Institute of Reflection

The virtual Agora for Occidental Meditation – A Tool for Clearer Thinking, Emotional Balance and a Rounded Perspective

Reflection on Reflection

An Essay on Thinking Reflection (Left) ‘The Thinker’ by Rodin (Right) ‘Beata Beatrix’ by Rosetti …And can I better employ this holy Sabbath than in endeavouring to exalt my mind, and purify my soul, than by meditation on Thy Holy Law, by prayer, and by the severe examination of my thoughts and actions… Then my […]

An Essay on Thinking Reflection

(Left) The Thinker’ by Rodin (Right) ‘Beata Beatrix’ by Rosetti

…And can I better employ this holy Sabbath than in endeavouring to exalt my mind, and purify my soul, than by meditation on Thy Holy Law, by prayer, and by the severe examination of my thoughts and actions… Then my body will enjoy rest, my heart elevated in gratitude, and my faith and courage sustained by meditation and prayer; thus will my soul be prepared for eternity. (Bold font not in original text)

  • Extract of Jewish prayer

***

The prayerful words quoted above could have been penned by an Eastern Guru. East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’ wrote Rudyard Kipling but was he right?  And even if so, why shouldn’t we borrow the best of both worlds?

Holy Books, a corpus of literature, sects and cults have spread far and wide from the orient.  ‘Meditation’ especially in an Eastern sense evokes inter alia a reaching into an Essence of the self and/or up to an Empyrean.  It may involve an all-encompassing Universal Soul.  If this is the case, is it stratified to envelop more than one type of soul, for instance the soul of a tribe or a nation?  Mere rumination hardly is up to the job of contemplating this vista. Breathing techniques of near-ritual status aim at muffling the ebb and flow of a stream of thoughts that obtrude into the forefront of minds. It implies an innate lack of mental control that is best curbed.  Religions have roots in particular cultures; was an impetus behind this guidance to dampen a suspected volatile streak in the Eastern character?  If the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ is not shared background, any approved support from On High in attaining to an ‘optimum equilibrium balance’ would not go amiss.  Dr Johnson was against this stilling of the mind, else “A cow might say ‘Here I am in this field, with this grass, what being could enjoy greater felicity!’” 

How might the Maharishi have countered Dr Johnson?  It is one of the infinite number of Unknowns.  Perhaps one day – when there is no day or night – if all time is circular, and all souls interact with one another, we may find out?  When and if we do permeate that point in space – if it is a point – possibly having shed our earthly allegiances along with our emotional baggage, we will – do, or did – care about who outscores the other?  I may be a Johnson man today but tomorrow or yesterday I may be a Maharishi spirit.  Is the answer In or Out There?  A Book in which Is Writ All our Deeds as posited by the brimstone-tendency of yesteryear Divines may take the form of an unimaginably vast computeresque ‘brain’?  Reflection sets us free to speculate on …anything.  The vast panorama of life is but a pearl in the oyster of what we are licensed to think about if we are not being led by teachers to see their teachings insinuated into our thoughts, right down to those depths in our minds that we perhaps have not fully fathomed. There is nothing to stop someone who is meditating from considering any theme with which they are comfortable: to think about loved ones, for instance, to try and imagine what life would be like without them, to call to mind their image or personality.  It can lead to a truer appreciation of them.  Such insights often are less likely to happen ‘on the hoof’ than in quiet contemplation of the things that matter. 

