Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Wed Sep 15, 2021 1:55 pm
Just an observation. My take on Ramana's teaching is that while it does emphasize establishing the indelible foundational Realization of knowing ThySelf, it's not meant to be the end of exploration, since as far as I can tell that doesn't preclude whatever exploration may proceed from that Realization being fine, insofar as it is ancillary to that indelibly established Realization. However, insofar as such explorations proceed without that indelible Realization as the foundation, then they can very much be a distraction from first establishing the Realization.
This realization is the easy part. But things begin to diverge when we enter into the details. There are many different ways our Earthly self can take this realization into itself. We saw recently, someone posted
Leo Gura, where this realization takes very peculiar form - the ego
inflates endlessly to implode the whole universe in itself (and we are God all along).
In mysticism (including Ramana) we do something similar but in the opposite direction, so to speak - the Self continuously
deidentifies with everything until there's nothing left but pure bliss spread throughout the Cosmos.
What both of these approaches have in common is that the sphere of personal consciousness is never really left. Leo's solution is that this personal sphere is all there exists and it will simply inflate indefinitely sucking as a blackhole every being, people, rocks, plants, animals, and make them unitary part of the inflating ego's imagination (or rather they are already part of that imagination but the God that we are has somehow went out-of-phase with his imaginary contents). The mystic's solution is that the contents of consciousness which constitute the personal sphere are being slowly released and thus we asymptotically approach the pure consciousness - that is, we already
are pure consciousness but are distracted by the contents.
Recently I illustrated this:
In both cases it is assumed that our current sphere of self-experience is already what it is. In the first case we simply have to overcome the illusion of separateness and suck in all contents of consciousness and make them our Godly imagination. In the second case we let go the contents of consciousness and more and more feel ourselves to be the circumference of the sphere, which is in itself featureless but yet completely blissful, infinite existence, containing all potential.
Now when we deal with the above descriptions entirely through our intellect, we can find logic in both of them. The only problem is that what these descriptions imply can only be
extrapolated by the intellect beyond the threshold of physical death. In the first case, no matter how much Leo exerts himself, he won't be able to convert the perception of his wife into his own imaginative creation. She'll still drive him nuts and do the opposite of what he imagines that she should do. In the case of mysticism, even if we deidentify with everything in the mystical state, somehow we can't identify afterwards with another body, for example. That is, the threshold of physical death remains an actual boundary which we can't simply ignore. Leo will say "Yes, now I'm powerless to imagine my wife the way I want but I'll show her after death!". So it goes for the mystic.
These long posts (I really don't enjoy at all writing that much) have the sole purpose to show that this boundary of death can be crossed while on Earth, but only with the help of the type of consciousness that is appropriate for that world. This I also tried to illustrate:
The blue shape is the same sphere (personal consciousness) that the previous image depicts. The big difference is that in both Leo and mysticism the true nature of that sphere is only extrapolated from within the intellectual state as a kind of asymptotically approachable limit, ultimately realizable only after physical death. On the other hand, in the above case cognition rises into a higher sphere, which not simply contains more colors, sounds, etc. but the contents of that sphere is the activity of higher beings
within which our ordinary consciousness flows. In certain sense, the Cosmic Thoughts of those beings are the spiritual (archetypal) moulds within which our Earthly consciousness can flow. The only way we can step out of this dimensionalized flow of spiritual activity is by rising to the perspective of the higher beings themselves and observe how they Think the dimensionality of our Earthly being. Deidentifying with the contents of consciousness - even if up to the level of nothingness - doesn't give us the higher perspective. It leads us to a kind of pure consciousness but not that of the Divine but the
purified personal sphere expanded to unfathomable distances. Although no mystic will admit to it, this actually is like saying "I'm willing to give away all the contents of consciousness but I'm not giving up the perspective that allows me to feel as if I'm observing reality from the ultimate periphery. I'd much rather succumb into nothingness than conceive of the possibility that there could be a higher perspective than mine, where a whole spiritual world of beings is active within my personal sphere (even if contentless)." It is similar to Leo's case "It's absurd that there could be a higher perspective than mine. I'm already that perspective - I'm God. It's all a matter to reconciliate the whole world into my imagination".