Shifting the Standpoint of Awareness Above the Crown of the Head

0:00 Various paths of yoga featuring various objectives in the practice suggest the practitioner concentrate or place their central focus on one area of the body or another to contact and utilize the energies available in the subtle energy center located there. Those who practice devotion are asked to concentrate in the area behind the heart where the psychic being resides. Those who follow the path of knowledge and will generally concentrate in the area of the ajnat chakra known as the third eye in the area between the eyebrows. Each of these practices has a value and potential benefit not just for the practitioner of that specific path, but as a general methodology to open up the capacities locked up in those areas.

0:55 There are times and circumstances for the seeker to explore opening each area, each energy center, and each opportunity as part of human development and as an element in their growth in the yogic process. In a yoga focused on transformation through the advent of the next power and the evolution of consciousness in the manifestation, the area of focus shifts to the opening of the higher realms beyond the mental level and thus exceeding the limits set by the physical body and it seemingly contained energy set. The practice of shifting the awareness above the crown of the head is in fact not entirely new, as certain practitioners of Tibetan yoga were trained in a technique that consecrated the effort to the guru and the lineage and then visualize the guru above the head with the lineage sequentially seated one above the other.

1:59 While the explicit purpose of this practice was not to create a permanent link to the next evolutionary stage of consciousness and bring it into action in the being, there is no doubt that the experience of the disciples introduced them to ranges of awareness that were seated above the mind and which provided the experience of wideness of consciousness. They achieved certain states of liberation, although their objective was not to transform life on earth through the advent of that higher range of consciousness, Sriorobindo writes quote. It is the aim of the sadhna that the consciousness should rise out of the body and take its station above, spreading in the wideness everywhere, not limited to the body. Thus liberated, 1 opens to all that is above this station. Above the ordinary mind, receives there all that descends from the heights, observes from there all that is below. Thus it is possible to witness in all freedom and to control all that is below, and to be a recipient or a channel for all that comes down and presses into the body, which it will prepare to be an instrument of a higher manifestation remoulded into a higher consciousness and nature.

3:27 What is happening in you is that the consciousness is trying to fix itself in this liberation. When one is there in that higher station, one finds the freedom of the self and the vast silence and immutable calm. But this calm has to be brought down also into the body, into all the lower planes, and fix itself there as something standing behind and containing all the movements. End Quote. Reference Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, column Peace and Equality, page 20.