@ Cleric: Did Dante really go to paradise?

[Soul_of_Shu]

While revisiting Mark Vernon's channel, I came across this recent video (only 31 minutes), and would be interested in Cleric's take especially, but others' as well, pro or con ...

[Cleric K]

Dana, I'll look at it tomorrow.

[Cleric K]

While revisiting Mark Vernon's channel, I came across this recent video (only 31 minutes), and would be interested in Cleric's take especially, but others' as well, pro or con ...

I looked at it. To be fair, I haven't read Divine Comedy so I can't comment on any details. I know the general plot from various summaries and other written things. The video above sounds very in tune to what I feel about the book.

The way Dante portrayed the ascent to the highest world is also fully in line with later spiritual research. There's no reason to doubt that he possessed a level of spiritual perception. I have no idea if he was Initiated in some of the esoteric streams or it was instinctive gift. Of course Dante didn't speak (AFAIK) about reincarnation and Karma, we can only guess if he had understanding of that. Probably not. Similarly Swedenborg also didn't manage to integrate the idea of reincarnation, even though he had very vivid Imaginative and Inspirative perceptions of the higher worlds. This once again shows that spiritual perception doesn't at all presents us with some complete, fully fledged exposition of reality and its laws and principles on a plate. It's all a matter of gradual transformation, continuous purification, identifying the layers of personal, cultural, historical dynamics and rising above them - the journey of the Human Spirit.

For anyone interested in a walk through the Worlds much like Dante's, I recommend Steiner's Theosophy. It is very easy read, not yet reaching the even deeper relations that were elaborated in later works.

[AshvinP]

While revisiting Mark Vernon's channel, I came across this recent video (only 31 minutes), and would be interested in Cleric's take especially, but others' as well, pro or con ...

I looked at it. To be fair, I haven't read Divine Comedy so I can't comment on any details. I know the general plot from various summaries and other written things. The video above sounds very in tune to what I feel about the book.

The way Dante portrayed the ascent to the highest world is also fully in line with later spiritual research. There's no reason to doubt that he possessed a level of spiritual perception. I have no idea if he was Initiated in some of the esoteric streams or it was instinctive gift. Of course Dante didn't speak (AFAIK) about reincarnation and Karma, we can only guess if he had understanding of that. Probably not. Similarly Swedenborg also didn't manage to integrate the idea of reincarnation, even though he had very vivid Imaginative and Inspirative perceptions of the higher worlds. This once again shows that spiritual perception doesn't at all presents us with some complete, fully fledged exposition of reality and its laws and principles on a plate. It's all a matter of gradual transformation, continuous purification, identifying the layers of personal, cultural, historical dynamics and rising above them - the journey of the Human Spirit.

For anyone interested in a walk through the Worlds much like Dante's, I recommend Steiner's Theosophy. It is very easy read, not yet reaching the even deeper relations that were elaborated in later works.

It's interesting, I was just reading Steiner's take on Swedenborg last night. Apparently he held onto his own conscious perspective on the physical plane when entering the spiritual, so he still felt that he was observing the spiritual beings, rather than being observed by them, and opening up to them to actually become their thoughts. That relatively simple concept really blew my mind! But as you say it goes to show it's not just the Wild Wild Spiritual West up there... there are laws and principles to observe and we can really confuse ourselves if we enter unprepared.

[Cleric K]

It's interesting, I was just reading Steiner's take on Swedenborg last night. Apparently he held onto his own conscious perspective on the physical plane when entering the spiritual, so he still felt that he was observing the spiritual beings, rather than being observed by them, and opening up to them to actually become their thoughts. That relatively simple concept really blew my mind! But as you say it goes to show it's not just the Wild Wild Spiritual West up there... there are laws and principles to observe and we can really confuse ourselves if we enter unprepared.