Homespun Philosophy does not have an aura associated with Great Thinkers even if can be about Universals.  It has no iconic champion in literature as in sculpture where Rodin’s The Thinker at present furrows his brow.  Philosophy – with a capital ‘P’ – is in a Tower of Ivory, its academic drawbridge raised to prevent most seekers after truth crossing the moat to its higher learning save mainly the ilk of able ‘A’ level students.  The subject’s very intellectuality may distract from its being understood by everyman. The eternal verities seem to cower in the tresses of the hair-splitters.   Metaphysics?  Which pedantic Methuselah sniffs about in that midden?  Psychotherapists of various stripes deal with mental malaises but rarely zero in on any emotions short of outright trauma as needing their nostrums or their honeyed words.  Emotion merely recollected in tranquillity is no big deal.  Life coaches can get you where you want to go and where you want to go tends to concern this life.  Most people’s fascination with what goes on what matters in the world is topped up by their daily fix of news. Newsfeeds add little edifying value to deep understandings save for a stock of facts, many soon forgotten.  As for pondering Life’s profounder questions, however perennial the curiosity in human cupidity or natural disasters, they hardly tip the scales.  The last time the Ideas Men hit the headlines was when Bertrand Russell led a CND protest demo.   TV Programmes like Mastermind or Brain of Britain should be hauled up before the Advertising Standards Commission for misleading branding, an instance of how a title can conceal the truth about the content. True, ‘A Memory Game’ doesn’t trip off the tongue with a PR ring to pull in the viewers.  There is much in media and literature that appeals to those of a reflective disposition but, overall, the influences nudging people to veer off into any number of side-tracks are ubiquitous and insidious. Thinkers may be placed on a pedestal but signposts do not usually point in their direction – unless they are statues.  Novelists and playwrights depict deep truths but they tend to do it en passant.  They can sneak in a reflection or two on ‘why we are here’ and ‘what to do about it’ if tangential to ladling out entertainment. Sagacity is all very well in its place – which is in business.  Pensées – digestible, pithy, categorizable – were The Thoughts popularised by Blaise Pascale.  And there we have it!   The fruits of reflection per se are all very fine if they are shrunk to sound-bite size.  The pleasure of picking the fruit, of thinking things of consequence over and becoming a more rounded person in the process has few accredited Masters of Ceremony to cry ‘Roll up!  Roll up!’ 

But hold on a moment!   People do think about reflection even if their thoughts are not docketed in a single mainstream ‘subject’. 

Many are the thoughts of celebrated people about reflection….:

Reflection doesn’t take anything away from decisiveness, from being a person of action.  In fact it generates the inner toughness that you need to be an effective person of action. Think of leadership as the sum of two vectors, competence (your specialty, your skills your know-how) and your and authenticity (your identity, your character, your attitude)

  • Peter Koestenbaum

Ultimately knowledge in martial art means simply self-knowledge. It can become intelligible only in the vigorous and constant process of self-inquiry and self-discovery

  • Bruce Lee

It’s our mind which forces our self to do positive activities and also negative activities. So first learn to control your mind then automatically you will start doing positive activities which will result in a discussion of different great ideas.

Zeeshan Talib

We can … go beyond mere opinions and so-called common sense conclusions.  One must learn to be a skilful scientist and not accept anything at all.  Everything must be seen though one’s own microscope and one has to reach one’s own conclusions in one’s own way.  Until we do that there is no saviour, no guru, no blessings and no guidance could be of any help

  • Chögyam Trungpa 

The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and “consciousness” cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will and “will” cannot evolve involuntarily.

  • Gurdjieff

If you feel drawn to solitude, give yourself complete permission to go in that direction. We need silence and beauty to re-connect with the spiritual side of ourselves. The world is a noisy place, as is the mind. The spiritual journey is not about developing more and more beliefs and opinions. Rather, it is about shedding away our beliefs and preconceived notions about reality in order to have the True Nature of things revealed to us. This requires radical self-honesty and humility. The truly wise understand the limitations of the intellect and seek to go beyond it rather than refining it.

  • Beau Norton (PerfectlyatPeace.com)

Develop the heart. Too much energy in your country is spent in developing the mind instead of the mind instead of the heart. Develop the heart.

  • Dalai Lama

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves

  • Blaise Pascal

To refuse to recognise any part of reality is to confuse our vision of the whole, and to make ourselves incapable of the redemptory action which the world requires

  • Dame Rebecca West

If you are losing your leisure, look out!… it may be that you are losing your soul.

  • Virginia Woolf 

People often want a publicly celebrated authority figure to dress up worthwhile sayings but in truth we all can have our say in our democratic times and learn from each other.

Anthony Newton, a retired solicitor, writes that in his teenage years he:

‘…developed the habit of staring into the middle distance without any apparent thought and unseeing. What was I doing?  What if anything was going through my mind?  The very simple answer was nothing, consciously.  Somehow I was able to clear my mind and detach myself…’.

Mr Newton’s daydreaming enabled him to see things with greater clarity. 

