AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Sep 24, 2021 1:05 amCleric K wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 10:23 pm In this sense there's no actual veil between worlds but it is entirely up to the development of consciousness to grow into the relations of all the planes. Our physical body is in the physical plane ('spectral band' of Divine Consciousness, so to speak), our feelings are of the same 'substance' as the astral world - they are part of the astral world, our thoughts are 'made of' intuition and they belong to the higher spiritual world.
We must be quite clear that it is because of our physical habits of mind that we are inclined to imagine things in the simple way. Because of our physical body, we're used to imagine our consciousness as packaged around it and belonging to the physical world. Similarly we imagine, for example, extraterrestrials as belonging with their complete body/consciousness package to other plane/dimension, and eventually they pierce the veil and visit us. It's one of those things that we can overcome only when we investigate ourselves and find out that we imagine things in this way entirely out of convenience. We simply take our understandings as developed through the interaction with the sensory spectrum and abstractly copy-paste them multiple times in different planes/dimensions.
Brilliant. And let me be the first to say, I have been reading and thinking about spiritual science daily for many months now, and I always first envision the veil 'entities' between physical, etheric, astral, etc. I can repeat "there is only One reality, there is only One reality, there is only One reality" as many times as I want, but that initial perceiving-and-conceiving process of various 'veils' structuring the spiritual does not simply go away. It is only after a fair amount of thoughtful reflection, or a post like Cleric's above, when it sinks in and helps me make sense of all that I had been thinking about in that context. So this modern habit of mind is no trivial thing to (a) recognize and (b) overcome, whatsoever. If I were to approach an evangelical Christian today and explain how scripture is really referring to this prejudice throughout, they would feel I am completely trivializing the scripture, but that's precisely because they have never reflected on how deeply it influences all that we perceive and conceive in the world, which in turn influences all relationships and treatment of others.
This one simple prejudice of division, segregation, fragmentation, abstract copy-and-pasting, etc. makes sense of nearly all shortcomings in modern philosophy and science, as well as our own daily experiences. And this is nothing new - anyone reading who is familiar with Jungian depth psychology has already encountered this idea many times over. But, because of the very same prejudice, this abstract knowledge is not integrated with other fields of knowledge and our own immanent experience. It is all held flatly and abstractly and seems like just another "theory" in a long list of theories out there to consider and speculate over. Honestly confronting the prejudice and reflecting on how it functions within our immanent experience, even with mere intellectual reasoning, will automatically add living depth to the idea. That is a core aspect of PoF, for those who are currently reading it or plan on doing so - one can never add depth and thereby improve the life of ideals without first knowing what needs to be added to and how.
What does it mean to add "depth" to an idea? Well, for one thing, we suddenly realize why all the criticisms of "higher" cognition, "higher" spiritual realms, "higher" this or that, which try to pin the use of that language on some sort of Western spiritual superiority complex, is so far off the mark. It is quite literally higher in the same way that climbing to a higher-elevation mountain peak gives one a more comprehensive perspective on the range. Those flattened ideas of "projecton", "compensation", "shadow", "unconscious", etc. actually die and resurrect back to a fuller and more richly meaningful life in our own mind. Apart from myself, I think some like PZ can already testify to that spiritual rebirth occurring for much of the ideal content she was merely familiar with but never actually knew. Yet we can also understand that we are still climbing one of the lowest peaks in the range, and that is what is so exciting and enlivening about it.
"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." -Jung
One more thing I woke up thinking about this morning and would be remiss not to mention, especially in the spirit of this thread. How fortunate are we to have a personality and imagination such as Cleric's on this forum? Someone cannot keep illustrating these ideas in the most varied ways and angles without the living depth mentioned above. The perpetual cynic will say that it is an active fantasizing imagination, whose logic just happens to hold together (because his fantasy is hyper-logical?). Others may say our values of inspiration and admiration are reflections of weakness and gullibility. The uber cynic might add Cleric has created another profile and is now flattering himself
. Meanwhile, the most simple and obvious explanation is dismissed out of hand - what he is approaching from many angles is the actual structure of Reality and so his Spirit cannot help but hold it together logically. The flattening intellect does not only miss the immanent value to be gained in these ideas with depth, it frequently turns it upside-down. "God and I are one in the act of knowing" becomes "The act of knowing can never perceive how God and I are one". There is no room for less extreme position because there is no depth to freely move in. And that all this depth is thanks to the Spirit working through personality of Cleric does not diminish his own role, because each soul is in fact One with the Spirit. Not abstractly One, concretely One. An easy way to tell the difference - what is abstract cannot be meaningfully expanded upon, what is concrete can always be fleshed out into higher resolution, as Cleric beautifully illustrates so often.So, that is my slightly pedagogical way of saying, thank you Cleric!