Yeah. This is key. The immediate conception of clairvoyance for most people is that a kind of extra layer of perceptions is overlaid on top of our ordinary senses (for example we begin to see shiny auras around people). This of course implicitly assumes that the relation of the thinking ego towards these higher perceptions is the same as to the sensory. In other words, higher seeing is imagined as something like sensory vision but of some finer, more ethereal kind.

We must be aware that this is much more the case today than it was in the time of Dante. Today even people who consider themselves spiritual, rarely realize how much is their world conception unconsciously shaped by physicalism. The worrying indication for this we can see in the results of psychedelic use. Psychedelics can be at the same time a beautiful trigger that sparks the quest for true reality but at the same time can produce exactly the opposite effect, where more and more of the influences of the higher strata are being simply fragmented into sensory-like perceptions that the intellect enjoys and believes that it has raised into a higher world. We have enough examples even in this forum, where people with lifetime experience in psychedelics still remain on 'our side' of the wall of imagery - even when the intellect dissolves (called ego death). Even with all the empty talk about non-dualism, it rarely occurs to these people that there might be actual higher form of consciousness where we experience from the 'first-person' perspective the creative forces which work on the 'other side' of the wall of imagery.

That's why it's so important today that one first goes through the 'ground school'. We must first of all understand thinking as the limited expression of the living Spirit within us and that true seeing consists in liberating the slumbering spiritual forces that lie hidden within the folds of intellectual thinking. Then we must also form some concepts about the general structure of the Cosmos so that when the Spirit begins to discover its so far stifled by linear thinking, degrees of freedom, we can orient ourselves in the new environment.

This is the most common point for superficial attacks against the methods of Initiation. People say "But this doesn't make any sense! First we're pre-conditioned with concepts then it's obvious that we'll see what we're suggested. I want to see everything for myself without any prior conditioning!" Such an objection rests upon gross misunderstanding of the way matters stand. As said, the one saying this doesn't take a moment to reflect that he has completely prejudiced conception of what higher consciousness is. And this is not that surprising when we consider that this conception is fueled by all kinds of gurus that suggest that one simply needs to sit with legs crossed, deidentify with the ego and become 'enlightened', and then all secrets of the Universe lay spread before him. Speaking of conditioning ...

Our practical life gives us enough indications for these things but when the main motivating factor is 'convenience', all the rest is pushed in the background. Let's consider mathematics. The above objection would sound like someone saying "I don't want to hear anything about calculus, complex numbers, quaternions, etc." I don't want to be apriori conditioned. I'll allow myself to learn at most about counting and everything else I want to see for myself. Well, I'm not saying that this is hypothetically impossible but let's be real. If it took millennia of development and hundreds and thousands of brilliant minds to explore the invisible mathematical landscape, are we really serious when we expect that we can replicate all this work in one or two meditation 'retreats'? Anyone can draw their own conclusions.

The concepts of Spiritual Science are of similar kind. They didn't pop up overnight. Newton's words "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" hold to even greater degree for spiritual matters. Mathematics and physics after all deal with purely intellectual discipline which maps mathematical thoughts to sensory perceptions. In spiritual life our every state of being becomes a living organ in the organism of the Invisible Edifice. If someone is given wrong mathematical concepts, after beating their head for a while, will say "This doesn't make any sense, things don't fit at all". Note that this requires certain soul mood. The mathematician is interested in exploring the objective relations of mathematical thoughts. He's not interested in fantasizing whatever he whims. It's the same for the spiritual investigator. It's not about overlying reality with fantastic pictures but striving strenuously to reveal the living relations, the laws and principles of our metamorphosing states of being. The mathematician tests his mathematical ideas against the intuitive structure of the ideal mathematical landscape. The spiritual investigator tests the concepts acquired from higher order perception against actual Life in all of its dimensions. And the beautiful thing about this is that these concepts can be tested even by those who don't yet have worked on the actual exercises for higher cognition. The concepts have internal coherency and they are directly verifiable against practical Life.

[Soul_of_Shu]

More musings from Mark Vernon on Dante and Spiritual Intelligence ...