What is Meditation

Meditation Techniques

Spiritual Inspirators

 

Western  Mystics


CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS AWARENESS

I. Consiousnes & Evolution

II. Defining Awareness & Consciousness
III. The Mystery of Awareness

IV. Consciousnes as Nothing
V. Consciousness as Something
VI. The Ouroboros Consciousness
VII. Ouroboric Super-Awareness


FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The Super-Awake Flow
Fields of Consciousness

Group Meditation
The Glue of Love
God wants to be Human
 


ADVERSITY AND SPIRITUALITY
Integral Suffering and Happiness
Meditative Pixelation

Trauma and Transcendence

 
CIVILIZATION & CONSCIOUSNESS
The inner and the outer Person
 
● 
Eastern versus Western Consciousness
The liberation from or of the Body
Modern Forms of Suffering
 
Civilization and Consciousness 
Civilization and Consciousness Part II






I recommend you to
read the first five
chapters from
I. to V.
under the section
CONSCIOUSNESS
& AWARENESS
in order to get
a better understanding
of the techniques I will
walk you through here.



Read also
the chapter
Integral Suffering
and Happiness

For people who do
not believe in or experience what could be understood as 'god':
Replace the word 'god'
with 'consciousness' or
any other word that for you could describe a sense
of the mysterious.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Albert Einstein
.

  
MEDITATIVE PIXELLATION - a Way of Living

"If you can Face it - God can Fix it
If you can Feel it - God can Heal it"

There is a profoundly important realization to be uncovered through the simple act of closing our eyes. The most fundamental meditation technique is also the simplest: closing your eyes while remaining fully awake.

What Happens When You Close Your Eyes
When we close our eyes, the body’s myriad sensations rise into conscious awareness, revealing a rich field of interoceptive perception. You can experience this for yourself—just close your eyes for a few seconds.

In our typical waking state, consciousness registers only a tiny fraction of the body’s subtle yet vibrantly dynamic, almost roaring sensory experience. This disparity is striking.

It Is a Paradox
The moment we close our eyes, the inherently outward-focused consciousness begins to align with the vast, ever-present, and infinitely attentive ocean of interoceptive bodily existence. This hidden life reveals itself under the light of consciousness but unfolds on a stage of awareness we may not have known existed.

Consciousness is generally unaware of awareness, and awareness is oblivious to consciousness. We remain largely unconscious of what we are constantly aware of—a reality that is truly primordial. Awareness is ancient, while consciousness is the "new kid on the block," initially unfamiliar with its surroundings.

Gurdjieff’s Insight
Gurdjieff takes this even further, suggesting that a human being consists of a hundred different personalities, most of which are unaware of one another. These "personalities" are essentially the sum total of various biological operative systems accumulated and reused since our existence as amoebas. Many, like digestion, function intelligently within their own systemic circuits but remain oblivious to activities beyond the "city walls" of their cellular polis.
 
Just as an ant walking along a highway cannot comprehend what a car is, the primordial systems within us cannot grasp the complexity of the more advanced systems that have evolved on top of them. However, the most recently developed systems possess the ability to understand and integrate the functions of those that came before them. In this way, we can bring consciousness into awareness of awareness itself—and in this process, even allow awareness to become conscious of itself.
 
Mirabai's Wisdom
The Indian Saint Mirabai says:

"Oh Friend! Understand
The body is like the ocean
Rich with hidden treasures."

With Mirabai, we are called to consciously explore and understand these hidden treasures—the archaic languages of the body. At the heart of all meditation practices lies a state of conscious bodily awareness: alert, present, and free from thoughts or external distractions.

THE CONSCIOUS CHOISE
How, then, do we practice this? It begins with the simple yet profound act of closing our eyes while fully awake. This act is not passive but a conscious choice—a deliberate decision to turn inward. From there, the journey unfolds like walking blindfolded along an inner path, guided not by understanding but by 'innerstanding.'

Both the ancient Indian tantric and later Chinese Taoist traditions encapsulate this beautifully with the principle:

"Where the attention goes, the prana flows."

We can consciously choose where to be aware.

