Eugene I wrote: ↑Mon Aug 23, 2021 7:28 pm
Cleric, you should not assume that you are the only meditator here who practically work with and analyze the thoughts and conscious experiences on a regular basis. What you are describing here (observations and studies of the inter-relations of conscious phenomena "outside" of the framework of the ego) has been part of millennia of both Eastern and Western spiritual practices.
We sit in meditation and observe the conscious phenomena - sensations, thoughts, imaginations and intuitions with their meanings, we analyze their interconnections, we have intuitions of how they are inter-related, we observe how our egoic structures function and respond. You are not the only one who do it on a regular basis. The difference is how we interpret these intuitions and insights ourselves and how we present them to people.
Eugene, I understand your sectarian concerns but nothing of this would be necessary if things were understood rightly. The above quote shows exactly that the point is being missed. I've made many attempts to explain the fundamental difference between Oriental and Occidental meditation. The possibility for the latter became possible only after the event on Golgotha. The methods have been slowly developed in the last two thousand years within the secret streams. The Rosicrucian impulse brings them to a high degree of refinement. Today this Initiatic science must flow in the general consciousness of humanity because we are at a time where we either penetrate into the true nature of the human being or we'll bounce back into a downward spiral of degeneration like we've never seen before.
This is one instance where I don't really know if I'm doing lousy job of explaining things, if they are simply not understood or they are intentionally misrepresented.
Shu, what I'm going to write here has direct relevance to Adur's work, so I'm not sidetracking the thread.
I'll make one more attempt to explain the essential nature of the contemporary method of Initiation.
Let's start with the Oriental method first. You're fully correct that observing conscious phenomena is not something new. Ashvin did a great job in his latest essays to draw the historical development of consciousness. The ancient Greeks also observed thoughts. What is changing in the course of evolution though, is how the I's relation to the thoughts metamorphoses.
Here's an imaginative picture:
I remind that the above should not be thought of as an theoretical model of reality. It must be seen exactly in the way I explained about drawing circles representing hot and cold and connecting them with a line, representing the warmth gradient. Everything in these pictures corresponds to inner experiences, the images are only
symbols for them.
The wave of spiritual upheaval that we witness today, almost exclusively has a picture like the above as basic understanding. It is heavily influenced by the Eastern teachings. The idea of 'pure consciousness' has become almost accepted in scientific circles that seek to push the boundaries of materialism. We can see it also in Adur's essay here, as with Almaas, Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, etc. The basic idea is that there is only (one) Consciousness which experiences flow of phenomena. Let the circle above represent the 'volume' of consciousness. The figures inside are phenomena, for example thoughts, which can be related, traced, etc. The basic idea behind popular 'enlightening' is that we are truly the experiencing Consciousness (symbolized with the eye at the periphery). The thing is that humans are preoccupied with the
contents of consciousness. They are being constantly dragged around by thoughts, feelings, perceptions. The idea of popular meditation is that one has to detach from all these contents so that conscious phenomena can be observed objectively without allowing one to be dragged along. This eventually reveals even additional details (the greyed area) which so far have evaded our awareness - our attention has simply been preoccupied with other things.
So far so good. There's truly a lot that we can accomplish through introspective meditation like this. But this conception has certain very subtle consequences. Because it's assumed that we're the eye at the periphery, all spiritual development is conceived as the conscious volume becoming more and more impartially and clearly perceived. In other words, it's implicitly felt that everything that can ever be conscious phenomena is already
in front of the eye of consciousness. We only need to refine our attention, such that we're not sucked in by the trivial phenomena but increase our sensitivity for everything else.
Let's use another analogy. If we're in a dark room and only a handful of objects are illuminated, these are the conscious phenomena for us. As long as all our life revolves around these objects we can say that we're in the world of Samsara. Popular enlightening conceives that we should shift our attention away from these objects and gradually we begin to notice other objects in the room which are less illuminated but still have always been part of the roomscape. This is the tracing of relation, interconnectedness, etc. of conscious phenomena. One thing is taken for granted though - that our observing position is
already complete in itself. Adur's work makes this quite clear. We are the Universal Consciousness and the World Content comes into being just as refinement and filtration (according to the Law of Consistency) of what is already in front of our conscious eye. The rose is a rose - it's just a consensual amalgamation of color 'pixels' that fill the volume before the eye of Universal Consciousness.
