Many people have reported the experience of visualizing, either in deep meditation, or in what may be called a dream state, or a lucid dream state, a house, or building, or even in some cases a cave, and when one enters into that space, there are numerous passages or doors, and if one follows it up, all kinds of information and awareness is revealed. C.G. Jung explored what he called the “collective unconscious” and others report visualizing a massive repository of scrolls or books that each open up a branch of knowledge about oneself, about the past, the future or about some other time, place or event. These represent occult or mystical experiences of realms of consciousness transcribed to our external mental faculty as moving through and exploring rooms and tapping into the knowledge contained therein. These are in fact symbolic experiences of actual events in consciousness for the person undergoing the experience.
The Mother builds on this to show how one can contact the soul through conscious process of deep meditation and the use of visualization techniques to explore and open the door, behind which the soul-consciousness, the psychic being deep within the being, awaits.
The Mother observes: “When I ask you to go deep down within yourselves, some of you will concentrate on a sensation, but others may just as well have the impression of going down into a deep well, and they clearly see the picture of steps going down into a dark and deep well, and they go down farther and farther, deeper and deeper, and sometimes reach precisely a door; they sit down before the door with the will to enter, and sometimes the door opens, and then they go in and see a kind of hall or a room or a cave or something, and from there, if they go on they may come to another door and again stop, and with an effort the door opens and they go farther. And if this is done with enough persistence and one can continue the experience, there comes a time when one finds oneself in front of a door which has… a special kind of solidity or solemnity, and with a great effort of concentration the door opens and one suddenly enters a hall of clarity, of light; and then, one has the experience, you see, of contact with one’s soul….”
Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Living Within: The Yoga Approach to Psychological Health and Growth, Exercises for Growth and Mastery, Visualization for Discovering One’s Being, pp. 131-134
Santosh has been studying Sri Aurobindo's writings since 1971 and has a daily blog at http://sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com and podcast at https://anchor.fm/santosh-krinsky He is author of 16 books and is editor-in-chief at Lotus Press. He is president of Institute for Wholistic Education, a non-profit focused on integrating spirituality into daily life.