The greatest gift we can offer another human being is our undivided conscious attention. Try it—it’s transformative. The same principle applies to our own body. Simple, focused, high-quality consciousness directed inside, enlivens the body and even holds the power to heal.

The first human being you must befriend, by bathing it in conscious awareness, is your own body.

Strength and Quality of Conscious Awareness
The inner energetic life of the body is profoundly influenced by our conscious attention. The more conscious awareness we direct toward the inner body, the more this inner life responds, becoming increasingly dynamic and vibrant. This feedback phenomenon generates a reinforced flow within the body, and this flow is directly proportional to the strength and quality of the conscious awareness we invest in this inner loop.

This idea is worth repeating as a mantric self-reminder. Gurdjieff referred to it as the practice of 'constant self-remembrance'.

The intellect, in its illusionary superiority, assumes that once a statement is made, repetition is unnecessary. Yet, the deeper layers of human understanding resemble a tense muscle—they require repeated massage for the blocks to dissolve. Similarly, transforming undesirable habits into something positive demands constant, gentle nudging. This is in fact the true meaning behind the use of a mantra.
 
As an electric solo guitarist, I know that behind every well-played riff lie countless repetitions.
 
The Cleansing of Consciousness
The next step, repeated a million times, is to consciously engage with all bodily sensations in a state of innocent but deliberate, conscious "aha-awareness."
 
What do I mean by 'aha'? By aha I mean childlike innocense.

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to capture a natural photo of someone who is self-conscious about being photographed? Metaphorically speaking, we all adopt performative “silicone lips” the moment we pose for the camera. Achieving innocence within consciousness is equally challenging. Consciousness, designed to analyze and manipulate the external world, inherently lacks innocence. Similarly, awareness cannot comprehend consciousness—it operates instinctively, acting without intellectual understanding.
 
The holy grail of meditation lies in uniting these two operative systems, bringing them together like knights at a round table. This can only be done by cleansing consciousness from an operative system that evolved so much in partnership with the pure mirror of consiousness, that it almost works like a symbiosis. Hence we inherently 'think' that the thinking process is identical with consciousness. However, it is NOT. Consciousness is, as explained in detail, like a mirror, not affected by what is mirrored. This aspect has countless spin offs. However the one take away here is that in order for consciousness to merge into awareness, it must be cleansed from, concepts, words and understanding. It must return to its innocent aha-state.
 

INNER PIXELLATION - BEYOND UNDERSTANDING
Resting in inner, sensational body-awareness, and always capturing feelings before they capture us, can ultimately lead to a process I term "meditative pixellation."
 
Now, what do I mean by 'pixellation'?
   
Here is a short summary of what I mean by the term: As you become more accustomed to observing the myriad of sensations within your body, you will be able to penetrate the wall of meaning through naming, behind which these sensations hide.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
Rumi

Just as images, whether good or bad, and other meanings and judgments you assign to them, are fundamentally composed of pixels, so too are your sensations. By sensing your inner body-self free from concepts, so closely and intimately that all you are aware of is the flow of pixels, you realize that these atomized sensations and feelings are neither good nor bad. Behind the wall of naming there is essentially no difference between pain and pleasure.

Through this, the first layer of mind interpretations of inner bodily sensations disolves. The body's inner sensory space shifts from being a stage for emotions and thoughts to becoming a field of super-aware micro-dots of 'something.'
 

The 'Energy' State of Pixels
What you once called pain, before coming close enough, is now just an endless morphing stream of what we could metaphorically term 'energy'. Just as particles in quantum physics fundamentally consist of frozen energy or light, the building blocks in our inner world are revealed as made out of liquid energy when we come closer to be aware of them. Henceforward, I will refer to the pixellated state of sensations as 'energy'. However, remember this term is only a beautiful metaphor borrowed from a quantum world that I only know little about.

Pixels are either bad, nor good
Imagine a digital image of Jesus or the devil. As you continue to zoom in on this image, it eventually consists of neutral pixels. Similarly, in meditation, hyper-focused pixelated perception transcends our conventional notions of good and evil. Seen and felt from this abstract primal reality, there are no evaluated differences or boundaries. Here, we are all part of a fluid continuum, a boundless life. In this sense the inner world of the body is non-dual.

