Imagine going inward

Imagine your body, slowly dissolving, senses and organs relinquishing their places in your mind.

Imagine your mind losing the weight and the strong, gross vibrations from the body fading away.

Imagine your mind slowly becoming aware of the lighter vibrations that underlay the bodily vibrations.

Imagine a world without physical sensations, just vibrations, subtler and subtler, presences and entities in vibrational states alone. [1]

Imagine flailing around, drowning, desperately trying to make sense of a world shorn of decades, no, millennia, of familiar vibrations; trying to grab something, anything; seeking stability somehow, anyhow.

Imagine being too afraid to go to even lighter levels and frantically struggling to get back to familiar vibrations. Gasping, trembling, you come back to your body. Shaken, you swear - never again!

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Now, imagine the same journey with a benign presence which takes you inwards, level by level, coaxing you to enjoy the ever-unfolding peace and joy. And brings you back to your body awareness gently, your mind at peace with all the levels, remembering how the weight built up gradually on the way back.

With every session, the dissolution, the laya, into subtler levels, happens more and more easily, faster and faster. Lesser and lesser effort is needed to surrender and relax consciously. The muscle memory first for body relaxation, then the mind memory for different levels.

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Now, imagine a careless, not-so-mindful presence being the guide. One that can go instantly to a particular level and has become totally obsessed by the vibrations there. In that whirlpool of a presence, imagine your mind also reaching that level violently, unable to stop itself, or slow itself, drowned. Your mind doesn't know how it reached there or the details of the way back. But its memories across millennia of the physical vibrations take it back. Yet the sheer ecstasy of the subtler level may take your mind back, especially if that presence is around. The distaste at the violent journey lingers and destabilizes the mind, rendering the practice of regular inward journeys troublesome.

NOTES

[1] This world is reached every night by those who get to NREM/deep sleep [2],[3]. Those conscious in deep sleep can remember the experience. The others experience but don't remember.

[2] Technically, per Vedantic psychology, mental activity stops completely in sushupti. So a better phrasing may be deepest levels of REM sleep.

[3] In Indian philosophies, e.g. Sahaj Marg, that discuss post-death experiences say the non-material aspects of a human being try to return to familiar environments, basically another human body ASAP. Deep meditative experiences that go entirely beyond the physical senses give a foretaste of death.