words and we really can't, within your consciousness.
And you'll be able to shift that image around in your consciousness, and then you can go start exploring.
Once you've reached that level, you've actually started the process of entraining key in your body.
You're just not yet consciously directing that.
It's almost as a side effect, because the willpower will drain off a certain amount of key to keep supporting it.
That's one of its functions.
It's kind of like how the battery in your car continually drains the electricity to keep itself charged.
And so, it actually works at that level.
And in doing this process of meditation, you'll get enough key that other processes will become easier.
So, as much as a bitch as it is during the early days, when nothing is accomplished, and you just sit there and sweat, and you actually sweat, it's really hard work to do this.
At some point, the key starts cooperating because you cross this threshold.
And then it actually starts snowballing on you.
And it's really cool at that stage.
So, let's look at one other series, or a bunch of other specific, quick techniques that are like the persistence of vision.
Because I can talk about this for hours and hours and hours, days and days and days, and it means absolute shit.
Does not mean a damn thing because it is not sitting.
We're talking about sitting.
And so, once you listen to this, don't listen to it again.
Go and sit.
Then maybe listen to it again if you want.
But go and sit.
You're not going to get this by listening.
You're not going to get this by reading.
You've got to go and sit.
If you've ever seen the book, the read the book The Razor's Edge or seen the movie, there's a section in there where the guy who's been obsessed with enlightenment all his life and has been lugging along all these thousands of books and stuff and trying to get enlightenment through that approach finally grasps it all and he starts burning these very rare books for heat.
And he gets it.
At that point, he has reached this point of threshold of enlightenment.
And we are looking for that.
We're looking for a threshold experience, which you don't get listening to me.
You get by sitting.
So we're going to go through some real quick stuff and then I'll drop it off here and we'll pick it up some other time with some of the more secondary approaches.
But again, for early meditators, there are some other ways to achieve persistence.
And you can do it through control of your body.
Now, many of the control of the body things will cause you some physical pain when you start.
Again, persist through the pain.
It is merely pain.
It's not damage.
It's just your body saying, I'm very uncomfortable.
I've never had to do this before.
I think maybe something's going to happen to me.
Don't do it.
And so here are some of the things you can do.
You can use specific breathing techniques where you count your breaths.
You can use specific breathing techniques where you breathe through one lung and then into the next.
You can use techniques where you hold your nose on one side to force the air through the other side that is not dominant.
I need to get into that at some point.
Bear in mind the dominant parts of your body, the two halves, swap every 90 minutes.
And you can control that.
It's another way of controlling your body.
One way I really liked it, I really loved in the early beginning, although it hurt like hell, was to put the eyes to the bridge of the nose with the eyeballs open.
That is to deliberately cross your eyes and look at the bridge of your nose.
And when you do this, after you've achieved that and it hurts like hell and you're in a cross-eyed state, you stay in a cross-side state, and then you gradually, slowly, agonizingly slowly, lower your eyelids until only one quarter of your eye is exposed.
This technique is an extremely powerful one.
What many people don't recognize is that because we are actually energy bodies and energy is flowing through and we only think we have physical atoms and stuff, that it is true, and it seems really stupid to say so, but the yogic fellows discovered that if you put your body into certain positions, there are certain energy flows that are created.
Duh.
Basically, what you're doing is tuning your antenna and allowing those energy flows to reach your consciousness.
And so, one of these things, the eyes to the bridge of the nose, is a very specific technique that creates a specific arrangement of consciousness in your brain.
It's actually a brain-effective process, as you will discover if you do it for a half an hour, and then stop.
That first half hour you'll just, actually, probably the first few minutes if you're just trying it for the first time ever.
Okay, so we've got eyes to the bridge of the nose.
We've got specific breathing techniques.
There's even breathing techniques where you put the two thumbs on the abdomen, one at the base of each of the lungs, and attempt in turn to push each thumb out individually through your breathing, not through your diaphragm.
Other things are diaphragm-specific breathing techniques.
Then there's the body positions.
Now, the body position approaches go all the way through the yoga sun salutations, through all the various different mulahardra and other chakra-enhancing positions.
But they also the body technique positions include the things like the Taoist forms of sitting.
There's various sitting techniques.
All of these things can be looked up, by the way.
I'm not going to go into them.
You can just put in Taoist meditation sitting techniques, and you'll see lots of different examples.
But some of the body position things that are really interesting, besides, you know, contorting your limbs to create various different flows through the joint areas.
The joints are an interesting part of the body because how the key flows through them.
But there's also this other thing.
And if you want to look it up, it's spelled M-U-D-R-A.
And it's mudra, mudra, whatever.
It's a yogic technique that basically describes, in a general sense, putting the body in specific technique, in specific positions to create specific mental effects.
Now, the mudra, though, are very refined.
They're at the apex of this because they're usually hand gestures and even can go so far as to be merely eye-lid arrangements.
You simply move your eyelid at a very subtle level and create a different effect in your consciousness.
But the hand techniques of mudra have to be investigated at some point.
It's interesting to look at them and see them.
Some people find that when they do mudra techniques in their early meditation, that is hold their hands in certain ways, they get a huge boost out of it.
Again, I didn't come up that way.
I used the seiza.
I came through the martial arts rather than the yoga, although I'd done yoga for years.
I didn't use it as a meditative technique.
So I came through the martial arts and set Seiza, the typical Zen approach.
And you put your hands in a couple of places relative to your knee positions.
The yoga approach of mudra, there's all kinds of hand techniques, and I use them now that I'm much more advanced in meditating because they're extremely powerful.
Again, I can't say how they would be, but I have heard reports from early meditators that they can indeed add a serious boost.
So it may be worth looking at.
I'm going to let you all go now.
We're about 40 minutes into this, and I've got to get another cup of tea and get moving here and get some stuff done.
Again, it looks like I'm going to have to promise another meditation discussion here because there's probably about 50 or 80 of these techniques I didn't even get to that I just wrote down in a broad brush.
You can look a lot of these up online.
But basically, as I say, the goal of meditation is to store key so that you can take it with you.
You can use the key and the process of meditation for great purpose and benefit here on earth before you're dead.
But for men, basically the idea is you've got to have a big battery of key to be able to exert your will in the bardo.
You need power.
It's simply a power equation.
You can have all the willpower you want or will that you want, but without the power, you don't have willpower.
And that is, in my opinion, it's a necessary thing when dealing with the bardo and the system that encompasses our consciousness as we transit through death and recognize our eternity as opposed to our immortality.
Immortality is limited.
Eternity is not.
So, anyway, there we go, guys.
Some techniques to get you started.
Don't listen to this.
Go and sit.
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