Here is a text exchange with Anja Gohde:

‘Meditation is often thought to be about rising ‘to the stars’, the empyrean.  Well, the direction is right – namely ‘up’ – but do we have to aim quite so high.  The eagle-eye is better, often, that the worm’s eye view….’

‘How very true. Yes, I try to reflect on a regular basis about my life and what I do and what the impact of my words and action has on other people or why I am reacting and feeling the way I do.’

The above picture conveys the right impression of Anja whatever she looks like.  It is her ideas that matter.

Dr MillanSachania though writing about music could be referring to reflection:

A ‘fount of wellbeing and spiritual refreshment ..,a way … of ‘nurturing the skills of value judgement required for negotiating a reality that is non-binary and complex.’

***

Are you the foil of your own petty concerns …the sort of chap pilloried by T.S. Eliot in his poem J. Alfred Prufrock: ‘I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.’?  Will you use forensic prowess against Eliot’s deluded fool and argue that instead you measure out your life in teaspoons?  One lump of sugar or two, please?  The poem continues:


I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker

Reflection sometimes can seem like a poor relation of ‘Meditation’. It makes no grand claims of itself and it is not as purposive.  Someone arrayed in a gaudy dress giving a large account of himself grabs the attention.  Unobtrusive types in the background can get overlooked though have valuable ideas.  What of YOUR truth?   What of your still, quiet inner mind?  You reflect before even starting to meditate ‘on’ anything.

Reflect: we all do it to a greater or lesser degree.  It is a staple of our persona, a ‘given’ part of how we ‘are’.  We are so familiar with it that there is no need to think about it, we think.  Will you reflect on the idea that you reflect for a moment?  Moods and duties get in the way of doing it but because you are reading these lines and not otherwise occupied, this might be a good a time?

Everything comes from reflection, even for the quick-minded type.  We reflect whether we take time on it or not even down to a choice of any particular dish in a menu.  Your life as it is and your daily round has sprung from reflection, if camouflaged by the name of feelings or intuitions or certainties of what your life or life in general is about.  Your conclusions may not have come to you in a flash in a spell of hard thinking, a proverbial towel round your head about ‘how’s’ and ‘whys’ of your life, career or relationships.  Even if you saw the light in a dream, you just ‘chose’…    did you?

How often we hear about the three wise monkeys, who are said to see, hear and speak no evil.  But …is it true that a wise person sees no evil? 

Many things that go wrong in our lives are because we did not sufficiently think – reflect – about them.  Results follow from fine-tuning attitudes.  Action precedes from thought.  From microbial lifeforms do acorns grow, and from acorns, oak trees grow.  One does not have to be an Einstein to see this but his example is instructive. He wondered how life might look to a traveller on a beam of life.  His cogitation about the reality that we all perceive resulted in his upending the apparently solid edifice of Euclidian geometry.

There is little coaching for this habit of mind – reflection for its own sake – despite how much it helps get a handle on issues confronting us all.  It is just done – so we suppose – in the process of doing other things, acquiring facts and views on which, a rational person anyway should be not be spoon-fed but come to his own conclusions.  The claims of reflection are blanketed out by the pressure of busy lives, common habit, and because attention is not drawn to it being a worthwhile occupation in itself.   The author of a vade mecum on the Advantages and Fruits of Reflection is yet to arise.  It does not have to be this way.  Applied Mathematics does not preclude the study of Pure Mathematics even if it is abstracted from a focus on any particular mathematical problem. It is a way of thinking that helps in all manner of contexts…

Open-mindedness is fostered by reflection.  Rigidity of mind, being single-minded, has its limits and those who do not bend with the wind are more likely to be blown down. The weighing up of options before becoming single-minded while retaining an open mind in case fresh evidence may justify rethinking.  It is a mark of both common sense and intelligence.

From now on a breach of common sense will be regarded as a breach of rules

  • Miss Gibbins – Headmistress, St Mary’s Calne school

You are never too old to learn something stupid

  • A paraprosdokian

Questioning, rationalisation, synthesis of ideas, all among the habits of mind involved in the mix of careful thinking.

