Description
(pdf file, 8 ill.)
Abstract:
What is the inner sense and how do we develop it? This article deals with an open eye meditation method which involves the concentration on both material and subtle objects. As an example of a subtle object, I present the meditation practice on eye floaters (muscae volitantes) according to the four steps of meditation in the Yoga sutras by the Indian philosopher Patanjali.
Introduction
Delicately chiseled features and grey concrete blocks, monotonous traffic noise and resounding laughter, scratchy cigarette smoke and irritant perfume, sweet baklava and hot samosas, soft pillows and hard benches – what we know as our weekday is a tide of miscellaneous information which we receive with our five senses and put together to an integral picture in the brain. The sense organs are the gates of our body – they connect the outside world with the inner world and determine, dependent on our state of consciousness, how we experience this world.
No wonder, the spiritually awake individuals in the East and the West always paid great attention to their senses. Indian philosophers, for example, studied the interplay of sense organs, sense objects, thinking and consciousness very extensively. They concluded that an unbridled sense activity is an obstacle on the way to the realization of the self or God…
