My "Subtle Mind" Exercise Experience

Hi everyone

           In this week’s blog, I would like to share my experience with the “Subtle Mind” Exercise. Before I share the “experience” let me give you a little antipasto before the meal. This particular exercise has acquainted me with the three stages of the subtle mind which are the witnessing mind, calm-abiding, and unity consciousness. This is an exercise that should be our basic every day exercise, helping us to develop in the direction of psychospiritual flourishing. It is going to take time to develop this as a regular exercise for us. We had to start with a modest yet thoughtful early preparation linked to our breathing. We had to practice our breathing for a couple of reasons. The first reason is because there is a straight association between our breathing and our mind.

          Our mind shadows our breathing as our breathing comes to be more relaxed and regular. When we have serene breathing patterns this brings us a serene mind. When we still our breath we make our mind tranquil. The second reason we practice our breathing is that our breathing is with us at all times so we can practice with it anytime or anywhere that we may be. When we practice our breathing, we pick up how to discipline and calm down the mind by developing our witnessing consciousness. This witnessing consciousness supplants any clutching and adhering, and we increasingly experience calm-abiding. Then calm-abiding slowly but surely develops into unity consciousness. Next, I will share my experience…

My “Subtle Mind” Experience

           At the start of the exercise I used my breathing as a central point to focus on. The exercise narrator said that “we can either focus on the rising and falling of our chest in the breathing cycle or the movement of our breath in and out of our nostrils with each inhalation and exhalation.” I chose to use the former choice rather than the latter one. I started by taking my attention to my breathing choice. Then I took ten deep in-breaths and ten deep out-breaths. At that point I had considerations, outlooks, perceptions, and imaginings that diverted my attention.  Then I just observed them without grabbing onto them and quietly returned my attention to my breathing.  After that I was able to calm down into easiness within my mind and my body. I was able to breathe easily while I kept up a strong focus on my chosen breathing choice.

          This particular exercise was an extremely deliberate, attentive, and to some degree powerful process. This is what was needed for us to do in order to discipline our busy mind. As my mind reacted and the psychological commotion became quiet, I was slowly able to let up on the grasp I had on my breathing. I was now spending more time witnessing my psychological movements and not as much time overwhelmingly submerged in them. I experienced this intensive focusing practice for a while. I was able to take the chance to see how my mind works. I looked at its psychological activities. I was able to see how I was reluctantly drawn in the direction of indiscriminate psychological activities. It is amazing to see how my mind has been educated to hold onto and adhere to them.

           I was wondering what comes about when we drop our concern for our psychological activities and let go of them. The thought came to my mind about where the psychological actions go at that point. I saw the variance in my mind and my body between grasping and observing. I did see how it is possible to convert the adhering and fastening mind to an observing mind. I was able to see how an idea, emotion, or illustration as expected increases, takes, and melts away if you leave it alone. I witnessed my mind and acquired the knowledge of how it truly works. I remember thinking that my development is going to call for perseverance. Irrespective of anything I did, it has always been possible for me to be unable to find my concentration at different times during any of my sessions and that’s alright.

          Whenever that happened I just had to remain with the exercise and I had to take my awareness back to my breathing. I did this for a while until I was able to calm down and search my mind. When my mind got to the point where it was not as suitable to grab on to psychological activities, I was gradually able to let go of the hold on my breathing. I still kept up my concentration but it was with a smaller amount of energy. The narrator mentioned that “it is like holding a piece of paper very tightly between your fingers and then slowly releasing your grip while still holding on.” My concentration had to be sufficiently snug so that my mind couldn’t become absent and it was free enough so that I wouldn’t be stressed. I am acquiring the knowledge I need in order to develop this stability as I progress in my exercise.

           During this exercise my mind was able to get decisively calmed down into tranquility. I am aware that this may happen during some of my practices and not in others. I do realize, though, that when this happens, I can gradually let go of my grasp and move my awareness from my breathing sequence to the calmness itself. I was able to make the calmness my new point of focus. This is definitely a “subtle” and significant change. There is a little area of my mind that sustains my awareness to my mind’s calmness, which is a less noticeable point of focus. This is when I started to travel around my still mind.