The wish for reflection is half the battle; once one has taken it on board as a personal and worthwhile wish, undertaken for its own sake, it can become a second nature, a form of maturity.  There is hardly a thought – in the sense of a general rather than a particular formulation of words – that any of us can have that is entirely original.  What may be original is the order in which we think these thoughts, the weight or importance we assign to them, and the feelings associated with them.

If reflecting is what we want to do, we are entitled to do as we wish.  There is nothing difficult in it other than fence with an idea.  True, how to deal with any intangible is not necessarily easy.  A TV advert portrays a strong-armed toothbrush wielder battling it out with gum decay; beefy biceps played its part and a trusty electronic toothbrush can machine-gun the dastardly hominy grits but despite all the visuals it is the right attitude to dental hygiene that makes the big difference. 

Peter Cook, the comedian, was asked by David Frost whether he would like and meet Sarah Ferguson, shortly to become the Duchess of York, on a given date.  There was a rustle of paper as Cook consulted his diary after which he replied:

“Sorry!  I’m afraid I can’t do that evening!”

“But she is going to marry Prince Andrew!  It’s a great opportunity to meet her!”

“I find that, on that evening, I will be watching television!”

Imagine the following conversation:

“No, thank you for the lovely invitation but I’ve checked my diary and, so sorry, I have a prior arrangement.”

“Pity!  It must be very important!”

“Yes!  That is the time that day set aside for reflection!”

At the time of writing that line of reasoning seems eccentric.  If one says – using the largely communal mind that is so influenced by what others think – ‘I can’t deal at the moment with (this or that) problem as …I’m reflecting’, it has an odd ring.   The fact that we do not rate something as being important is often largely because we take it for granted; it is not prized. We often do not focus on what is in front of our noses.

The recent period of the pandemic has engendered some reconsideration about the way we live our lives.  Some of the goals of a consumer society that were tantamount as a sort of religion to many people have been re-evaluated.

We can dance our days away in a pot purri of often contradictory codes, a combination of unconscious plagiarism and arrogance.  We fling ourselves into what we have been flung into, flag-bearers for our totems.  The basic truth might just not be visible to the naked eye so why not look into it.  We wish to feel that what we think is consistent with our goals and, by doing so we may compound illusions by which we live.  It can be the saddest thing discovering this too late in life. 

We want to avoid a wild goose chase.  But thought is needed; who knows, perhaps wild geese got it right after all?

Wild geese are well organised, show commendable community spirit and are not stick-in-the-muds.  Their flight paths cover enormous distances in an aerodynamic V-shaped formation to a destination known in advance, wings beating in a way to uplift all the flock; they allow for a tired lead goose to fall back with a fresher one at the spearhead. If a goose drops out exhausted, two stay alongside it down to ground level staying with it for as long as it takes to be of help to the stricken bird.  

If we are grounded in our lives, the thoughts that come to us during such moments are more apt to go to the core of what we need to be doing in life

Finding yourself includes Observing Yourself.  Is there an explanation why the pronoun ‘I’ and the word ‘eye’ sound the same?   

Self-observation is the beginning of progress, says Buddha

Reflection is usually tied in with self-narrative.  It is a vantage point from which we view our lives; a point mid-way (approximately) between the fluidity of life as it lived and a static observer-point above the fray.  We take a mental snapshot of ourselves ‘frozen in time’.  We stop for a moment and consider what we do and what we are and what we feel and peer into ourselves. 

‘Longevity affords us a chance to accumulate more self-enclosed stories that will, in toto, form the tale of one’s life, a self-enclosed tale that no one else on this earth will comprehend, rather than a ‘narrative’ of arguable, full veracity?

Awareness of thoughts and feelings – holding them up for inspection – develops them. and …they may feel watched.  A call for a justification may prompt a re-think.

A cleansing and cooling afterglow follows from reflection.  The traditional English way is just to do it and not to make a fuss about it.  It is a form of unconscious cerebration.  In these touchy-feely days of splurge and instantaneous reactions and when more and more rats are running the races it is time to retreat to first principles. We should make time and space for our inner voice.  Why airbrush them out of thought processes just when trying to find ourselves.  The leisured lifestyle may be a thing of the past for most of us but let us not forego all of its benefits which include caring for ourselves. 

