27. Thinking/Feeling/Willing Exercise

(For context see Post 1)

Posts 18, 19 and 20 described means to strengthen the powers of the soul, each with a different emphasis. (18 Thinking, 19 Observation or Feeling, 20 Willing)  This entry describes the training of all three faculties together.

The exercise requires several new efforts:

To generate an image independent of physical reality

To change that image gradually: to alter one form into another

To experience polarity and the intermediate states between them ( to “feel” it )

Imagine an unbounded plane, uniform in all directions. Try to feel the freedom and dizziness of such a plane, like being on a vast prairie under an infinite sky.

Gradually imagine the infinite extension of the plane uniformly shrink to distinct limits (edges).  Feel the supporting yet open gesture of a plate-like surface and the limits it imposes on movement. (Akin to being on the broad top of a mesa)

Now, “roll-up” the edges of the “plate” into a bowl-shaped depression.  Feel the enclosing protection of the walls as well as the restraint, the unfreedom it imposes.

Continue this process, stopping to notice the increasing sense of protection and the declining degree of freedom, as the form progresses from cup-like to vase-shaped to enclosed sphere.

The sphere represents a maximum of protection with corresponding isolation and unfreedom.
Finally, intensify this form to negative infinity–that is to a vanishing point of maximum apartness, and individuality.

Do this in reverse to finish the exercise.

In a similar fashion any polarity can be contemplated inwardly.  Light and dark, red and blue, center and periphery, for example.  In each case, imagine vividly the form, color or tone, then will its transformation into the polar opposite, ‘feeling-knowing’ the stages along the way.  The idea is to mentally picture movement  along a continuum, with an imaginative, feeling intuition.