It is essential that you keep watching this process carefully. Go
back into the focus in the third eye and into the seeingness, let
the image become altered again... and suddenly, another grasping
of the mind takes place, and all the perceptions disappear. When a
master like Sri Aurobindo says that a silent mind is a prerequisite
for higher yogic experience, nothing else is meant than an
eradication of those graspings. The more you watch the graspings,
the more they will appear to you as something superimposed on
your natural perception.
5.11 Which state of perception is the altered one?
Let us develop this last point, because it has immense repercussions
on the way we see the world.
When people start working on themselves, they usually have an
implicit preconception: They consider that the world, the way
they see it every day through their mind, is the ‘real one’. And
they infer that auras and spiritual beings can be superimposed on
this vision of the physical reality, through some sort of additional
perception.
Now this exercise (5.9) demonstrates exactly the opposite. It is the
sharply outlined mental image that appears as an artificially
constructed reality. As soon as you let go of the graspings of the
mind, the image explodes into a fluid multitude of astral colours.
It is not when you see auras, spiritual beings, etc. that something
is added – it is when you see through the mind! The mind
contracts and adds a facade of rigid contours on top of the fluid
reality. The more you get to see the functioning of your mind,
the more you realize that it is a kind of cramp. Release the cramp
and the sharp physical reality disappears: the non-physical worlds
open to you.
All this is a gradual process of course, it is not going to happen
overnight. The mind is tenacious, it is not going to let go of you
too quickly. Nevertheless, when you do the work, a new perception
slowly develops. From time to time, you find yourself just ‘being’.
It is a very simple and innocent state of consciousness. And in this
simplicity, auras and other worlds are perceived.
Most of the time you are caught in the usual functioning of the
mind. But as you advance, the mind appears more and more like a
crust on top of your being. It becomes obvious that the mind is
something added, superimposed. It is only by clinging and grasping
that it can operate. So you automatically start to regard the sharp