The experience of tathata, suchness, is fundamentally an experience of pixellated emotions and sensations.

My challenge to anyone seriously willing and brave enough to explore their inner world of senses and feelings through introspection is as follows:

Any emotion or sensation, no matter how pleasant or unpleasant it has been named to be, will ultimately dissolve into pure neutral sensation for the one who continues to consciously observe it in vigilant awareness.
 
Let's Refer to it as 'Energy'
At this profound level of interoceptive awareness, words may still hold value, albeit words nearly devoid of conventional meaning. Thus, I metaphorically name this 'something' as 'energy.' This energy can manifest in myriad forms and shapes. Henceforth, I will employ the term 'energy' along with 'pixels' and other expressions. Beyond the near-abstract emptiness of the term, there is an intriguing observation: the deeper one delves into this abstract realm of energies, the more energized one feels afterward.


'Dark Energy'
To emphasize the fundamentally unknown and unnamed sensations we encounter on the introspective path to inner energetic oneness, I will metaphorically borrow a term from quantum physics. Scientists try to explain what they cannot really verify by using the term 'dark matter.' I will henceforth sometimes use the term 'dark energy' as a reminder of the integral 'unknownness' we must encounter on this path.

This very unknowingness also requires a fluid use of unusual metaphors. You need to 'innerstand' the metaphors used in this chapter intuitively. If I fixated and defined them as I would in an academic text, you might think you understood the text just because your intellect grasped it. This would be a grave mistake, similar to theologians dissecting Meister Eckhart's writings using intellectual 'headucated' analysis rather than actual experienced wisdom through introspection.
 
Feel Your Inner Body with Innocent 'Aha' Awareness

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer

In the pixellated state of dark energy observation, focus on the phenomenon of feeling itself without trying to change or remove these sensations with mental strategies. Resist the temptation to tell stories. The key is to mentally ignore the age old instinctual urge to 'do' something about especially unpleasant sensations while giving them your full, non-cognitive attention. In this form of non-doing meditation, what matters is the direct encounter between your innocent 'aha'-awareness and the interoceptive feelings and sensations themselves.

Meditative Pixellation as a Lifestyle
This inner non-judgemental observation-pixellation until we reach the unifying state of dark energy is, in my opinion, the most important form of meditation one can practice. Unlike other meditation techniques that create ritual oases—specific time zones dedicated solely to meditation—meditative pixellation is more of a lifestyle than a technique confined to a specific timeframe. It involves cultivating a permanent habit of body-directed awareness.

Make it a lifestyle to always feel yourself as an abstract flow of energy without reflecting on or analyzing your experience. Let me massage this message into my habitual unconscious body with a mantric repetition by telling it to you: In this ever-ongoing meditation-riff, the goal is to keep returning to an innocent 'aha' awareness of the feelings and sensations in your inner body, from head to toe. The aim is to live a life in what Gurdjieff termed 'constant self-remembrance,' which implies the constant, effortless return to a state of self-referential awareness.

Exteroceptive 'Distractions'
This act of continuous returning is necessary as we are constantly distracted by our thoughts and outward-focused senses. This exteroceptive 'distraction' is a natural process created out of evolutionary necessity. However, now we must swim upstream our ancient river of survival by turning around and inward.

Every time we discover that externalities have taken hold of us, we simply and without any drama return to our roots of 'sensationing'. Do this while walking, talking, eating, or scrolling; in any situation where your brain gives you a sudden moment of self-awareness in which you can remember the task of aware sensing. In such situations, set your eyes free either by closing them or letting them stare. You might even be able to continue an outward task, like speaking to another person, while still being aware of the energy-flow inside of you.


On Deeper Levels of Awareness: We are all Infinite Oneness!

"If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is: infinite."
William Blake

On deeper levels of awareness they seem to exchange into a common currency, a united abstraction leading into a world with less and less names and forms. Hence the word energy as a 'lingua franca' becomes more and more relevant as we allow simple but intense awareness to penetrate our interoceptive realms.
 
In the next little session I invite you to observe and explore the sensations coming from the surface of the skin in your hands. Now fold your hands and close your eyes once more for a while.
 

