Training Finer, Finer
Training finer, finer, as well as relaxation on the level of your mind, is poorly understood -- which doesn't mean you cannot do it better than you did it before, you can. You simply have to observe several important points :
First, the relation with "Other" or Christ, then when you practice finer and finer, you have experiential evidence that it does make the difference in your relation. Your mind is kind of lost with "finer and finer," whereas if you relate to "Other" or Christ, finer and finer makes sense.
One day you will realize that if you really begin to face, you cannot do it in the usual condition, then you will be happy you practiced with finer and finer. You will experience the need of it, and you will-go even further.
Relative to relaxation : As I said, you simply relax finer and finer points, but usually only on the level of your consciousness. Relaxation, as it is known, is very primitive, and the awareness of relaxation is very poor in the beginning. I'm hinting at a practice in which, when you do it finer and finer, you make endless discoveries.
If I relate, for instance, to the desire exercise, the principle is that if you have fulfilled your desire the desire/tension is gone, and then you can begin to become aware of what is working behind. With relaxation you can go behind instantly. You simply relax. But you need practice until you really do it. Let us say it's a step beyond the desire exercise. You just relax and the movement is gone. So you discover what is behind. This is a beginning of a mastery over your personality. You can train your personality to behave according to what you, the comedian, need. If, for instance, you begin, as you just told, by living finer and finer with mainly the mind, and you come to a dead end, you relax, the movement is gone, and you are free to do something else.
One of the more difficult points to relax is your brain, because you are used to relaxing everything except the brain. So, do that for the brain and possibly different parts of the brain, depending on what you feel inside. The brain itself is physical, but you can also relax patterns in your brain. Then you can relax patterns outside of the brain, meaning you begin to be able to follow brain-supported awareness or awareness without the brain, and so on. That's a whole world of discovery.
It's not just simple relaxation, you relax because you need it. If you want to live finer, finer, finer, facing "Other" or Christ, for the sake of "Other" or Christ, you will notice that the spinning of the mind and so on are automatic functions, sometimes so coarse relative to your relation with "Other" that you have to stop them --so you relax them. Then relaxation becomes a tool that allows you to go where you want to go, instead of having the functions in the way all the time. Incidentally, that finer and finer practice relates, directly to your experience. It slowly takes away that heaviness, that clumsiness you felt, so it immediately has a very practical purpose. And maybe you learn that other conditions are real, sufficiently real to modify the persona. You have an apparently adequate persona and then something else comes along and suddenly you realize the persona is no longer that adequate, that it has to be reshaped for the purpose of that presence.
But, right now, you have a kind of difficult task because you have to acknowledge and recognize that other condition which is you, instead of imagining that possibly you have a higher self. And it's kind of puzzling. As you experience it, you also realize that the idea you had that your instrumentality was so simple and so finite is definitely not complete and you can experience your body, for instance, very differently. When you feel those high vibrations it's not just high vibrations, it's like particles in suspension instead of a heavy body. See what I mean? This is closer to reality. So just continue.
One of the major problems you have on the level of personality is recognizing the reality of that other condition, respecting it, and letting it work of it's own authority, instead of interfering and deciding everything that has to be done for it. With finer and finer you become aware of what it needs. You don't reduce it, for instance, to mind awareness. And, as with the previous participant, I would insist that you give a big emphasis to doing it facing "Other." It's very important, very important, because little by little it will diminish the power of what in called "ego," which is artificial.
I have often quoted Patanjali because I find what he says about Atman (which is our symbol for the comedian, and a bit more than that) quite good. He says that Atman projects itself into chitta (mind substance), and the mind makes an image of Atman, feels it is that, and feels being conscious. Patanjali says the mind is not conscious, Atman is. It's a bit difficult for your minds to realize the implications. It means that what we call consciousness is simply a function on the level of the persona, real consciousness is not on that level.
Livance is real consciousness. We had to make a special word for it, and you have to learn to respect it. Livance is not dependent on any aspect of consciousness, consciousness is just a function.
So the one who is aware is Atman, but the image on the level of chitta is what is called "ego," and chitta, believes it is that. One day you will lose this belief and experience another condition. In the meantime the base remains that ego, that image it makes of Atman, that reflection of Atman on the level of the mind. When you have learned and trained even your own mind to recognize a reflection as not being it, then what you begin to sense of that other presence becomes very real and eventually the center of gravity shifts from the reflection side (ego) to Atman.
But it's some work, some training, you have to adjust consciousness. You have to get the consciousness, all" of it, including the sensory, to adjust to the presence of that other condition. This is tremendously hastened if you do the practice facing "Other," for the sake of "Other." As long as you do it for the sake of yourself it is possessiveness and possessiveness is the mode of action of the reflection called ego. Possessiveness, if you want, is a function of survival. The other aspect is not possessive at all.