In the waking state, you move in a four-dimensional space-time in which all objects, starting with your physical body, have spatial and temporal limits.
However, what is experiencing these limits, if not your consciousness?
Does your consciousness have finite limits in space-time?
Is it not a vacant space, in which all your sensations, emotions and thoughts appear and disappear at every moment?
Table of Contents
How does your consciousness work?
Your consciousness is permanently fed by your five senses, which only pick up certain information: they are totally insensitive to a large part of the information in which you evolve (for example, hearing does not pick up infrasound or ultrasound, the eye does not pick up ultraviolet rays, the back does not discriminate between two points that are less than a centimeter apart).
Moreover, your mind analyzes and filters the information captured by your senses, based on what it already knows and therefore based on certain beliefs and thought patterns that keep your experience of the world within finite limits. And when you are used to a conditioning, it becomes very difficult to perceive it: it is as delicate to make someone aware of one of his conditioning, as to make a fish understand what liquid water is!
Nevertheless, during a journey, a sharing or a spontaneous awareness, you sometimes become aware of certain conditionings. This is the proof that your consciousness has the capacity to position itself in a space that is outside of all conditioning.
How can you go beyond conditioning and usual limits?
First of all, the fact of being able to welcome a limitation and to let it live in you, even if it creates reactions such as physical tensions, emotions or thoughts, shows that you can place yourself in a space larger than this limitation. So welcoming a limitation without judgment or identification places your consciousness in a space larger than your usual limits. This is possible when your mind is calm and attentive to feeling.
In particular, in order to stay in the feeling when exploring the body, at first slowness is necessary. For most people, as soon as there is movement, the muscular will stifles the feeling. In each posture, it is thus advisable to go slowly and to check at each moment if you create muscular densities. If it is difficult to stay in the feeling in slow explorations, it is functional to increase the speed of the movement, and then to let the movement slow down by itself.
Experiencing “going beyond oneself” is also a way to momentarily experience the absence of limits. By repeating a gesture or a mantra for example, this translates into the feeling that you could continue this movement ad infinitum. In these practices, your mind and energy become more and more focused because of the will to continue the movement.
In contrast to concentration, the expansion of consciousness to infinity effortlessly dissolves conscious and unconscious limitations. The sounds produced in expansion of consciousness, with images of space in the body and outside the body, powerfully decondition the mind and provide sensations of great freedom and extreme emptiness.
In summary on the yoga
As you live in a world of limits, you feel separated from your environment. But in reality you are an integral part of the universe, since your physical body is composed of atoms that were made by distant stars long ago. Your body and mind are the result of billions of years of evolution, so you are connected to all the beings that came before you, as well as to all the beings that will come after you. Your physical body is composed of billions of cells that interact permanently, driven by an invisible consciousness, which also connects you to all living beings of all kingdoms. Experiencing unity with the living, experiencing the wholeness of existence, is one of the most beautiful gifts a human being can receive.
There is no need for complicated exercises, no need to add new conditionings to make this experience: on the contrary, it is a matter of emptying yourself to meet the consciousness that you are, through the confident opening to all your sensations.