After coming back: Did you notice that the skin borders between your hands seem to disappear when the energy, as a ball of oneness, makes the hands merge into each other? Our external senses tend to divide everything, while the internal senses, at least as experienced on a subjective level, seem to unify everything. As perhaps the most close and intimate sense, the mechanism of skin sensationing seems to be able to do both. As you sit with closed eyes, observe how the exteroceptive skin sensations of sitting, the places where you are in contact with the pillow or chair, seem to blur into oneness. This oneness also includes the interoceptive sensations of the inner body in the same area. There seems to be an evolutionary link between outer skin sensations in a given body area and an enhanced ability to feel the deeper 'energies' emerging from the organic life beneath the skin.

Now is that not amazing how much we can 'learn' or rather unlearn from just simple observations of hands holding hands?

Close your eyes again for a few minutes and verify again for yourself how awaring hands in hands plays out in your inner laboratory. Remember to base your meditation practice on what you yourself are able to verify, not on what I or others say to you. In meditation, we get inspired from outside, but we only follow the voice(s) from inside.
 
Let me, in this context, make a claim for you to test: Just by the very act of closing our eyes, we unify ourselves and, through that, the world. This simple act is the beginning of the doors of perception being cleansed, leading to life becoming infinite. By holding your own hands, you make peace with yourself in the morphing, growing ball of abstract energy. Now, can you imagine what happens when you hold another person's hand? I leave it to you to explore the expanded adventure of holding a friend’s or even a stranger’s hands in a state of meditative pixellation.
    
THE INNER LANDSCAPES OF THE BODY
You are now about to embark on a journey into the secret life of your own body. It is time to observe the essentially unknown landscapes of your inner biological being. Each body part, each organ and even cluster of organs has its own energy signature, a signature that grows and morphs when given the water of awareness. As we delve closer to more subtle levels on the journey towards energetic oneness in pixellation, these internal energy-body systems change their configurations.
 
Socrates' famous words, "know thyself," translate in this context to "knowing" the energy formations within the body. Becoming familiar with your inner body's moving and morphing energy signatures is, for me, true wisdom as opposed to mere cognitive knowledge.

 

The 'axis mundi' of dark energy runs from the anus to the top of the head. Some of these areas are hotspots for energies that can be difficult to contain in neutral awareness, as they can be highly intense and even unpleasant. You might then ask why you should engage with these energies. The reason is simple: the more unpleasantness you can contain and digest in your field of awareness, the stronger the emotional healing process in your body will be. We feel to heal.

However, you will need the bravery of a warrior to successfully 'hunt' and heal the energies within the body’s kingdom. With each minute, day, month, and year, you will become better at this practice. It is truly an art where you are both the artist and the masterpiece.


Biochemical Sensing Instead of Known Feelings
Take any feeling, especially when it is fresh and prominent: lie down as described and examine it. It could be clusters of fear in the stomach or tensions in the throat. When contemplating someone you love, warmth might emanate from the chest or a pleasant lightness might fill the whole body. Feel the lightness in the body when feeling happy.
 
Once you step into the anatomical landscape of so-called familiar emotions, you might discover an unfathomably simple truth: behind familiar concepts like anger, joy, jealousy, love, offense, and feeling good lie abstract biochemical sensations placed in various locations of the inner body.
 
All our seemingly familiar emotions are, in reality, spatially expanded electrochemical sensory energy phenomena. These phenomena have distinct qualities depending on where in the inner body-space they are perceived.

 
Every Energy-Bundle Represent a distinct Bio-Operative System
Next more advanced step is to explore the energy in hands as they rest on your stomach area. Feel and aware how they merge into oneness with you stomach. You might here feel something akin to the famous 'butterflies' in your stomach, described as tickling, crawling, burning, nervous, or electric energy. These sensations often resemble pain. Let these sensations blend with the more neutral energy ball in your hands.

As discussed in the chapter Consiousnes & Evolution the human body is made of remodified and recykled genetic information since the beginning of life.
A friend of mine told me that both the times he had taken LSD he felt that there was a hostile meat-eating plant residing in his stomac. As far as I see it, his stomac was not happy and it was not able to tell him before somehow a psychedlic tuned brain gave the stomac the ability to communicate in dream-like symbols.

