● What position should I choose ● Simple beginner Meditation ● Meditative Pixelation ● Breathing Techniques ● Mantra Meditation ● Who am I	● How to deal with Thoughts ● Group Meditation ● Open-Eye Meditations ● Healing Hands ● Music Meditation

I recommend you to
read the chapters
'The Mystery
of Awareness'
and
'Ouroboric
Super-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"

From the ancient Indian tantric and later Chinese taoist traditions, there is a saying that translates beautifully into English: "Where the attention goes, the prana flows."

The highest gift we can give to another human being is our undivided attention. The same is true for our own body. Simple, high-quality awareness makes the body more alive and even heals it. I will repeat this simple statement like a mantra throughout the chapter.

The intellect, in its illusionary superiority, believes that once a statement is made, there is no need for repetitions. However, the deeper layers of human understanding are more like a tense muscle; they need repeated massage for the blocks to go away. Similarly, our undesirable habits require constant gentle nudging to be transformed into something positive. As an electric solo guitarist, I know that behind a well-played riff lies a million repetitions.
 
Strength and Quality of Awareness
The inner energetic life of the body is highly influenced by our attention. The more attention we direct towards the inner body, the more the energies respond by moving and intensifying in clarity. This feedback phenomenon means that strong, pure awareness can create flow in the body. 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.
 
Pixels Beyond Name and Form
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.

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.

'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.

PIXELLATION PROTOCOLS
Observing inner energies should also be an essential part of traditional meditation practices. There are countless ways to do this, and over time, you will develop techniques that are uniquely tailored to you. I will now outline some pathways to help you get started on this glorious inner journey. This will be done in a mix of actual meditation guidance and explanatory text. Please have patience in this regard. I believe that this form is the best way to lead you into this strange and yet so familiar world.

What our Amazing Hands can Tell us!
Let’s now initiate a concrete meditative pixellation experience starting with our hands. Hands are cardinal when it comes to the exploration of sensory energy. Unlike other areas in the body, such as a stomach full of butterflies or a heavy chest, hands generally serve as a 'safe space' for inner exploration. It either feels neutral or pleasant to experience the energy in our hands. As a general rule, none of the energy phenomena in your hands can be described as painful. It is only in rare cases that hands harbor unpleasant energies and in such situations the hands most often feel too hot in the form of a burning sensation.
   
Our hands are evolutionarily created as hot spots full of sensory 'energy'. In this sense, hands are highly aware parts of the body compared to areas like the shoulders and the back. Hence, I recommend that beginners use the exploration of the neutral but strong 'energy' in their hands as a starting point for inner space travel. We could call this practice "homunculus meditation," in accordance with the map displaying the areas and proportion of the hands' neurological importance in sensation.
   
Humunculus Meditation
After reading the next lines, close your eyes. Fold your hands together in any way you like, as long as they are in contact with each other. Observe from the inside what is happening in the area of your hands holding hands. Let this process include both the awareness of the skin's outer energy sensations and the more abstract phenomenon of energy inside and between the hands. Let your inner awareness rest here for a few minutes or longer if you feel like, then come back.
   
With your eyes open again, read the next part:
 
Did you notice that as soon as you bring awareness to your hands with closed eyes, the energy in them begins to intensify? This phenomenon is what is encapsulated in the previously mentioned saying, "Where the attention goes, the prana flows." Intertwined hands are one of the easiest places to discover and explore an incredible ability we all possess: an energy-charging mechanism triggered by pure, simple aha-awareness. Initially, you might feel your hands becoming warmer, colder, heavier, lighter, itchy, or tingling. However, when observed with constant awareness, all these sensations seem to merge into each other, forming what could be described as an abstract ball of energy with its own morphing life. The deeper we get into a meditative pixellation of our various sense-registrations, the more they are able to merge into each other.

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.
 
Lying down is the best Position for Energy Exploration in the Body  
When we sit upright in a traditional meditation position with crossed legs, we deliberately block the flow in the lower part of the body and create an upward stream of energy. In a lying position, the energy flows more freely in the body as a totality, but in a trade off where we become more body-aware while generating less consciousness.

For the exploration of the inner body, it is hence recommendable to lie on your back on a flat surface. Use a mat or a relatively hard madras. Do not use a pillow under your head, as it will bend your neck and block the energy flow between head and body. The inner flow of attention is closely connected to the body’s position, so it's also important to lie symmetrically. Any asymmetrical body position will block or distort the inner flow of energy. Even your hands, fingers, and feet should adopt symmetrical positions. Prana loves symmetry!

Lie for a little while as shown in the illustration. Close your eyes for a some time and initiate a preliminary body-scan. Localize the nameless dark energies from your feet to the top of your head and then from the tailbone to your throat. Notice that the character of sense-energy changes with every centimeter. The dark energy in the ring muscle in the anus feels very different from the energy in the stomach area or the area around your neck.

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.

Helping Hands
As this task is not an easy one, I recommend utilizing the strong and safe energy of our marvelous hands.