Here is Dickens writing in Great Expectations:

‘Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before – more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. / So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the course of the quiet walk…, and still reflected for my comfort … while I was occupied with these deliberations,,,’

In reflection our perspective on others can be brought to bear on oneself, without the excitement of situational or emotional melodrama, but as others might see us, in our natural fall-back position.  It is closer to history than to politics; judgemental rather than engaged.  It is an altered perspective of our own on ourselves.  Finding ourselves can be like ‘finding’ other people – there is much that we do not know about ourselves.  Thinking out the motives of others may be a way for us to consider the game of life.  It is an idea when playing chess to walk round the board and see it from the standpoint of the opponent. It can be a surprise to come at it from a different perspective. 

A thought often is freighted with emotionality.  It is a matter of choice, a skill that comes of practice – unless one is the victim of one’s own mind – as to how far to allow emotion to creep into thoughts.  Quietness in thinking allows greater control.  If one is calm at the start of a session of reflection then what might surface in one’s mind is a realisation of which emotions are the deep ones and which are more like froth or even a scum on the surface.   A wish to rid oneself as far as possible of emotion which overcomes rational thought can enter into the allure of reflection, a wish not to be too much at the mercy of possibly festering emotions. 

Our ‘self’ has consistency through time. Today we may have virtually the same feeling or sensation as was previously experienced, a thread marking out an individuality.  It is sometimes in later life that one re-identifies with feelings or goals that one had when young.  They were there but they were buried. Natural sympathies came of raw rather than over-sophisticated feelings and relationships.  We forget too much too easily if we do not remind ourselves of what we were and are about. 

Reflection, like writing is a solitary occupation.

In a quiet period of reflection, one may suppose that this feeling is much the same for everyone. One has a sense of one’s being – a consciousness of one’s consciousness. This sensation is not transferrable to anyone else however similarly it is described by others.  The recognition by others of what you experience owes its resonance more to what they feel than because they introspect into your mind.  Our thoughts are private, inner; protected, particularly if we wish, by our carapace, the bounds of our own bodies and minds.   

A habit of encouraging a calmness of mind is often the best way to deal with problems rather than acting on impulse then repenting at leisure.  A wish to ‘go back to nature’ speaks to much the same urge for serenity.  Thinking, quietly, calmly and undisturbed, with the aid sometimes of whatever ‘props’ are to hand is a study of life coloured from a wider palette than that of the ‘everyday’.  The kernel of our inner calm is also a part of our nature from which, for so much of the time, we are in flight, an antidote to which is going back to the peace of nature.  We have that nature within us.

Card by John Moffat for Rosemary Cockayne

What of that onrush of a higgledy piggledy cascade of emotions and musings that can hound us if we try to clear our minds?   Most of us know our own ‘non-stop gramophone record’ of mind-chatter only too well, the feelings of deep love or hate, or of preoccupation, faces that rise up out of our thoughts when alone, the ideas that will keep on at us.   What are the sensations that we experience on trying to ‘see ourselves as we really are’ without all the mind-clutter?  It can be put into words in ways that we all recognise but that does not mean any particular reaction is the same for everyone. Why junk it all as being just circumstantial baggage in the way of knowing ourselves, as some gurus tell us?  Is it a ‘messiness’ or is it instead the feeling that we are not fully in control of it at which we jib?  Does this ‘jumble’ distract us from being who we really are?  It might be the opposite in that we like to put our conscious mind in control rather than listen to what is going on in our subconscious.

The subconscious goes on its own way, sending up messages to the conscious mind.  To take a homely example, how does a person know to wake up at an hour that he knows to be the required time to get up?  Reflection should aid awareness of a part of the mind that usually is least susceptible to challenge from conscious reaction.  Much reflection concerns conclusions brought into the light of day, allowing second thoughts about conclusions that sometimes seem to form of themselves.  Ideas can be espied in the deep, unruffled pool of our minds or in the grip of emotion and are as if ‘churned out of a tossing sea’ by disturbing the sediment.

