Refined perception results from polishing the physiology on each level and increasing clarity.
I’ve spoken of how purification helps bring clarity and soma refines the structure of the body. But what causes polishing?
Daily experiences of life. Sometimes, the hardest experiences can burnish the most.
If we’re resisting those experiences, we create noise and sludge that hinder our ability to see. This impedes refined perception. But it doesn’t stop the polishing.
However, we won’t recognize the polishing until we clear those windows of perception.
We can call learning a polishing of the mental “body,” Emotions refine the emotional “body,” and so forth. Life experiences also help us stabilize and embody openings.
Thus, if we live a full life, transcend and add soma to the mix, and allow healing of past experiences, we’ll find refined perception arises naturally. This may not show up as visual – the form it takes depends on our dominant sense and inclinations.
Life itself polishes the vehicle of perception. If we learn to enjoy much of what arises, our path will be much smoother.
Davidya
Essentially, all understanding is metaphorical. Once we have come to terms with this, everything is taken much more lightly and in my experience we will start to experience growth spurts in the sense of reintegration process of our eternal beingness. Indeed, As perspective is refined, perception is refined…
Metaphorical understanding; two words that go very well together on the path of awakening 🙂
Hi Raz
I would agree that all language is metaphorical – symbols related to meaning. And yes, mind that uses language works in the metaphorical. But there is also deeper understanding born of experience that is not metaphorical. Like the recognition we are pure being.
And yes, once we see the mind for what it is, it’s loses its captaincy and we stop taking it so seriously.
Would integrated recognition of pure being be residing in formless potential? as an immediate spacious and inexpressible understanding. Thus in expressed potential this quality would be reflected like the quality of the soil is reflected in the quality of the plant?
Well – when it’s integrated it’s no longer formless nor potential. It’s then lived in form, experienced in life.
But yes, I agree with the later. They sometimes use the analogy of the transparent sap being expressed in all aspects of a plant.
So even negative emotions (e.g. uncharitable feelings) also polish the emotional body? Good to know 🙂 I have finally gotten to the point where I do not try to push away negative feelings saying that they are beneath me. When I am done being caught up in the feelings – I am able to say about the negative emotions “they are just an experience of a certain emotion and hence just part of knowledge to have that emotion”. It would be nice if these negative feeling also help us in some way – if only to gain insight into the human condition.
Hi K
Well – harder emotions do polish but if we’re resisting them, they also create friction and sludge. That gets in the way of the polishing being recognized. When we learn to allow emotions to just be what they are, you get the polishing without the sludge. This speeds up and smooths growth.
And one day, you’ll just see emotions as emotions – natural responses to experiences. None are really negative. More challenging and heavier perhaps.
At first, we can find the emotional world a sea of noise. A pain body as Tolle put it. But as we resolve some of the backlog, the air clears and emotions tend to get more distinct. Then lower emotions can be pointers, signals there is something in our life that needs looking at.
Why am I anxious/ angry/ afraid? That can point to subconscious things being unmet, something out of balance, something that needs to be said, and so forth. They can become very insightful and help quality of life.
Like pain, once the need is met, the feeling will pass, resolved.
Hi K!
Michael Brown (author of the presence process) teaches all about resolving emotional imprints (as he calls the emotional charge which gets imprinted in our emotional body in early childhood). These are what we call negative emotions.
He teaches that all these imprints are “fuel cells” for our personal growth and beyond when we release and re-integrate the fragmentation. And from personal experience they are!
They bring insight into our human experience and also into the karmic structures that flow over several lifetimes. They also teach us a more broader “feeling abc” (to have much more difference within our emotional expierence). And they seem to refine localized aspects of consciousness which deepens our understanding of how the individual experience releates to the SELF.
Also as this deep fragmentation within gets resolved being will shine through more and more even though the full shift has not happen yet.
Hope that helps a bit! 🙂
best
Michael
Hi Michael
I frame it a bit differently. We experience emotions we don’t like as “negative” and tend to resist them. Any strong experience that we don’t resolve gets imprinted.
And while I know there can be a subjective experience of fragmentation, it is only our seeing that is fragmented, blocked by lack of smooth flow. We are never really unwhole.
But yeah, the broader principles of clearing our backlog and healing and becoming aware of our feeling state is valuable.
Yes – it does. Thank you Michael.
We can also view an emotion as a flow of energy being experience subjectively by the emotional body.
A thought is a more subtle flow of energy experienced by the mind.
Sensation is a coarser flow experienced by the body.
Touch is experienced by the body but recognized by the mind.
I view emotion primarily as the ‘selfless self’ tool of organizing self.
I view form as expressed in layers. We then experience those layers with different aspects of our subjective self.
We could say those layers are how self organizes, then experiences that organizing.