Place your hands on your body in a location of your choice: it could be the stomach area, solar plexus, or lungs. You can place one hand on top of the other or intertwine your fingers. First, allow the generation of the previously mentioned ball of energy to take place in the area of your hands. Then, invite this ball to enter the body at the place where you have placed your hands. If the bodily sensations occasionally get too overwhelming, you can always guide the awareness-energy back into your hands again.

After some time, come back and reflect on what you experienced.

Are You a Multi or Single-Tasker?
It is now time for a little personality test. Go back into meditation with your hands placed on your body after reading this next suggestion: After first becoming aware of the energy in your hands and their interaction with your body, be open to simultaneously feeling any other sensation from head to toe. It could be the one created by the skin's contact with the surface you lie on. You can also experiment with awaring both hands and feet at the same time.

After returning to this text, I have a question for you: Were you able to simultaneously be aware of both the abstract skin sensation created by lying down and the energy ball in your hands interacting with your body? Could you feel both your hands and feet in one go?
 In general, there are two categories of interoceptive awareness types here. Some are able to effortlessly multitask, while others prefer to focus on one area of the body at a time. No type is superior here. It is just a matter of knowing what type you are in this moment and cooperating with that in your meditation.

Follow the Flow or Let the Flow Follow You
In the next session, allow this energy phenomenon the freedom to move to whatever place in the body it 'wants' by its own accord. Also, experiment with a more willed way of directing the awareness where you want it to go. The inborn bio-system of attention has the same ability as our breathing to be both autonomous and willed.

Explore these two possibilities for as long as it takes. Take several rounds of experiments before coming back to the text.

An amazing feature of the energy flow is that it follows our attention. However, the reverse is also true: where the energy flows, our attention goes. When our attention begins to follow the energy, the process, like our breathing, becomes autonomous. It takes on an intelligent life of its own. It is certainly possible to deliberately choose the direction and place for our body scan to move, but allowing the energy to guide our attention can be much more interesting and effective from a healing perspective. The amazing thing is that the body knows much better how to heal itself than we do. So allow yourself to be yourself and, in this process, be taken by yourself.

Let your Awareness take the Lead
On the next journey we embark upon, I invite you to set your attention free to explore on its own. Once the energy ball in your hands is invited inside your body, let it move its own dance. Maybe the attention-field will go to your feet, maybe to the top of your head. Slowly, you will get accustomed to trusting the inherent intelligence in these autonomous awareness movements, and you will be able to surrender more and more to them without interfering in their work.

Let me give you a little example. Once, years ago, I was scanning the energy body in meditation. Then I noted a tiny sensation like a subtle pinprick in my forehead. I ignored it because I was busy scanning my body in a willed slow movement from toes to head. However, the pinprick sensation continued, so out of curiosity, I gave up my scanning project and allowed my attention to wander to the tiny sensation in my forehead. Immediately after my awareness was set free to go to that place, the sensation grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly a portal to vast peace and bliss opened at that spot, leading me into a wonderful state of being meditated by that wondrous phenomenon.

So, by all means, we do our deliberate body scans, but the real fun happens when we let go of the control of where to focus.

The Spatialization-Exploration: Where is the Energy Located?
Now, aware of the body-stage on which this inner life-drama is set, we can begin on a new exploration and that is to spatially pinpoint our emotions and interoceptive sensations. This we can do, both by directing our attention to different body-part with our will and with letting our attention go its own ways.

This marvelous spatialization exploration is described in detail in the chapter "Ouroboric Super-Awareness." (It would be a good idea to read that text before you proceed.)

Now let us begin with the one percent of feeling sensations for which we have coined actual words. The task is:

Where in my body do joy, pain, anger, love, envy, a fear reside?

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.

THE POINT OF DE-CRYSTALLIZATION
If constant attention, like water, flows into the inner drought landscapes, the inner energy will sometimes reach a qualitatively new state—a point of no return where a decisive shift in the dance of energies occurs. This can be likened to ice starting to melt and then again water starting to boil when the heat is constant. For this process to happen, the blocks in the Tibetan ice-body at least for a while must be suspended or melted away.

Harmonization & Healing Point
While exploring the inner realms at rare occasions, when our awareness is of high quality and quantity and in perfect balance with the awared, a wondreous phenomenon can take place. I call it the harmonization point. It usually comes suddenly by itself and it should like a butterfly never be hunted for.
 
At this sudden transition point of no return, the nervous-electric energy begins to harmonize, organizing into orderly energy patterns. The inner energy shifts from being unpleasant to pleasant, even ecstatic.
 
This transition from chaos to new, unpredictable order can be compared to an orchestra that, from playing without a score, begins to play in unison guided by a common score and a common beat. Here, attention itself is the conductor.

This will on a subjective level be experienced as a tremendous healing almost like a little rebirth. Here we find ourselves in forgetting ourselves and in this moment we are not defined by our limitations.
 
Birth of the Inner Dark Space
The most important new quality in the experience of the inner energies is their context—the space in which they unfold. This space becomes much larger, expanding towards infinity. You will experience a large, peaceful inner space within your body!

Focus is no longer solely on the energies themselves. They are now inseparable from their context—the infinity of the newly born inner warm space. Let us return to William Blake once more with this new understanding:

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

EPILOGUE: 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 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.