In fact all the various essentially nameless bundles of discinct energy signatures are the wordless languages in which our ancient biological parts communicate with us. 99 percent of them do not understand normal language or cognition so we have to communicate with them on their terms.

Again by personal observation, notice that these sensory patterns are not static. They may begin to move in slow, sweeping motions, evoking the movements of seaweed in the sea. The transformation of these patterns from static to dynamic is influenced by the quality and intensity of the awarenes with which you observe them. As mentioned in repetition like a mantra, they grow more dynamic and start to morph when nourished by the warm sensory sunlight of heightened awareness. It is the sheer presence of vigilence, in its most fundamental and wordless state, that nudges these patterns into a condition of flux. Figuratively speaking, I imagine our cells transported back to life in the Cambrian primordial ocean, where the first cellular symbioses reveled in the warming morning light of the sun.

It's utterly fascinating that we carry within us such a varied sensory aquarium without actually being aware of it. It's astonishing how knowledgeable we are about the world and yet how ignorant we are about ourselves.
 

Inner Jellyfish, Fire Coral, and Sea Nettles
Continuing with the zoological imagery, which is entirely my own poetic way of describing something that is very hard for the conscious and cognitive mind to understand. These metaphors are mine, and they help me understand and connect with my inner sensations. You might find different metaphors that resonate more with your experiences.

The journey of pixellation initially involves deconstructing all known feelings into abstract energy. Once this goal is achieved, the next step is to use new imagery that helps you visualize and relate to these internal phenomena.

In my world it makes sense to describe these slowly dancing three-dimensional energy patterns as for example inner jellyfish.

A sensory pattern, with its sensory tendrils, takes on a form that closely resembles internal jellyfish or fire coral, depending on the level of perceived threat. These jellyfish, along with countless other life forms within us, live their own lives as they swim around in the body's dark primordial ocean. Anyone who introspectively explores themselves can go on a hunt for these Cambrian creatures lurking namelessly in the body's inner darkness.

The a-ha awaring of energy becomes the lingua franka we use in communicting with all these ancient but remodified surving lifeforms within us. 

Here, seemingly nondescript terms like sensory patterns, emotional patterns, or energy patterns can act as magical keys. As long as we still operate under the ego operating system, we can only truly "see" the troll after it has been named. Later, as we become more awakened, we will be able to consciously aware this inner world wordlessly, in an innocent form of "aha" recognition that can't be described, only experienced.
 

EPILOGUE II: THE WATER-BODY

Oh Friend! Understand
The body is like the ocean
Rich with hidden treasures.
Mirabai

Peer inward now and uncover a wondrous realm. Find your own way of doing this, but here is my poetic take on what to percieve. It is not academian based science, but it might inspire you.

The Tibetans wisely and wonderfully use the metaphor of an ice-body full of energetic blocks that, through the heat of tummo, slowly melts into a flowing water-body.
The internal, abstractly spatialized electrochemical sensory shapes consist of bundles in myriad forms and variations. These bundles, unique to each individual and each moment, are intricately constricted and/or expanded and continuously evolve in response to the sensed external environment and our thought process. They could be described as fluctuating sensory patterns with specific locations, shapes, and dimensions. Such a pattern might extend its tendrils into the arms, legs, and head, but its true core generally resides somewhere within the inner torso. The "Rome" of our inner body lies in the torso, but countless other "sensory pattern-civilizations" traverse the pathways from the sphincter muscle up to top of the head and out in arms and legs. These abstract patterns often manifest as independent, abstract entities with a central core and tentacle-like projections. As we become more acquainted with these inner ancient operative systems, we discover that different zoological sensory patterns belong to different regions of the body's internal ocean. Why do I here use the analogy of the ocean? It is because I do believe that each of these energy signatures in our body are recalibrated versions of ancient bio-operative systems within our body. Many, if not most of these systems were like the drivers to our heart-beat, that were made in sea-annemonaes, already living a pre-cambrian oceanic life. Every cell in our body lives an oceanic life. These metaphoric statements align perfectly with the ancient Tibetan notion of humans as being flowing water-bodies.

