BASIC METHOD (from Chapter 15, CENTRE The Truth about Everything by Brian Taylor)
Feel your way into it by watching your breathing.
The breathing starts and finishes at the Centre. Feel the breathing carefully and try to locate exactly the point at which it stops and starts again.
This is a very pleasant and worthwhile thing to do. The more closely you watch it, the more subtle the breathing becomes. You can feel the attention subsiding, sinking down from the brain. Thoughts become weaker, become more easily noted as “thinking” and can be let go of.
As awareness subsides from the throat, there are fewer negative and competitive feelings and emotions. Even those nobler and more agreeable feelings of love and friendship centred in the heart are let go of. The attention focuses increasingly on this tiny centre of our being just above the navel but in the centre of the body.
States of mind and images similar to dreams start to flicker on and off. Since one is doing this deliberately and not just falling asleep one can take care not to let them catapult the attention up to the brain or other secondary centres where they may have come from.
More vigilance is needed to prevent one slipping into sleep (a pleasant state) and losing awareness altogether.
Locating the Centre is like finding the point of balance while standing on a seesaw.
When one finally succeeds, the next step is to sink completely into the Centre, withdrawing one’s attention from the thinking brain and the outward-looking senses. And stay awake and aware.
When one can do this, one experiences a state, independent of the senses, which is profoundly happy and peaceful. This is the turning point in a man’s life.
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