Your subconscious mind may be the true guide to what you are really feeling

Why deny one’s origins or one’s nature?  Clutter silting up our minds can be dispensed with but as regards the animal-like side of our nature the fact is …that it is us.   ‘Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.’ as Virginia Woolf said. Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’ and we are part of nature A tendency in Meditation is to see so-called lower nature, physical fulfilment, as rather beneath us.  The notion in places is at odds with that of ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’. We preen ourselves as being of a higher order than animals just as we also see ourselves as more developed than primitive tribes.  At the least, it does not follow that we cannot learn from either.  Even the dull and the ignorant / they too have their story’, inwords taken from Desiderata. Some emotions may more real to animals than they are to humans.  A creature living fully in the moment with emotions unfiltered through the medium of man’s brain may experience emotion in a more raw, pure, form.  Animals have much the same emotions as men as instanced in their maternal instinct.  This need not be a mere academic idea; if it is felt it has greater effect. 

The idea of the wonderful, extraordinary world in which we live is more than cerebral appreciation; genuine feeling to accompany it is what counts.   A mindset that tends to kindness and induces compassion is among the useful by-products of thinking about feelings.  In a tale that speaks to the heart rather than the cerebral processes: the late Rosemary Cockayne once astonished strangers by knocking at their front door asking for water for a thirsty rat.  On the request being met, a knot of bystanders gathered to gape at the spectacle on the pavement of the gasping rodent gurgling down ambrosial liquid bemusedly provided in a saucer.  The rat expired but its emotions happily replete in its final moments were obvious to all witnessing them on that paving stone bier. 

The guts, courage and sensitivities of beasts may be more impressive to a naturalist than to a worker in a slaughter house.   We like our illusions but do not like to face up to our own judgements. We like to think that we would like to communicate with life forms yet to be discovered on other planets but quite why we think that, if we encounter alien life from some other planet, we will want to understand it is anybody’s guess! 

Should we give our nature its’ head where possible?  The idea of Ecstasy, or ‘Ex-tasy’, comes in part from an idea of the ancient world, for instance in the cult of Dionisius, affording a license to stand outside of one’s ‘normal’ self in cathartic release. It was a tacit admission that there is something antipathetic about the shackles of society.  We may profit from time out to let rip in an orgiastic free-for-all – swig wine, do whatever an imagination conjures up in the way of debauchery.  It can free one up to find ‘the animal’ within, without the filter of stern consciousness and is arguably an essential part of who we truly are.   Why try and tie it into the steadier emotions?  Why not from time to time and within reason detach from the rational, the steady, the ‘Apollo’ as the Greeks put it, and tune into the so-called ‘lower nature’.  Is it that we cannot be ‘trusted’ to know when to stop?  By who?  The One who made us that way?  Cue in a debate between a whey-faced advocate stating that ‘one should not let hair down; the approved linear shape for hair is vertical’ pitted against a free-thinker demanding the right to ‘let it all hang out’.  If there is a case for a Dionesian Disneyland, why not consider it in a study of the mores of society?  It would be inter-disciplinary but common sense has its place there along with the teachings of all religions. It is about an arguably justified balance of mind.  The fact that we need to know when to stop does not mean that we must not start.  It may be that pleasure gives is a belief that life is worthwhile so it keeps us going for higher purposes.  An inner release of some of the springs of our nature tunes our engine no matter that this may be of a physical order; it can free up a contentment of soul from which ‘higher’ thinking is better placed to take flight. 

Physicality is a bedrock for much spirituality.  Physical wellbeing let alone the choices we make in life about almost everything that matters to us and to others spring from the same actuating source, spirit or inspiration or what you will.  The fact that it is blurred at the point of original inception, opaque in many ways to a study of it, does not prevent us training a telescope into those clouds.  The scales can fall from our eyes even if there still a mist over what they see.

We are grounded physically in ourselves, a primary factor in our mental backdrop. As Gurdjieff says: ‘It is only by grounding our awareness in the living sensation of our bodies that the “I AM” of our real presence can awaken’.   If one is disposed to wander down Memory Lane it can help to trigger memories to be in the same place as where the memories were laid down.   Again, when preparing for an exam, it can help to imbed facts in memory if they are studied in different places.  Alzheimers – as an illustration – attacks memory which presumably implies memory has a physical locus.Thought processes originally were connected with requirements of physical mobility – a need for movement.  Much imagery of spirituality, astral travelling or levitation where one ‘sees’ oneself beneath oneself contain physical surroundings. The higher form is born of a lower form and retains its connection as a part of who we are.  We may travel in our minds in a sort of vacuum but tend to bring ourselves down to earth.