EPILOGUE II - The State of Simple & Sensed Amor Fati
This is the simple path towards freedom. Be aware of yourself - know thyself - not as a distant onlooker, but as far as possible as a non-judgemental 'feeler.' Here it is not so much about seeing the light, but in close subject-object union, feeling the warmth of the light. Way too many meditators are too visual in their observation of themselves, which is in danger of creating an alienating split in the pscyche, where you become a gost-like distant onlooker to your own life.
There is anecdotal evidence of people attending an intensive meditation course and then when they come home they have difficulties loving even their own children.
 
In fact, we have two cosmic antennas: one is consciousness, and the other is awareness. Focusing solely on cultivating consciousness in meditation creates a dangerous split within us. We must first anchor ourselves in awareness. From there, the task is to merge the two into a unified system of conscious awareness, which is defined on this site as ouroboic super awareness.

Meditation is about constantly returning to the near-sensed micro life in living, loving awareness. Nothing else is needed. In fact, all else is just distractions and what Rumi would call "poor translations." This is to live in a state of simple amor fati, a love for what appears in front of our nose.

So, why does the world excel in poor translations? As mentioned, it is because we in the West tend to follow the desire to commodify. Closely related to that drive is the urge to 'understand' in order to manipulate. This cultural tendency makes us overly mental, which in turn affects our approach to practicing meditation.

 

THE SPATIALIZATION OF THE INNER BODY

Now let's shift our attention to the medium in which this flowing, pixelated energy occurs. What does the stage look like? What is the nature of the dimensionality of this inner world—so familiar that we overlook it?

The Inner Cathedral
With eyes closed and immersed in these inner energies, we find ourselves in what could be described as a dark, inner void. I prefer to call it our 'inner cathedral,' inspired by the sense of awe it instills. As initially discussed in this chapter, the most marvelous wonders often lie hidden behind the veil of the obvious.
The manifestation of inner spatiality is so straightforward that we often don't realize how wondrous this process truly is. Even more amazing is the fact that we can actually experience this spatialization multiple times and then forget it the moment our "awareness camera" swings back to its usual outward-facing mode. It is exceptionally curious that we can host such a space within us and yet still concern ourselves with mundane matters like mortgages.

Duality and Non-duality in a state of Super-position
As earlier sections have demonstrated, consciousness requires some degree of separation to function. It can only observe and experience within a framework delineated by the distance between subject and object. Yet, within this dark realm, everything is perceived as interconnected in a non-dual unity. The inner cathedral is a location without location, a space so fluid and alive that its boundaries seem to float. In this way, the inner cathedral exists in both duality and non-duality, much like a particle in a state of superposition.

 
Variable Spatial Dimensions of the Inner Cathedral
This celestial inner chamber only materializes when consciousness turns inward. Our otherwise non-spatial internal sensations take on spatial qualities when they intersect with bodily sensations. However, the boundaries in this intensely dark space are not visible; they are felt. The space is akin to the night sky—everything, both the actors and the stage, is fundamentally sensed rather than seen.

The galactization of the inner Cathedral
In a state of deep meditative attention, the sensations and feelings you experience are all contained within an inner space. This space is felt subjectively inside your body, and as your focus spirals inward, the dark space that holds these feelings becomes more conscious of itself. The feelings and sensations grow more intense, but so too does the container that holds them. Without this expansion, you'd be overwhelmed or even traumatized by their sheer intensity. However, during an ideal meditation or even a psychedelic journey, this space can grow in size, intensity, and clarity, all in accordance with your level of concentration.

 

THE PITFALLS OF NARRATIVES
In this context, meditation is the lifelong artistic project of consciously perceiving basic sensations directly, before they get 'contaminated' by our habitual verbalization.

Meditation is thus more than metaphorically a journey back to the primordial forms of life.
 