All this is quite different different in the methods developed in the West in the last two millennia. The
key for understanding this is that, as already said, the relation to thoughts has been slowly changing. The Greek was living with thoughts, he was looking for the proper relation of thoughts to Nature. When asked what is the force that produces these thoughts the Greek would answer - the Logos. Just as they had the Muses and all the other Divine beings, they felt that there's a mysterious force behind the ordering and rhythms of thoughts. Thinking for the Greek was like a gift of a math genius who without specific effort would just see the solutions to problems. Thoughts would flow in their mysterious logical ordering as if inspired by the Logos. All this changes after centuries. At the time of Descartes we already see how he could now fully identify with thinking process. Thoughts were not simply flowing as a stream of inspiration from a higher source, he could feel intimately responsible for each thought. This was so clear to him that it was the self-evident proof that his "I" exists because it sees its reflection in the thoughts it produces.
These things have always been the object of study in the mystery schools in the times after the event of Golgotha. The inspirer of thinking for the Greek, the Logos, has now moved within the human soul and now man could identify with the Logos itself - the spiritual force creating the thoughts, the
creative principle of the living Universe.
This realization stands also at the base of the modern Initiation. For the oriental mystic the goal was to free from the enchantment of conscious phenomena so that he could observe clearly the conscious volume from the periphery. Thoughts would pop in and out of existence, their relations could be traced and so on, but the question of "What is the Source of these thoughts" never approaches the self. On the contrary, the tracing of the source of thoughts is at the foundation of higher development.
How can we trace the source of thoughts? Just observing thoughts and their relation doesn't reveal much of their origins. We can only speculate about them by adding more thoughts in the conscious volume. This is what the materialist does for example, when he builds his theory. The I/eye observes the thoughts and trumps them with more thoughts which say for example "These thoughts appear when neurons fire thus and thus". This doesn't really give experiential knowledge of their origin, it just replaces the immediate thought experience with more thoughts. It's the same in any other attempt to explain thoughts by covering them with more thoughts. Things are different when we focus on the very process of thinking, where we experience that thoughts are practically precipitations of our intuitively experienced spiritual activity. This is key. We now have not thoughts that replace other thoughts but we have actual living experience of the living spiritual activity from which thoughts precipitate.
This is not the end however. Anyone who honestly thinks about this will have to admit that even though we feel directly responsible for the thoughts, we can't claim that we know in full details why we think precisely the thoughts we think at a given moment. In other words, we feel that there are processes that precede the end product of thinking. We should say that materialists are more objective here because they properly assess that the thoughts are only an end product of underlying process. Mystics on the other hand believe that as long as they observe from the eye at the periphery everything is in front of them (even if not yet uncovered).
We've talked many times about this blind spot of consciousness. I've called it the inversion horizon in my latest essay. It's the threshold that divides the conscious phenomena
in front of the eye, from the processes that lie
behind it. This 'behind' doesn't exist for the mystic. Everything is in front of the eye of Universal Consciousness. The behind exists for the materialist theoretically but it's considered to be inaccessible for conscious experience.
Above is a different picture which takes into consideration also the 'behind'. How can we actually know anything about this behind? Let's think logically. The thoughts are in front of us, we perceive them and we feel responsible for them. At the same time we feel that there are processes that shape and guide us through the landscape of consciousness. To put it into a metaphor, if we walk through a museum we have our thoughts about everything we see but at the same time the guide leads us around and determines for us the context within which we manifest our thoughts. It's similar in thinking, we're producing our thoughts but we're not fully aware of how we are being moved around the invisible landscape. We think now of one thing, the next moment we think about something else. Did we really choose consciously in what direction we've diverted our thoughts? Sometimes yes, but most of the time we're being simply carried along an invisible ideal landscape and we only verbalize our intuitions. So if we are really precise in our observations we can't fail but notice that there are forces unknown to us which throw us around the landscape and we're forced to think about whatever they take us to. The question now is, how can we become conscious of these forces?
It's clear that we can't know this by just doing more thinking. We already said that above - in this way we're simply covering our immediately experienced thought process with more and more thoughts. This is what we call speculations, interpretations, theories and hypotheses. None of these brings us closer to a
real experience of the forces behind thinking. We can't do that by focusing on feelings, will, sensory perceptions, either. These again lead us away from the genesis of thoughts. We can never experience a thought being born out of a feeling. We can think about a feeling but the thought itself comes from our spiritual activity and meets the feeling. In this sense, mystical mediation can't tell us anything about the origin of thoughts either. There we push away all thoughts and succumb to universal feeling where we can no longer even speak of clear spiritual activity.
