The effort of remaining present to himself, although firm, must, at the same time, be quiet and full of gentleness. The intensity of this effort had to be just right, neither too much nor too little. He learned, little by little, the subtle art of recognizing when he was approaching the right and delicate moment to begin cautiously relinquishing his effort, to abandon himself to that which was superior within himself, and to what extent he could do this without risking falling back into his habitual state. As he deepened his meditation and prolonged its duration, he felt the liberation and the expansion of his consciousness more and more. His consciousness seemed to grow infinitely and to become more and more luminous, fine, and ethereal. Furthermore, instead of the dense and weighty matter of his bodily form that he was used to feeling, he felt the indescribable sensation of a very subtle and ineffable ethereal transparency of being. Every time that he came out of his meditation, he felt the disconcerting sense of his consciousness retracting and becoming matter once more, thus returning to his dense and habitual bodily form. While he was reaching ever higher levels of being, he experienced, when coming out of his meditation, the feeling that there occurred effectively an expansion of his consciousness, every time that it was no longer condensed in a material form, and a retraction when it condensed itself once more and returned to its dense material form. A mysterious thought then began to grow and to take form in his being: perhaps the final liberation of consciousness for a human being consisted in permanently losing the need (ingrained by force of habit) to descend once more into matter and to take some kind of form—which was ordinarily necessary to him in order to experience the feeling and the knowledge of his existence. Furthermore, and on a much wider scale, a dizzying question arose in his mind and would not stop troubling him: was it possible that these myriads and myriads of celestial bodies inhabiting this immense Universe were, themselves, only consciousness condensed in matter and that the whole Cosmos had, itself, a secret need to liberate itself from its imprisonment in its material manifestation? translated from Edward Salim Michaels biography : Le Prix dun Destin Remarquable (The Price of a Remarkable Destiny)
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 14:00:16 +0000