          My mind wanted to wander at different points during the exercise and so I went back to my breathing until it stabilized again. Then I was able to let up again, moving my awareness to the calmness, and I stayed in the calmness as I carried on my analysis. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was going to be a “back-and-forth process” that is going to change during every exercise session. I kept up the exercise for a while, putting together variable intensities of exertion as I experienced the taming of my mind, witnessing its mechanisms, and stabilizing it in calm-abiding.

          When calm-abiding is constant, it naturally develops into unity consciousness. It’s like the openness and calmness of calm-abiding magnifies and magnifies until it surrounds us on all sides. This is when unity consciousness and unobstructed awareness make themselves known. This is also when our inmost core comes out. At this point our mind will be clear, quiet, stable, open, alert, and all-knowing. This is also when “the mind drops into the heart.”  The separation, isolation, disturbed emotions, confusion, doubt, and our imbalanced physiology that we were dealing with are all healed by our deepest source. I found out about my inmost nature and the natural healing properties of an open mind and an open heart. I let my mind go and I permitted it to float free. I experienced the whole thing with a clearness and brilliance, but I didn’t grab on to anything. I observed the quality of this consciousness.

         

          Unity consciousness and pure awareness are the result of the subtle mind exercise. This apparently simple state of mind is an extraordinary level of accomplishment, and so it will take time to achieve. Even though, the first entrance to unity consciousness may last only a little while, our exercise will develop with practice. It is very significant for us to know that we can experience this innate natural home. Even if we don’t remember it in our daily life, we can’t lose it. We need to take some time each day to stop, look to our innermost, and rest in this innermost home. In doing this, we will always train our mind to recenter itself in its deepest core. I stayed with the exercise until it was completed.

           It seemed to me that the “Subtle Mind” exercise was more difficult to get through the different levels than the “Loving-Kindness” exercise. I will be honest and say it was not easy in either one because I had to fight through much negative mental and physical issues. That is where my frustrations showed up. But once I was able to calm down and get to the level of the “Witnessing mind” things got better because those areas that would normally distract me were just floating by and I noticed them and didn’t attach to them and then they dissipated. I also thought it was a benefit to have a soft spoken narrator and some serene music along with the crashing of ocean waves.

 

           We know that in the last twenty-five years, there has been a lot of hard work to increase physical health that has gone further than the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There is now a concern for physical fitness, nutrition, preventive measures, and health promotion. The thing is that they expand but do not in essence alter Western medicine’s limited focus on anatomy and physiology. So the result is that we continue to be unaware of other areas of our biology, areas that can only be learned through an integral approach. This method calls for us to move further than the singular focus on the physical and go beyond anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, microbiology, and genetics, into the mental and spiritual.

           Developing these areas of our biology will help us advance the full potential of our biological life. The major levels of biological development are anatomical, physiological, mind/body, and spiritual body. As we climb each step up the developmental ladder, we change our focus and enlarge our horizon. This growth on the way to an increasingly higher level of development, complexity, and capacity is in essence a movement from body to mind to spirit, which is a method of development that applies to each of the four aspects of life. This is the common design for the evolutionary explaining of our human potential and integral health. This growing movement from body to mind to spirit is a change in understanding and distinctiveness from the realm of the physical with its emphasis on survival, instinct, and self to the more subtle and intangible realm of the mental with its focus on ideas, intention, and interconnectedness to the most subtle spiritual realm of awareness, wisdom, and oneness. This same growth system is also a move from outer to inner to innermost. This will unfold as we move from the most physical levels of our biology, the anatomical and physiological, to the more subtle mind/body and spiritual body.

           As far as how the connection of spiritual wellness to mental and physical wellness goes, it has manifested mostly in the negative in my personal life.  Before I started learning about the different levels of psychospiritual flourishing, the physical (medical) issues were causing stress in my life along with all the other nonmedical stressors. At some point I developed mental issues that increased over time to where I didn’t want to be around any more. I have had those thoughts many times recently. So when the physical and mental have issues eventually the spiritual will also have them. The thing is that we have it backwards because these issues start in the spiritual side and then go through the mental and end up manifesting through physical symptoms. I have to say that since I started the first mental exercise it seems that there is some progress in my mental state and as I have been going through the other exercises I have been able to get through them even if I have to repeat them a few times. Thanks for reading my blog!

Craig S Aronoff