It may be that a certain physical sensation predominates when trying to meditate.  If there is some worrisome issue, say, it may manifest itself in a slightly febrile or jittery sensation, probably appearing to be in the region of the chest.  It might be a sensation that has a value like first night nerves of a theatre actor prompting better performances.

In calm reflection, a gentle physical sensation predominates.  We gravitate to what is pleasant.  In so far as one can identify the locus of feelings, they may in the cranium if of a logical variety, perhaps in the region of the chest if they are related to love or to angriness. An ache in a finger, say, makes immersion in quiet self-contemplation problematic.  Our wish is to distract our minds from this unpleasantness. When on a physically even keel, what is likely to happen is that flocculent, enveloping, generalised sensation creeps in.  Our inside voice clings to a higher, nameless realm that may be watching down on ourselves – a ‘realm’ that is part of us.  Looking in at, or down on, ourselves can tend to accentuate dominant sensations of our lives at the time, be they of general contentment, perhaps thinking of a particular stage that we have reached in our journey through life, or a loved one.  Alternatively, perhaps we feel walled out of contentedness by a concern or alarm at an obstacle in front us that we must outface

You are now alone with yourself.  What do you think and feel?  Here is one perspective:

It can be a wordless awareness of your skin, that boundary of your-self.  It can be a being in touch with the Other when the Other is oneself.  A central, self-absorbed stillness can radiate with a slight ‘weightiness’ from the hub of your heart and with an un-heated sort of warmth in the head.  It is like being outside of oneself yet centred in oneself.  It feels true.  It is being true to oneself.   The tentacles or threads from within us that stretch outwards to the outside world are more liable to be soothed.  It is a settled home from which we all too often eject ourselves.  It is a true North even if, in the perspective of the world outside ourselves, we are realised more in action or in the narratives that overlook much of this essence of what we are about. 

So, in what does this inner life of ours consist if we try and look at it head on and define it?  Straight away we come up against ‘The Blur’ again and the difficulty of putting into words what is going on in our inner life.  Language has not been developed to expound this knowingness of who we are.  One aspect of it is in part an illustration of resistance in society to puffing up a member of it save as an exemplar of how members of society should feel.  The pressure is part of how language and thoughts work.  The language to describe an atmosphere is not exactly rich. So… what are we to think, given that the tool of vocabulary is rough-hewn?  Gut feelings may be right but we should feel them in …our own guts. 

It seems a novel idea that a thought can rate in importance as high as a material entity, leastways Orwell was thought to be breaking new ground in his dystopian 1984 where Winston Smith was not allowed to die till cleansed of every last subversive idea.  When starting a course of meditation, the problem of dealing with ‘the intangible’ is not to be underestimated.  It is clear through scientific findings that there is a powerful – perhaps an all-powerful – unseen world.  It actuates the physical world.  Initially invisible entities appear in branches of physics.   There is a physical or DNA link between the body and the mind.  Scientific work has been done on the locus of thoughts and feelings.  Where is situated in the body the filament in a character that a given situation can light up? The fact that a ‘filament’ in a character is not visible or tangible is not far from proof that it is not there.  Has the ‘dictating’ spirit of a person a specific and material correlation in the body?  Is the mental component primary or is it causal?   Can character traits be passed across generations?  

The Duke of Marlborough and his descendant, Winston Churchill, and the Earl of Chatham and his son, William Pitt: they all saved the day for England in its hours of greatest peril.  Does the fact that the scions of just two families in four crises showed their true mettle imply that they possessed an inherited ‘Save Great Britain’ gene…?   

In considering such questions, the speculative mind has found a groove that may take it away from one form of meditation into a realm whereby it is more like some sort of puzzle. There is a time to get one’s basic thinking done.  One should not go round in circles. They can turn into prejudices and self-brainwashing.  One should think afresh and constantly be aware.  We live in a mental world; being aware of our physical surroundings is only a part of it. The practice of constant re-evaluation and thinking for oneself is not a time-consuming one; the mentality being fostered can help us in many contexts in our lives.  

Much of all this comes down to a simple precept: ‘Look before you leap’ rather than make avoidable mistakes.

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