10.4 Exercises in Self-Expansion

Exercise 13. I am sitting at a table, but I imagine that I am an artist out in a field painting a tree. How nice this picture looks, with two branches on this side and three on that, and what a nice curve of foliage the greenery makes. Yet, somehow, it lacks! And the trunk. It does look a bit like a leg of Uncle Abe's working trousers!

First, then, I am at this side of it, painting those two and three branches and the foliage and the trunk standing on the ground. Then I am at the other side. Then I am up in the air, painting it from above (I had better think, ``I am in the sky'', else I shall be in a restless airplane; we have childhood pictures of God well established in the clouds and peeping through the spaces between, which were quite restfully depicted.) Then I am down in the depths, and the earth has become transparent, and I picture the base of that trunk, which has no base but curvingly loses itself into numerous tails called roots.

Try this practice first with a small object, such as a little statuette on your table. Imagine yourself to be looking down upon it from above. For this purpose transfer your consciousness into the ceiling. Then bring your consciousness down, and go carefully and slowly round the object at a little distance, observing if from every point of view. Next get your consciousness down into the floor and observe the thing from underneath. And finally, by going through all these circumambulations of consciousness one after another with increasing rapidity, try to blend all the images that you have gained from the different points of view, and grasp the thing as it really appears without reference to your position with regard to it.

This is, of course, a difficult thing to do; but remember in these exercises one is not expected to do the thing, perfectly, but only to try.

Exercise 14. Select now a smallish object which gives a feeling of something enclosed, such as your jewel-box (if any) or a can of peas. There is the can on the table. I put myself into the can. The can is my skin and I am there inside. I become small. I move about among the peas. I look at and admire those tremendous bowls and domes. I become a point in the very center and from there look at the whole of the inside of the can, I enlarge myself slowly, equating myself to the can and seeing the whole of the inside of it with a skin-view inlook''. I expand myself as big as the room and look at the can from every point of view.

Do this with any chosen object. Repeat the contraction and expansion two or three times at a sitting.