It is clear - we can only hope to experience something of the essence of thinking if we turn towards the essence itself. In other words, we can't find the essence of thinking where this essence is missing, thus we can only find in within thinking itself. For most people of our age, thinking is experienced as a unstoppable stream of words. We need to be able to stop this stream. Why? Because as long as we are being blindly carried by the invisible forces we can never be conscious of them. We live only with the consequences of the forces. We need to place ourselves in opposition to these forces, so to speak. We do that through
concentration of our spiritual activity. It's like saying - "I'll anchor my spiritual activity and resist the forces that toss me around". This is similar to gravity. As long as we are in free fall gravity is undetectable. We only sense it when we have an anchor point, then gravity drags against us and we feel it. Similarly, as long as we're thinking automatically, we're as if in a free fall in the field of the invisible forces, thus we're not conscious of them. On the contrary, when we concentrate our thinking activity, we form an anchor within ourselves and begin to feel the forces dragging against us.
Most people would be able to concentrate only for a moment and the forces will take them again on their waves. Yet if we're able to sustain our concentration, our very concentrated activity becomes like a sense organ - we begin to feel how the forces impress in it. As a simplified metaphor, it's like we concentrate on the thought of a rubber ball. This thought is not only the form and color but also qualities like elasticity. If we can't sustain our concentration, we'll wander to other thoughts. If we can, we resist the forces, they imprint into our activity but can't move us off center. For example (again metaphorically speaking) the forces can press against our rubber ball thought and make a dimple in it. We don't see the forces themselves but they imprint (as seal into wax) into our activity. Through the way they modify our activity we become conscious of something like an inverted image of them. Remember - the forces don't modify the image - they modify our activity, which in turn is reflected in the image. Such images are commonly called Imaginations. I can't stress this enough, as it is misunderstood again and again - Imaginations are the reflections of higher order spiritual activity, similarly to the way ordinary thought-perceptions are reflections of the intuitively experienced intellectual meaning. They are not hallucinations (like in a psychedelic trip) that are being interpreted (divined) by the intellect. These images can be communicated. The drawing above is such an example. It's nothing that we can ever find anywhere in the sensory world, yet for anyone who has attained to these experiences, the above picture speaks as clearly as the line connecting the hot and cold dots. But even if one hasn't had such experiences, if they allow the image work upon them and set their thinking in motion, they'll be able to approach the living concepts out of which the image was reflected. This image can never work if we simply analyze it like a technical drawing. We need to livingly assume the position of the eye and experience how what is drawn corresponds to inner experiences.
Let's use another metaphor. Let's imagine that our thinking activity produces the thoughts similar to a stream of water spouting from a garden hose. The thought-perception is experienced where the stream splashes. In general, men of today are not conscious of the stream. We can glimpse momentarily at the stream when we focus on our thinking and try to experience livingly the fact that we're creating the thoughts. I'll remind of the exercise that I've described in the Time-Consciousness essay. When we concentrate on the light dot, the dot is the splash of water (the dot is our thought-perception), and our concentrating activity which we intuitively experience is the water stream, which we don't see visually but we understand intuitively as direct meaning (that's how we
know that we're producing the light dot).
On the drawing above this stream is represented by the orange line. It's the thread of spiritual activity that comes from behind the eye and becomes perceptible in front of it. Through meditative methods like the above, when we concentrate on an appropriate image, we stabilize this thread. Then, as described above, we begin to sense how the most varied forces try to bend and move the thread. These forces are active all the time while we think in the ordinary sense and experience only the splash. They are like invisible hands that move the hose around and guide where we'll form the thought-splashes. Through concentration we begin to move along the stream and become conscious of the invisible forces that move it (by resisting them).
As we sustain our concentration for longer and longer periods of time, the Imaginations begin to build up. Initially they are not clear at all and we must resist the temptation to immediately begin thinking about them. The more we withhold thinking about them (with intellectual thoughts) the more we learn to live comfortably with them and understand their language. Gradually we find ourselves in a whole world where beings and processes weave and shape our ordinary flow of consciousness.
Here things connect with the Time-Consciousness essay. As explained there, as we move towards the higher order rhythms, there's also expansion of the 'now'. For example, from a certain point of view higher in the spectrum (the dashed-line eye) things look such that for example, a whole waking day is experienced as something simultaneous, as if the events are spread before consciousness as if side by side. This is a point of view that is natural for the part of our higher self that is called Manas. Through higher development we can actually glimpse at that perspective. Let's give a more concrete example.
