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KARMA - THE MECHANISM
APPLICATION
ror to regain the clear understanding of the fourth stage, nor do we let go of our clear understanding to move back into the familiar hypnotic environment of level one. As soon as this equilibrium is disturbed and a tendency towards clear understanding or delusion is started, we leave this stage either in the direction of the fourth gunasthana (avirata-sanyaktva) or towards the second (sasadana).
The third level can only be reached from the fourth level. Its maximum duration is limited to 48 minutes.
The third stage has enormous significance for our development. Here an important process takes place that stabilizes our access to the clear understanding of the fourth stage. .
Many who dwell mainly in the first stage experience flashes of insights into the fourth stage. This is usually a fleeting sensation that feels like a brief, but intense awakening from some long and almost hypnotic 'waking dream'. The sensation is generally regarded as highly agreeable and almost always accompanied by flash-backs to similarly fleeting states we experienced before. Many perceive these brief insights in regular intervals (every 3 to 6 weeks). Most often they occur in times of relative quietness.?
Once we understand the nature of these insights, accept them as real and direct our attention towards them, they become livelier and more intense. We remember them more clearly and the ambivalence of the third stage - the simultaneous perception of clear understanding and delusion - occurs.
If at the time this happens we make a conscious effort to regain the clear understanding of the fourth stage, a momentum is created that eventually, but unfailingly causes the transfer of our
2 Since the West offers no explanation for these perceptions, and since
they seem so fleeting, we - after some brief irritation - usually store them in the same place as all the other unexplained experiences which accompany our life and which we choose to ignore as well.
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