Imagine a person or situation that has made you unhappy. When you attentively and meditatively look inward, you'll discover that what your mind interprets as 'unhappiness' is actually a sensory phenomenon within your own body. You may feel a knot in your solar plexus, accompanied by butterflies or a sensation akin to jellyfish in your stomach. If you are not present at this moment, you'll start engaging in a dialogue between your burning jellyfish-self and your thinking self. These two will create a feedback loop that, if you're not careful, becomes your unending re-enforcing narrative. This narrative becomes your reality—a reality where you live and jump around like a frog at the bottom of a well rather than getting the over-view as a free bird in the sky.
 
How to break free
The first step to break free from this negative spiral is to pivot 90 degrees inward and direct your attention straight into the foundational emotion as it is in itself. This step is both simple and exceedingly difficult, as thoughts continually attempt to resolve the emotion that instinctively feels unbearable. The trick is to neutrally disengage from these thoughts and refocus your attention repeatedly on the basic emotion. After repeating this 'exercise'—and I do not exaggerate—thousands of times, it will eventually become ingrained in the folds of your brain.

The next step is to contain our inner basic emotions. This is by no means child's play, but new neurons are created through repetition, and as the years go by, you will gradually get better at finding comfort in internal discomfort.

Once you've progressed far enough in this internal reprogramming to contain your foundational emotions without flinching, the next step is to dissolve them into pure abstract sensations. Before we return to the original sensory state of pure pixels, however, we will encounter internal sensory patterns.

In this perspective, returning to the 'primordial ocean' within oneself in conscious super-awareness means dissolving narratives into pure basic emotions, and then further dissolving these emotions into their original form of abstract sensations.

This pixelation process is one of Meditation.dk's most esteemed life projects. For it's here, between these three stages: abstract sensation, basic emotions, and emotional narratives, that our lives unfold, whether we know it or not. We come into being in the process where bundles of sensed emotions become conscious and verbalized.
 
Are you ready to carve new grooves into the eternal phonograph of your cerebral cortex?

Drama-Based Suffering vs. Pixelated Suffering
As stated now many times like a mantra: Only hyper-awareness can balance our incredible journey in a universe filled with unfathomable cosmological constants.

No spiritual path exists that is not as narrow as the blade of a razor.

The part of the New Age scene that takes the body's life seriously is rife with melodramatic suffering. Here, the drama narrative about everything that has opposed us is performed in tears and sobbing. Especially in new-spiritual Ayahuasca and other pschedelic circles, there is a profusion of drama-induced weeping where participants rile each other up to unprecedented heights, guided by some South American Indigenous shaman adorned with vibrant feathers. The shaman, incidentally, has little to no understanding of our complicated Western psychology.
 
The razors edge
The collective narrative here is that we go through immense pain, only to emerge purified on the other side. There's considerable truth in this catharsis. The issue, however, is that it can easily become self-perpetuating, trapping us in an endless story of suffering instead of liberating us.

Sentimentality involves 'emotionalizing' an emotion. Sentimental suffering in meditation is a counterproductive loop where the original, genuine suffering, instead of standing naked, gets captured by a narrative that now in itself creates suffering. The first and genuine sensing is the one that sees the approaching tiger. The sentimental sensing is the one that imagines the tiger coming; this imagined tiger then lands in the emotional body, plaguing it with imaginary monsters.

For me—and this is purely a personal perspective—no composer captures the essence of genuine, undramatic suffering as effectively as the Russian composer and pianist Rachmaninoff. Listening to him play, you'll find he doesn't sentimentalize the music through exaggerated emotional expression; instead, he delivers an almost mechanical performance that belies his own fingers' interpretation.

To undergo a purifying form of suffering, the suffering itself must first be stripped of words and narratives, leaving only the pure bodily experience. In this logical framework, there's no room for the traditional performative ego with its illusory belief in existential choice. From the vantage point of heightened consciousness, the notion of free will becomes irrelevant; everything occurs according to infinite algorithms reflected in a cosmic mirror.

In navigating our bewildering journey through a universe filled with unfathomable cosmic constants, only an elevated form of wordless, ouroboric conscious awareness will suffice.

This new situation demands a radical departure from traditional spiritual wisdom.
I observe so many people who falter on their surfboard of life because they in blind respect use outdated spiritual software.


 

With warm regards,
Gunnar Mühlmann
gunnars@mail.com