First we should mention that from that higher perspective we don't see the physical world per se but the higher order forces (the astral or soul spectrum). Let's say that our soul needs a certain exchange of ideas with another person. Here I'll use a metaphor based on quantum mechanics' wave function. From the higher perspective we perceive our soul life not as something happening in the momentary now of our ordinary consciousness but as something spreading in time. It's like a wave function that holds within itself the potential for the most varied soul experiences. At that level exists also the soul body of the person in question. We can picture them imaginatively as cloud-like formations but I repeat - the form is not really spatial but temporal too. Although I say 'cloud', there's nothing nebulous in these clouds. They have almost infinite, fractal-like depth, experienced as dense and rich meaning that we can hardly imagine in the intellectual state. Even though we don't perceive the physical world in the sensory way we know it, these higher order wave functions give us a much more valuable and deep understanding of what the physical world really is. Things like 'distance' here don't have the same meaning as in 3D space. The distance between our soul bodies is determined by our affinity. What we can relate to, is close, what we can't, is far. So now our higher self begins to draw closer to the soul body wave function of the person. To draw closer means that the two wave functions become more and more in-phase, so to speak, they become resonantly attuned. From the perspective of the higher self, the soul bodies must become attuned so that they can make an exchange, just as antennas must be attuned to the same frequencies in order to transfer energy. From the perspective of our ordinary self everything goes in its daily rhythm as always. We jump from thought to thought, we go around. Yet unknowingly to us the wave function from within which we decohere our thoughts and actions has been shifting all the time. So it is for the other person. Gradually our actions converge in such a way that what we can call synchronicity occurs, and we 'accidentally' bump into our friend on the street. Then we start talking and the exchange is realized.
This of course is an idealized example. In reality there are multitude of higher order beings who superimpose their activities and modulate our overall wave function. For example, there might be another higher being who would like to prevent our meeting with the person by interfering with the attunement of the soul bodies, thus there would be much less chance for us to decohere our actions such that they lead to the synchronistic outcome.
We should bear in mind that everything explained above is infinitely alive and intelligent. The words 'wave function', 'attunement', etc. must be understood entirely imaginatively. They are only symbols for higher order reality. I decided to use them because they are useful but we should never allow them to become dead and abstract. There's nothing more horrific than trying to apply reductionist logic to the higher worlds and imagine them as made of vibrations or something like that. It should always be the opposite - our ordinary thoughts are like dead precipitation, like nails, hair, skin flakes, falling from the living spiritual. We should really strive for what is real and living.
This post turned out much longer than I intended but I really hope that this question is cleared now. It must really be comprehended that in the type of spiritual development described above, we're going in a direction that is completely ignored in the Eastern traditions. This is not criticism of Eastern lore because at these ancient times this was the highest thing achievable by the yogis. But humans of today need urgently to at least consider, that our ordinary consciousness is only the outermost tearing process of dying thoughts, decohered states of being. Behind this we have layers of living beings which form kind of a universal hierarchical or fractal-like wave function. The higher we go along this spectrum the more Time the waves encompass as a
simultaneous whole. It is only through development of our consciousness that we can grow 'vertically' along the Time-Consciousness spectrum. Only in this way we can attain to freedom. Otherwise we decohere our spiritual activity wherever our guides lead us along the invisible landscape. We need living knowledge of this landscape so we can choose freely with what beings to associate. We are always associated with beings. As explained, they always interfere and superimpose in the wave function within which our destiny is unfolded. There's no way around that. But it is within our power to rise in consciousness and freely strengthen our connection with the beings which manifest the high ideal that we ourselves choose for ourselves. If our ideal is peace, love, brotherhood, we'll seek to manifest our potential together with beings who drive world development in that direction. If we want to live life for ourselves, to satisfy our own desires, have pleasures, then consciously or not, we associate with beings from whose wave functions we can manifest these things.
Now there may be complaints that this is difficult to read, that it's very complicated. And in a way I agree. But it's only so because people today are not used to this kind of viewing things. The reason mysticism is so popular today is simply because it's
convenient. It doesn't really demand anything special. Everything is already in front of us, we just need to refine the picture. But things are not that simple. Actually, in a way they are simple, but since humans have deviated so much into the domain of abstract thinking it is now very difficult for them to revert to livingly experienced spiritual activity. Yet it's an effort that we must put. It's quite literally a question of life and death for humanity. We either grow into the depths of reality or we'll increasingly become victims of higher beings who guide our wave functions in their own interests and poor humans will succumb even deeper in egoism until they finally destroy each other.
As a final I want to once again turn attention to the 'inversion horizon'. This is nothing else but the threshold at the eye in the drawings, where things are divided into front and behind. The critical task today is to bring forth the knowledge of how to address the behind, that which is greater than us, which is invisible to the physical senses, yet which continuously shapes the palette out of which we decohere our thoughts, feelings and actions. Unless we enter into
conscious relations with the beings that weave within that part of the spectrum, we'll forever remain as leaves blown by the winds. We need the missing science of prayer. Prayer not as weak beings that worship remote gods but as fully conscious spiritual activity of free human beings. The opening of the soul in humility and mood of prayer is the attunement of the wave function to the potential of our high ideal, a process of osmosis that brings into manifestation our highest aspirations.
